The Body Movement
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The body movement in the golf swing can be mind bogglingly complex or incredibly simple. Which do you prefer?
As I showed you in the intro video, Tiger never thinks about his body movement.
And it's ironic because Tiger's body movement is kind of the gold standard for the golf swing.
Every golf instructor under the sun has, at one point or another, put their student up next to Tiger's body and say, see what he does?
We need to do it like this.
Ironically, Tiger doesn't care about his body.
He never thinks about his body.
And as I showed you, he's swung this way with his body since he was five, at least since he was five.
So it can't be that complicated.
And the reality is it's not.
It's just understanding the feeling.
And this is the whole point of this video series is that mechanics and understanding the swing through 3D motion capture or high speed video, or force plates.
And all this stuff will only get you so far.
But what's ironic is that all these tour players who we look at their data, they don't think about any of that stuff.
They just do it naturally, which means, again, They're either aliens, or this is a natural, instinctive thing once you understand what it feels like in the swing.
And that's what I've always wanted to understand.
If I could just step in a Tiger's body for one minute and hit a half a dozen balls, I would finally understand what it felt like.
And that's why I went down this journey, because I feel like I now know pretty closely what it feels like to swing like Tiger Woods, especially in 2000.
But you'll see his movements have really never changed, not since he was five.
His body movement today is the same as it was 40 years ago.
The core of his golf swing is the same.
And what we're going to talk about now, his hips, the core and his pressure shift is really simple, but it's not what you think.
And that's the whole trick.
As I've shown with clips of Tiger and other golfers, feeling real, even for the greatest players of all time, it's never the same.
They feel a lot of times that they're doing one thing and they're doing the exact opposite in their swing.
And when it comes to the hip movement and rotation in the swing, I think that's exactly the same case.
What it feels like to move your body like Tiger is way simpler than people think it is.
What it really is, is lateral movement.
I don't believe that Tiger's ever really trying to turn his hips, or his core, or his shoulders, or his legs, or anything else in the golf swing.
What I believe is happening, and what I can show you, is that it's more lateral movement that looks or gets turned into rotational force, but he's not trying to rotate.
And this was another big eye-opener for me as I started trying to match up my body patterns to what Tiger was doing, get my body to do the same thing.
It wasn't until I stopped trying to turn that my hips started turning, if that makes any sense.
So, what started happening is that I started looking at Tiger's swing, especially the 2000 swing that I'll put on the screen here, and you look at his hips and his legs are barely moving.
In the backswing, his right leg barely straightens, it barely rotates, there's hardly anything happening in his lower body whatsoever.
All you can see in the downswing is a very obvious lateral shift back to the left, but there's not any obvious signs of rotation.
Now, of course, it looks like his hips are turning, but as you look at him from down the line, his hips are barely open.
You can barely see that left butt cheek.
You can see it, but it's not like it's ripped wide open like you can often see.
The reality is, in order to move this way, he's not trying to rotate.
He's moving laterally, and the simplest way to understand this is to feel it.
So, watch what happens.
If we go back to having our, let's just do lead arm only for a moment.
I feel it's a little bit easier to feel this at first without the trail arm.
If you go to the top, and what I want you to do first is make a concerted effort to shift laterally to the right, your whole body.
Your head, everything, let it sway off the ball.
I'm going to show you that this swaying thing is not what you think it is, but what it feels is wildly different than what it actually is.
So, what I actually feel in the swing is that my head and hips shift immediately.
And yes, as you saw in the four pressure shifts video, when I'm doing this dynamically at speed, I push off the left foot to give me some momentum.
I actually want a fair bit of movement laterally this way in my swing.
Now, what it feels like is this.
And what it looks like is this.
Feeling real.
Once I begin to shift laterally and start to move up to the top, I actually naturally start to recenter.
My pressure starts to move back this way.
And it's because the club is also going back this way, my head also starts to move this way.
None of these things am I trying to do.
I'm feeling like I'm trying to make a big lateral move this way.
And then, on the way down, the only thing I'm feeling is a lateral move this way.
And that is something where, to me, it feels very subtle.
I'm not trying to push hard off of this foot.
That will cause you to start rotating too early, get your hands and club getting thrown out toward the ball too soon in the wrong way.
And then, you'd be the old over-the-top move.
But if you feel just lateral and lateral, watch what happens.
So, I'm going to literally do this.
I'm going to shift laterally, and then I'm going to shift laterally.
And this is all I'm going to physically try and do.
Watch what happens to my hips.
Lateral.
Well, what the hell?
My hips are wide open.
How'd they get over here?
I did not try and turn them.
But they turned.
This is, again, a feel versus real thing.
I'm literally feeling nothing but this.
Lateral back.
Lateral through.
But once my pressure gets onto my lead foot, and I unweight this trail foot, like I talked about in the last video, where we're talking about how the hips turn in the swing, as soon as this foot becomes unweighted, well, this just naturally pivots really fast.
It's relaxed.
I'm not trying to push my hips back.
I'm not trying to twist my hips.
I'm not trying to turn my core.
I'm unweighting this foot, and my hips turn.
And as soon as you feel that, and once the club pulls you all the way around, of course your hips are going to be wide open.
But never once did I try and turn my hips.
When you listen to Tiger Woods talk about how his body moves, or his lower body, what does he say about it?
He never once says, I'm going to try and turn my hips really fast.
He says, I'm looking for stability.
That's what he tries to feel in his lower body.
Now think about that.
Tiger's hips move, you know, we know, move deeper.
They get the hips really open.
You can see both butt cheeks.
And yet he says he's trying to use them for stability.
Wait a second.
That doesn't make any sense.
He must be trying to turn his hips if they get that open.
I thought that for a long time as well, until I started trying to get myself to do it.
And I realized, no matter how hard I turn my hips, I'll never get them that open.
It doesn't work like that.
Again, it's a feel versus real thing.
So in order to feel stable in the swing, so that you have a stable platform to launch this club from the top to begin to accelerate, just like the long drive guys, you go ask a long drive guy how he hits a 400-yard drive.
It ain't holding the lag as long as he can.
It's accelerating that puppy as hard as he can, as soon as he can.
In order to feel that, you would want a really stable lower body.
You don't want your body sliding all over the place or twisting around.
It's going to make it harder to square the face.
So the best way that I found to think about this is the way Sam Snead talked about it.
Sam Snead talked about his weight transfer as heel to heel.
Now, We know that that's not 100% accurate in terms of what actually happens because of all the force plate data we have.
We know that the pressure moves in a very different way.
But the feeling of that is a wonderful way to feel stability and start feeling club face control.
Because what happens for most golfers when they add a ton of rotation, trying to turn their hips, their shoulders, whatever it is they're trying to turn, the club gets hucked out toward the ball.
Their hands move out in this direction.
The club's out of control.
Their body is wildly spinning and rotating through, And it's very hard to consistently make good contact and square that face when we're moving very rotationally.
The old school guys thought, I'm going to move lateral.
Remember Curtis Strange?
And lateral.
And remember the old 70s leg drive, right?
Remember Caddyshack, Danny Noonan getting this big lateral C, or reverse C.
That was all lateral drive.
That didn't change with Tiger Woods.
He grew up in that same era.
He has the same motion.
That lateral drive, we don't have to do it that aggressive, of course.
But the feeling is the same.
Feel heel to heel instead of this and this.
So as you go to the top of your swing, feel like your pressure shifts to your right or your trail heel, and then to your left heel or your lead heel, and let the club do its thing.
Now look how wide open my hips are.
I didn't try to turn my hips again, but I'm just going heel to heel.
And now my hips can turn really fast in response to how this club is working through, and I'm throwing it from the top.
So now you're starting to feel, instead of rotating back and rotating back, what you're trying to feel in your swing is a lateral throw this way, with a lateral shift that way in the backswing, and a lateral shift this way in the downswing.
So now my golf swing doesn't feel like this.
My golf swing feels, and I want to show you from down the line the exact same thing.
I feel like my left, my hands go straight down the line, and you'll see that takes the club straight down the line, and then I just try to flatten off my left wrist at the top, and again I've shifted laterally to my trail heel, and now I'm just throwing the club straight at the camera and shifting laterally.
And then as I release it, we'll talk more about that in a little bit, but the whole swing feels lateral straight line force this way, straight line force this way, straight with my hands, throwing straight with my hands.
But I'm turning.
It doesn't look that way.
It looks like I'm probably turning and turning, but I'm literally trying to feel the opposite.
I'm trying to feel straight back, straight through.
And that is what's going to give you the feeling, finally, Of being able to not fight this club face.
Because you're not coming from way inside or way over the top and rotating really quickly, because the harder you rotate through, as you remember from the How to Turn Your Hips video, I talked about how as this trail shoulder is working down, you can keep the club tracing down the target line forever.
The long as this right shoulder is trail shoulder is working this way.
But now as soon as my trail shoulder goes this way, now I've got the club wanting to close on me and my shoulders rotating really fast, making the path very tight.
It's a very tight arc.
In an ideal world, I would want that club to be traveling down a straight line as long as humanly possible.
And this feeling of going lateral back, lateral through is exactly what gives you that.
Don't be afraid of moving off the wall.
Now, of course, if you're doing this, that's not ideal.
When I'm showing you, you've got to look at yourself on video and get a feel for how much shift is this.
But don't be afraid to move over here because, again, even if your head's moving a couple inches off the ball or feels that way, You're going to start to naturally fall back this way if you've worked on what I talked about in those pressure shift videos.
So heel to heel is a great way to think about it.
It'll keep you from starting, you know, if you goat hump or early extend or whatever you want to call it, that's pushing off your hip and your heel.
And that's typically because you're trying to rotate your hips.
But if I'm just moving laterally, well, how am I going to goat hump?
If I just move laterally, note that my left hip gets deeper in the downswing, But I'm not trying to move it deeper or do any of these goofy wall drills, or even my old clamshell drill.
Well, this stuff now begins to happen naturally without me thinking about it.
And isn't that the whole point of the golf swing?
Isn't that how Tiger Woods learned how to do this at five years old?
Why all these great golfers, Bobby Jones, Ben Hogan, Jack Nicklaus, they dug it out of the dirt.
They didn't have to work through swing mechanics and force plates and 3D motion stuff.
They felt their swings and they had the right picture that gave them the right feeling.
Now, some of you out there may be saying, wait a second, I've heard Tiger Woods say he pushes really hard off his right big toe or his trail foot or whatever, his trail leg.
And he also says that he does do that when he needs to step on one, but it puts more stress on his back, which is exactly what I said in the How Your Hips Turn video.
You can absolutely speed all of this stuff up by trying to push really hard off of this foot, but you start putting more compressive forces on your spine.
So here's what Tiger said about that in his own words.
But I really try and feel like I really use this back leg to really push and start clearing and start jumping and getting out of the way.
That's how I try and feel it.
The reason why I don't do it that often is it puts a little stress on my back and puts stress on my knee, and I've had multiple operations on them.
So I bring that every now and again.
So understand you can absolutely create more force.
It doesn't have to be this old school Sam Snead rocking back and forth, although I love this feeling, because it gives you a natural innate sense of rhythm and tempo and timing.
If I'm moving from heel to heel, then it's kind of hard for me to do this really erratically.
And if I understand I'm not trying to power the swing with my arms, I'm just trying to start to cast the club a little bit with my wrists, well, all of this stuff is pretty relaxed.
So now if I just go heel to heel and let my hands work, I start to have a pretty fluid, really effortless golf swing.
I'm not trying to work hard at all.
I'm just shifting to the right, shifting to the left.
I got a golf swing.
I can play golf like this and generate a crap ton of speed, and I don't have to do anything else special with it.
I don't have to push hard off of it.
I don't even have to try and generate separation.
You've no doubt if you're on Instagram or some other social media these days, you see these people going up to the top and say, oh, you need separation.
Do this.
Do this.
Twist your hips before you move your shoulders.
You don't need to do that.
You don't need separation.
Take a look again at Tiger's Swing in 2000 and tell me how much separation you see at the top of the swing.
Hardly any.
He's not trying to do any of that stuff.
Now that separation will happen dynamically and naturally as you start getting used to this, the more relaxed you stay.
But that's the last thing on earth you should ever try and do.
It happens so freaking fast, Your brain literally can't process a thought and transmit it, and get your body to do it before you've even made contact.
Because the whole downswing happens in less time than it takes for your brain to react to the stimulus.
So don't try to get all this crazy separation or twisting your spine or any of that stuff.
Feel some rhythm and some tempo and some speed.
And then because you're moving what's more lateral instead of rotational, You're going to have control because you're not trying to time this clubface that's ripping through the hitting area.
Feel lateral, a little throw, lateral, unweighting, my hips turn.
I'm balanced, relaxed, and perfectly poised to hit a really, really solid golf shot over and over again.
In a nutshell, that's the entire golf swing.
In my mind now, it's as complicated as it gets.
I widen the angles, I move laterally, heel to heel, and that's it.
I don't really think about anything else.
That's pretty simple, right?
It's a feel.
And if I do these feels correctly, I have a great golf swing that looks almost exactly like what Tiger Woods looked like in 2000.
I hit the ball incredibly well with no effort.
I make it look easy and it feels easy.
And it feels freaking incredible, to be honest, because I'm able to pure the ball with so little effort.
And I can finally feel what my hands should feel like in the swing that the Greats felt in their swing.
So when you think about it, this is really as complicated as a golf swing needs to get.
If you make it any more complicated than this, eh, good luck.
I've spent a lot of time, three quarters of my life, studying how to hit a ball with a stick.
And I can tell you that the closer I get to a proper goat-like golf swing, the simpler it gets in my mind, the easier it gets in my mind, the less things I'm trying to do, the less things I find important in the swing.
And this is as simple as I can make it.
But now, let's put it into practical applique.
Let's start hitting balls and so you can feel what it feels like right away to start hitting the ball very straight, very consistently, very solid in the center of the face with my wide glide wide drill.
Edward
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Brian
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Michael
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Clayton (Certified RST Instructor)
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