Video Menu
My Favorite Videos
My Favorite Videos
How the Hips Move in a Throwing Pattern
Sorry, you need to be a member to access this video.
You Are Just Seconds Away - Become a member here!
Already a member? Log in now

How the hips move in a throwing pattern in the golf swing.
Travis what's up man thanks for the the kind words I'm glad we're on the same page I think this is first of all you got a great swing it's been a while since I've seen somebody come in on the first lesson looking pretty good on you know so many great things but there's one big thing that we're going to talk about today that's going to tie all these missing pieces together because you can see looking at your swing mechanically it kind of looks all fine right like I'm sure when you look at it it's like well I mean I'm making a full shoulder turn behind the ball kind of hands are in decent position I've shifted into the right side pretty good and then right here you start to make a pretty big lateral move which is something we're going to talk about and then as you get as you start coming down you see your arms start to fire so obviously you're getting some right arm throw in there but you see your left arm still pinned against your chest it's kind of stuck and so and you look just kind of a little different a little jammed up there and then as you keep coming down your arms still look kind of jammed up and stuck you don't have a lot of clearance between that left arm and the rib cage your right arm's kind of deep there and your legs look like they're doing something different as well and so and then you know do you know how to get a flat left wrist at impact but you're having to kind of hold your swing back to achieve all these quote unquote like things that you know that you're supposed to do in the golf swing right like the things I just mentioned so like now obviously you got a flat left wrist but I can tell that you're forcing it and that's why you're killing yourself causing yourself to lose speed because you're trying to make yourself do all these things and you're not flowing through any of these things and that's because you're you're trying to turn and that's what we're going to talk about so you know one of the biggest things that you're you're going to have to try and start to feel in your golf swing is understanding how to produce speed when you're going to be trail side or lead side dominant right now you're kind of in the middle you're doing both so you're you know you're you're a little vertical at address here that left arm looks a little jammed up so it's actually almost kind of bent it looks kind of awkward doesn't look like it's in a very powerful position your hands and arms look like they're kind of close to your body from this position not really you know doesn't look like you have your arms have a lot of space this is because you're pulling your arms into your body because we're going to when you're going to use your arms and shoulders in an aggressive way you're always going to suck them in kind of close and that's going to cost you some speed because obviously you're just making the whole arc of your swing a little bit narrower but you're also going to be forced to use your arms and shoulders for power and so as you go back you know everything looks pretty good here but i can tell that you're really tight in your arms and your hands and your shoulders trying to like make yourself look like you're in all the right positions and you and you are in all the right positions per se but what i know is going to happen next is that you are going to start to rotate and you're going to make a pretty big move let's just put a line here with your head and you see you kind of move out in front and most most players do but they do it in a very different way or most good players will have their head move back in front just a little bit and then it'll go back as you get into the release and yours is like doing all these position things but i can see it's happening with your arms and shoulders and that's why it really is your upper body per se more than anything because you're trying to twist and so that's why you felt like your back was hurting you um you know there's there's when you're lead side dominant you need to rotate because you're not going to aggressively use the right arm to add a lot of speed you're going to use it but you're not going to use it like in a trail side dominant pattern and in that instance to replace that power that you don't have in the right arm that you're not using you got to make up for it somehow that's just going to be a little bit quicker rotation a little softer hands you let the car club snap through there really fast post up really well and the club kind of feels like it does all the work and you've got to add a little bit of pulling to that in a trail side pattern i feel like it's not a good idea to add much lead side pull to it at all because that's what's happening to you so like if you start you lean into it and then watch how fast your left shoulder snaps here wham actually goes into blur mode so i lose sight of it really quick and that's just there's no way your arms are going to catch up that's why you look jammed up right there it's why your left arm is stretched really tight across your chest your hands look a little stuck you're turning into that arm too fast and so you're combining a lead side pulling pattern with a trail side pushing pattern because once you start throwing with that right side and pulling with the left side then what's going to happen is they're going to start working kind of oh and only the way that they can when they work together which is if your hands are stuck together the only thing you really can do is rotate you know i mean obviously your arms are still going to unfold and wrists are going to unleash and all that stuff but but if you're trying to use them together there's no real throwing motion that you can make with the right side because the shoulders are going to get activated when you pull out the left side so you need to and i highly recommend that you just stick with the more of a trail side pattern for you but you have to stop trying to turn in a trail side pattern it is truly a right arm right hand right hand more than anything throwing motion and throwing and pulling with the left side don't make any sense this is actually going to slow the right hand down it's going to make your body rotate and so this is one of the things i see a lot like with better players now who like kind of understanding how to blend this stuff together but they don't realize that when you're throwing it's got to feel like almost a thousand percent lateral instead of turning so like watch your right foot you see how you're still kind of back on it and you're pushing up and your heel is spinning out a little bit that's just rotation like your hips obviously are going to get pulled around so you're posting up really hard on the left side but you're turning your hips and that's not really how the hips work in a trail side pattern it's not a like pure rotational pattern you need that in a lead side pattern you need to rotate because you've got to make up for that loss of right hand speed but you don't have to do that when you're throwing because the throwing is such a powerful motion but if you try to combine those two together it's really easy to come down steep so you kind of got to fake it to shallow it doesn't shallow out naturally so you start doing all sorts of manipulations and those kind of things but if you move correctly with a trail side pattern and you're throwing then your hips have to move laterally and so that's the difference for you and that's what you'll see like that's why i kind of stop tiger on this so now if you look at how the gap between his right leg and where he was at the top of his swing and the gap between yours you can see that you just you know your your left hip is just a little bit further back because you've just turned you just and again you're so you've you've worked so hard i can tell like this you don't get a golf swing like this that looks this good and is this damn close but is missing the true like underlying movement pattern with it without putting a ton of work in your golf swing but the only thing that you're trying to do is combine two things you don't try and turn your hips in a trail side throwing pattern the way the best way to think about how to move your hips is actually the next video i'm working on coincidentally so perfect fit for you but is more like uh in a trail side throwing pattern a mike austin kind of i can't remember what he called like a double compound pivot or whatever i don't like the word pivot at all uh it's just me but the way to think about your hips going back is if the way that you load them is everything because you're already you can see that you're you're turning this is why your arm looks so stuck notice tiger's got a little you can even see a shadow he's not he's not fighting and he's not muscling that left arm to keep it out away from his chest like that if you start spinning your body that left arm's gonna get sucked in there like a tornado it doesn't have a choice that's why you look so jammed up that's why you look jammed up at a dress too so because now you know like if you didn't when you start rotating you're not going to tend to start missing it off the toe so you start standing closer to the ball so you start getting more upright so you start getting more less athletic in your setup and then all of the stuff kind of snowballs and then to make all of your swing pattern work here with you know rotating and stuff you have to slow everything down to try and get it to match up but that's not in a throwing pattern it shouldn't be any ever big deal to match up if you think about throwing a baseball like sidearm or underarm like i was talking and you threw it as hard as you could like you'd have a hard time like messing that movement pattern up you wouldn't just all of a sudden like your hips would outrun your arm it wouldn't make any sense because you're not trying to turn your hips in a throwing pattern you're stepping into them laterally and that's what you have to feel so that mike austin double pendulum thing whatever the hell he called it the way that your hips have to feel and i agree 100 with this as i started studying what he's talking about like let me wipe out these lines so imagine just like a pendulum there's something swinging back and forth here going that way and then your hips going to go back that way that's not rotation that's a pendulum motion and i think that's a great way to describe it so what you have to feel when you go back and you've probably seen tiger do these drills on instagram somebody clips him out on instagram or you know puts it it was on youtube where like tiger's new secret move and he's like sticking his ass out like for his right butt cheek what this is is him trying to feel that double pendulum motion getting that right hip deep and so i think about it the best way i can think about it is like my hip kind of goes back 45 degrees which doesn't feel like i'm trying to load my hip to be able to turn at all it feels like i'm tilting my hip and it's going back and it's swinging back like a pendulum in that direction and then it swings back a pendulum on the other direction but it's not i'm never trying to turn them i'm just trying to move them laterally to make room for my right arm and to get some power from my legs but because my right hand can throw that club so fast that needs to be the primary motion but you're trying to make the primary motion like turning your hips and trying to blend it together with an arm throw but when you throw you don't try and turn your hips so uh i would highly recommend i said i'm working on a video on this right now it's gonna take me a while to get this out but if you go look at some old mike austin stuff now he makes it look kind of straight because he has like a lot of extension in his leg and that's perfectly fine to do and you actually have some of that in your swing i was looking at down the line um you know to let that right knee extend and the hip go kind of up and back which feels kind of like a reverse pivot like if you were an amateur golfer that's kind of how you would reverse pivot but they were probably right all along in some ways at least if you were going to have a throwing pattern so you're going to feel like your hip kind of tilts up and back and then it like literally reverses that on the on the downswing which you can see like you're never trying to turn those hips it's just the way that that pendulum kind of works at that like what i kind of feel like is like a 45 degree angle swinging back and through like i tried to draw here if you were looking at it from up above this would make more sense so like if this was your head and you were looking down and a golf ball was down on the ground like this and this would be your club your hips kind of swing back this way and then they kind of swing back this way but they have to move laterally and if you try and turn you'll lose some of that lateral movement and that's why you can see that you don't have the same amount of lateral movement that tiger does to make room for his arms and to allow him to not get his arms all sucked up around his body and then you feel like you got to turn faster and all of this stuff so so really it's just coming down into your hips and once you free your hips up and stop loading them up to try and turn them and you start just letting them kind of move back in this kind of diagonal pattern and then the left legs are straightening and as you go through a very you know exactly how you would skip a stone or in that regard that will kind of help you understand how to start relaxing or something not trying to hit all these positions because once your hips stop trying to rotate because that's what's kind of throwing everything off you know when you try to rotate your core rotate your hips which has been taught by everybody forever which in a lead side pattern is perfectly fine but trail side it's not how they work so hopefully that kind of helps you get a feel for your hips and then once you free that up and start feeling like you're going to feel like you're reverse pivoting one way and then you're going to feel like you're reverse pivoting going the other way that's the other thing i want to talk about is that as i was you know your heads the way that it moves forward this is like an upper body kind of getting into that left side you don't want to feel that once you feel like your hips going back this way and then your hips going back this way your head's just going to go straight to the ground that's what it needs to feel like but you can't feel that right now because you throw the club down steep and that's why you kind of got almost like you got to stand up at it because your arms are firing but your hips aren't getting out of the way so it steepens your swing plane and so it's hard to shallow that out because what shallows it out is a shit ton of lateral movement like if you look at the amount of secondary tilt that tiger has here his hips are like way back and it's okay to do that when you're just in side bend that won't hurt your back because he's actually not really turned that much his spine and rib cage in relationship to his hips is not rotated a crazy amount like obviously his upper part is his thoracic but that can take it but where people feel strain is in their low back most of the time and that's when we're trying to twist our hips through and you can see that's why your hips kind of keep rotating through and while you're pushing up off your toe and tiger's pushing this way clearly off his big toe his foot's pointed that way right he's driving laterally off that thing and so that lets your head instead of moving this way toward the target when you kind of start your downswing like it's kind of in an exaggerated fashion like your upper body's like everything's kind of stuck moving together just kind of static so once your hips just move your right shoulder and right head are going to fall straight down and you know the closer you can get that right shoulder to your right hip the easier and longer you can keep that club face under control and and longer you can relatively delay that last little final snap of the release the further your right shoulder is away from that away from your right hip then the longer uh or you know the more the club is head club head is releasing so it's perfectly fine um but you're you know you're losing a little bit of that late heavy hit if you uh don't get that right shoulder down there a little bit longer because it helps drive the right hand forward further but anyway so you're going to feel like your head just falls straight down your right shoulder falls straight down you don't ever want to feel like it's going this way in a throwing pattern like your head and everything just feels like it falls in an arc like this and that again helps that right shoulder get down there and again that's all driven by your hips just having to swing back laterally this way to give them momentum to swing back this way but not turn you're letting them the right leg go into extension hip goes back and up to feel like a reverse pivot and then you exactly reverse that in a very similar way the way mike austin thought about it and you'll be way ahead of the game man
David
Chuck
Will
Chuck
Frank
Craig (Certified RST Instructor)
Will
Chuck
Will