Squish the Bug for Effortless Power - Pt 3 of 3

Learn how to use your legs and hips for power in the golf swing by using the Squish the Bug Drill. Learn more about RSA here: RotarySwing Academy

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Effortless power in the golf swing.

Where does it come from?

The simplest answer, you've heard me say it for years and years and years, it's releasing the club.

And that happens to be done primarily through the wrist.

That's where the bulk of your speed comes from.

But if you don't know how to throw, you haven't played other sports, haven't played other hitting sports, you may not know how to throw and release and snap your wrist.

And the reality is, Most golfers can't do it because they are trying to push the club through instead of throw the club through.

So today I'm gonna show you how to move your body to snap the wrist, to snap the release.

And it's gonna feel very different for most of you because I've been playing a lot of golf with a lot of amateurs lately.

And the one thing I see in the backswing wildly consistently is this knee kind of bowing out like this, and the arms kind of getting like this.

And then a chopping, pushing motion coming through.

As you saw in the first part of the video where we're talking about throwing the club, that feeling is what you need to feel in your golf swing.

If you don't feel that, and you feel that you're holding onto the club really tight and driving it through, pushing it through with your trail side, you will never have effortless power.

It's the exact opposite.

Speed comes from technique.

It's not about athleticism.

Of course that helps, but it's truly just technique.

You don't need to be a superstar athlete.

There's just a few things that you have to do correctly.

And the most important part is how do you use your legs in the golf swing?

We know we're supposed to use our legs and our lower body, but that's such an abstract thing.

My legs aren't directly connected to the golf club.

My arms and hands are.

And so that's what I want to do.

I don't want to throw the club head with effortless speed.

I want to push it through because it feels so much more powerful.

And that's the problem.

That's really the problem.

The golf swing, when done correctly, is really kind of an act of faith.

You are throwing the club head into its own orbit and you're not totally in control of it.

You're releasing it.

That's what it means to release it.

But you can't ever release it if you don't use your legs.

And nobody uses their legs properly in amateur golf hardly, unless they're like a high level, low handicap golfer.

The closer you get to scratch, the better you see hip movement.

And the pros, of course, most of them all do the hip movement really, really well.

And that's a big part of why they're pros.

Because if you don't move your hips correctly, you have to push the club through because it's the only way to put power into the swing.

And then you're in this never-ending death spiral of the harder you want to hit the ball, the harder you have to push, the harder it is to control the golf club because the more you're working.

You truly do want to feel, and it should feel, Effortless when you hit the golf ball, because the snap of your wrist like this doesn't take any energy.

And when you learn how to move your legs correctly, which we're going to do in this video, you're going to understand how to feel the ability to snap the club truly effortlessly.

And it starts with the first move off the ball, what you're trying to do in the swing.

You have to load your body correctly or it won't unload correctly.

Now, it seems kind of obvious, but nobody loads their lower body correctly in the swing when they're struggling with their swing.

If they don't have, if you can't consistently easily hit it 300 yards, you're not using your legs.

I'm not a big guy.

I'm 160 pounds and I'm five foot nine with a million injuries, and I can carry the ball well over 300 yards effortlessly.

Now, the trick to that is again, not my athleticism, not my ability doing other things.

It's purely technique and it's how I load my body.

And that's the key.

And that's what we're going to start with.

So if you're the type of person who, and I want you to do this, You need to get up and I want you to feel all of these things I'm going to do with you, because some of these are going to be exaggerations.

I'm going to explain that.

But some of them are going to be things that you're going to have to develop an awareness for.

And they're really, really simple, but you do need to pay attention to what you feel.

So if you were to set up to the golf ball, where do you feel your weight?

Most golfers have been taught and feel kind of 60-40 on the lead side.

And I'm not saying not to do that.

But I'm saying if you do that, you have to make a pretty aggressive move to the trail side in order to load properly, as you're going to see in just a moment, to create power in the swing.

So what I'm going to have you do today is the opposite.

We're going to work on the squish the bug drill.

And I know the squish the bug drill is pretty misunderstood and bastardized in the baseball world, but you're going to be shocked at how prevalent it is in the modern power playing era of golf, how many younger players truly do squish that bug.

And whether you want to or not, I'm going to show you how to do it with or without that exaggerated movement.

And I'm going to explain to you the benefits of both.

So the first thing that you've got to realize if you're kind of on your lead side pretty aggressively and your head's a little forward, your mass, your upper body, I see this every single day, that golfers have no axis tilt and they're kind of set up like this to get all the way over here.

It's probably not going to happen.

You say, well, what about stack and tilt?

Well, stack and tilt guys, the good ones who know how to do it, who hang on this side, they reverse and the way back, they have to get their head back to the behind the ball.

And you want to do that dynamically in that swing, to be able to get the pendulum effect of swinging the club through.

Obviously, I don't think that's the way to do it, or the best way to do it.

Because it costs you so much power and requires so much more athleticism to dynamically get your head back.

I prefer a simpler way of thinking about it, and that is get behind and stay behind.

I want you to actually start out and we're going to do this drill together.

Especially if you feel like when you normally touch the ball, do you feel like you can lift one foot easier than the other?

How much body weight, how much movement do you have to move to lift one foot or the other?

If you're really hanging on this lead side, this is going to be a huge difference in power generation in your swing.

So all I want you to do at first, I'm going to throw the club down for a second.

Forget the golf swing.

I want you to put all of your weight on your right foot to where you can very quickly, easily lift your lead foot.

You're going to feel that in order to do this, you're going to have to probably make some lateral movement, A lot of lateral movement from what you're probably used to, if you're used to hanging on the lead side.

But if you set up a little bit more back into that right side, and then it's not that big of a move.

But the biggest thing I want you to do right now is make a lateral bump to the right.

Until your hip is kind of over your foot, and your head is kind of over the center of your foot.

This should feel immediately when you do this, if you kind of just move just purely kind of laterally right now, your right hip starting to fire.

And I want you to sit here until it starts to burn a little bit, because we're going to burn this feeling in your brain.

Because if you don't feel this in the swing, you don't feel loaded up in that trail leg, you're never going to have effortless power because you won't be able to move your arms, hands, shoulders, upper body, and club without firing those muscles.

And that's really what we're trying to do is get all of this from here up to be truly relaxed.

And I'm going to explain what all that means is we could talk in relation to the throw in a minute.

But if your arms and hands are tight and your shoulders are tight, you'll start pushing the club through without fail.

And in order for your wrist to really snap, they have to be soft and feel just snapping your wrist like this, just moving them around and how quickly you can get them to snap.

The softer they are, the faster they're going to move.

So if we can keep our arms and hands and wrists soft, then our legs can move everything down and then the hands can snap, which is what we're going to feel in just a moment.

But if you don't get loaded up over here, you don't have anything to help bring the body down.

You don't have anything to help move all of this mass and accelerate the club.

But your legs are super powerful.

Your butt, your glute muscles, these are the biggest, most powerful muscles in your body.

And if you float into it, you should feel, oh, it does feel really powerful.

I can drive off of this.

That's what you need to feel.

But the catch is what your head and your upper body have to do.

Remember, in order to get the hands to snap, everything has to be soft.

There's no way to, if you're really tight with your arms and hands and trying to drive the club through, it'll never ever snap.

You'll just kind of keep pushing it and dragging the club through.

And that's why you don't have any power.

But if I'm over here and then I drive laterally, that's going to put my body into side bend.

I'm not tilting my body into side bend.

It is getting tilted by my hip drive.

I want to use the biggest, most powerful muscles in my body.

That's in my hips.

So I'm going to drive off this way.

But the catch is most golfers, even if they load decent, they then try and drive their upper body into the ball.

And that is a death move in the golf swing.

Of course, it causes you to release the club early.

It causes you to swing over the top.

It causes you to chicken wing and so on.

So what I want you to feel, and if you have never had real power in your swing, this feeling is one of the most important things that you've got to get.

So get stacked over here.

I can have this foot.

Completely in the air.

Super, super light.

It's just here for balance.

My head is going to feel, or right now it's going to be over the center of my foot.

Now, keep your head there while you, the muscles that you feel like you loaded into to move laterally over here.

Now use those to unload and keep your head back here.

What happened to my body?

I got moved into side bend.

Again, I'm not contracting these muscles and that's key.

We want to keep all of this from the belt line up relatively relaxed.

Of course, the core is engaged.

There's a bunch of other stuff.

I don't want to get in all the details of it.

But what I don't want you to do is feel these muscles start to twist your spine.

That's how you're going to have a sore back.

So if you keep this really relaxed and you just move laterally, I'm stacked over my right foot.

My nose is over my right foot.

And then the muscles that I loaded to get over here, I unload them and my head tilts back and I'm in side bend, but completely relaxed.

So my spine is safe here.

I'm not trying to twist my hips independent of my spine.

That's how you hurt your back is with side bend and rotation.

We're just getting into side bend right now.

And this is a totally safe position for your back to be in.

But more importantly, it keeps me back behind the ball so I can snap the release.

As I was talking about in the J release video, you really got to stay back to get those hands to have time to snap.

And that's partly why you have to throw the club from the top with this move.

Is that if I'm this way, how do I ever get the club to snap?

It won't.

I've got to be back here.

And so that's what, if you have a club, but all your weight on your right foot, shift laterally, keep your hands as soft as humanly possible.

You can hold on to the, again, we're going to do exaggerations right now.

Keep everything as soft as you can until you learn how to get tension out of your swing.

So my arms and hands are super soft.

And all I want them to do is this, as I come through, I want them to break down and release, just like we've talked about in the release videos.

And the softer I keep them, the fastest it's going to happen.

Now, if I just relax my arms, take a little step, and you don't have to take a step right now if you don't feel comfortable with this, but this move helps introduce a dynamic stretch in your body.

This is why if you've ever happy Gilmore at a golf ball, you feel so powerful that you have so much energy that's just free speed.

God, I don't know how I get that.

That's the feeling you want in a normal golf swing.

It's just that step and that stride dynamically lengthens the muscles at the right time.

And so you start to sequence the swing properly without realizing it.

So that's why when I'm on my back foot, you don't have to take a step, but I like that feeling.

I'm going to stay here.

But as I take the step, I'm stretching.

I'm staying here.

And then I start to drive.

My head stays back over my foot.

And then I let it snap.

Now, what you want to start to feel and hear, like you can see I'm barely holding onto the club as loose as I can get it to exaggerate.

This is extreme exaggeration.

But as I stay back, the club begins to snap and have a little swoosh sound with literally zero effort.

All I did was load into this right hip, take a little step, take a little stretch, drive off of that side, let my head stay back.

So I get into side bend and that allows me to stay back and snap it.

Feel the difference in when the club's going to reach maximum speed at the ball here versus when you get your head moving in front of the ball and try to push your hand through.

There's no speed in that.

So you have to work really hard and you can do it, but it's just way more work.

Why not stay back and let the club snap?

So this feeling of loading and getting fully into this trail leg, taking a little step, you'll feel a little stretch, especially as you try to keep your head back, you're going to feel this lead side of your body start to stretch.

Hogan talked about wanting that to feel to snap him back.

That's part of the feeling in the downswing.

But as you start getting used to this, you're going to realize you really have to get into your trail leg.

And that's something that's kind of been lost in the golf swing.

I'm not saying it's the only way to do it, but again, I'm saying it's the most powerful, Effortless way to load these big muscles in my lower body as much as I can and then drive off of them laterally right now.

We're going to talk about the rotation bit in a second.

So we're going to talk about squish the bug.

But just feeling this, I feel a lot of power I have accessible to me in my trunk, in my legs, my glutes, my hamstrings, all of these powerful muscles, even my quads.

These are what we want to use to power the entire downswing.

Now, if you can't feel your glute right now from standing over here, just standing here right now, you should start to feel it load.

If you don't, don't worry.

At the end of this video, I have a way to help you start to feel those again.

Because almost every single person on the planet as they get older, Their glutes and hamstrings stop to really fire because we've been sitting down so much.

This requires them to be lengthened all the time.

So I have a way to help you feel these muscles and strengthen them.

That relates to the golf swing that I'll talk about at the end of this video.

But once you're here and you feel this and your head stays back, you let yourself fall into side bend.

Again, this is just the purely lateral motion.

You're going to see that that head staying back is what allows your wrist time to snap.

And so now just keeping my wrist super soft and now I add a little dynamics to it.

My hands still, I'm not applying any force, any power from my upper body at all and definitely not my arms.

Those of you who have tried to throw and then I see a comment saying, oh, my elbow's really hurting.

It's not a throw with your arm per se.

Your arms have to stay relaxed in order to get the club to snap.

Now you can throw it with the arm and that will, for some of you, Start to aggravate that arm a little bit.

And it's harder to control the club face, and it requires more effort because that's a pushing motion of your arm to help accelerate the club.

I want my arms to do nothing because that's truly when the golf swing feels the most effortless.

If you've ever felt that pure shot that would just rocketed off the face, I promise you, you've felt nothing in your arms.

And so what you're really trying to do with them is you're snapping this wrist, that this wrist is a true snap.

It's not a driving throwing force.

I'm throwing the club head at the top to start to make sure that I don't down, cock it and have my wrist like this on the way down.

I'm starting to accelerate it immediately, but this lateral shift, the side bend, the throw and some rotation we're going to talk about now are all happening simultaneously.

And that's part of the challenge of the golf swing is we can't just isolate one move and say, okay, that's the golf swing.

I have to be able to transfer weight.

I have to load these muscles to generate power.

To do that, I've really got to get into my trail leg and I want you to exaggerate this.

And then to start down, my arms have to be really relaxed and my wrist has to snap and my body's got to start to unwind.

All of these things are happening at the exact same time.

And so that's the difficulty with this.

But once you start getting a feel for where power comes from.

And it's coming from your trail side in a trail side pattern swing, and you really have to load into it, then all of this stuff can finally stay relaxed.

So now let's talk about the rotation part of it.

Modern tour players have shifted to be more of a rotational, true squish the bug feeling and look in their swings.

I'll show you in just a moment.

Old school was a big lateral drive.

Both of these things work.

A big lateral drive with the old reverse C.

As long as you stay really relaxed with your upper body and aren't trying to put power into your swing with your upper body.

And push the club through, you can actually get into a reverse C and your spine will be totally fine in this position.

It's designed to do this.

It's when you start putting stress by engaging these muscles really powerfully that you start having sore muscles and then even injury.

So what you'll find nowadays is that the old school guys in the 70s did this stuff, had the big reverse C, big powerful lateral drive off that trail leg.

But the modern players know that that's not the fastest way to swing the golf club.

The fastest way is a bit more athletic, and it's more rotational, and it's that squish, the bug feel that is exactly what's happening in the swing.

So let me show you a few tour pros first to show you these pros doing this move.

You may not know the name Wilco Ninabar now, but I promise you, you will.

This young kid, six foot two, obviously a big kid, but can swing in the high 130s.

This is a swing probably in the mid to upper 120s.

But look at how smooth and effortless he's generating that kind of speed.

At that kind of speed, you can comfortably carry the ball 340 yards at sea level.

No problem.

But he's not working hard to get.

Obviously he's fit, he's athletic, he's strong, he's big.

Of course those are his advantages, but it's still his technique that is creating all the speed.

It's not muscular effort.

He's not a muscular guy, but he has radical club head speed and it's all in his technique.

So now let's break this down, slow it down and take a closer look at what he's actually doing.

So you may still be thinking that I'm crazy about this squish the bug baseball swing theory, but let's take a look.

Here's Wilco.

I've drawn lines on the outside of both hips and on the side of his head.

Now this camera is not perfectly steady.

It's going to move a little bit, but it's going to get you a very clear idea of what's really going on here.

So as he goes back, he obviously makes a shift into the right side as the first move and it's pretty significant.

His head's both moving and watch his right shoulder.

Obviously it's turning too, but you can see the guy in the background who's got a hat on there.

The Wilco is making a pretty significant lateral move of not so much his hips in this case, but more his upper body.

That's moving mass and weight.

That feels powerful to load into that trail side with moving mass in there.

And this is, again, where a lot of people are so afraid of getting stuck that they won't do it.

But here you're going to see all modern power players load into this trail leg and then drive hard off of it.

At the top, he's obviously got a huge arc, very long arms.

He's got an amazing build for golf.

And this kid's going to be around for a long time.

But as he starts down, do you see that he's making a huge shift into that lead side?

He's literally squishing the bug, as squish the bug as it can get.

His pressure is still back.

His weight is still trying to stay more back.

Look at the way his foot is twisting out.

People who stay back on their back foot, their foot, when they come through the ball, the ankle or heel kind of go out this way.

like Tiger who has more lateral move and his heel will kind of, it'll roll in this way and kind of go this way.

But these guys are twisting on that foot and there's lots of different power players that you'll see that do this.

And they're staying back to drive hard off of that trail foot and the squish.

The bug feel is what creates it.

Here's a case where somebody who's truly just purely rotational, all pivoting on that right big toe.

And that's driving his body back into the ball.

It's doing everything and his arms are staying soft so that they can snap, and that's how he looks so relaxed.

He's not putting force into it outside of primarily driving off this trail leg.

You remember these days?

Do you remember when Tiger Woods was the greatest driver of the golf ball the world had ever seen?

He was insanely long, incredibly straight, had complete control over that golf ball and nobody even came close to the athleticism he displayed.

What was he doing in his swing back then?

Let's take a look.

I've drawn the same three lines on Tiger.

Obviously, it's just looking at things in a two-dimensional view.

Of course, it's much more complicated than that, but you'll get the idea here.

So watch the line on his head, right hip, and left hip.

His first move is an obvious settling into that trail leg, a significant one.

You can see his hip line has already moved outside of that line where I drew.

His head's moved an inch or two.

And now notice how far his left hip has moved off of that line.

That's really getting into that trail leg diagonally, back, loading that hip.

He's both moved laterally, clearly, and he's moved rotationally.

And that's why his hip doesn't look like it keeps going out this way, Even though he's moved very deep lateral into it because his hip's going back behind him because it's rotating.

And so now, once he's that torqued into that right leg, which is where all his power is coming from here.

You can see he's barely even moved his arms.

He's really just made a big turn.

His wrists are pretty set or not very set.

You see the club's well short of parallel.

So now, where is he going to get all of this speed?

Because he hasn't loaded his wrists very hard.

If he pushes with his arms, his head's going to start to move in front of the ball.

His shoulders are going to start to open early.

We all know Tiger has kept his shoulders shut from the top of his downswing as long as anybody.

What he's done now, significantly, has started to drive off of that right leg.

You can see how quickly and how much it's unwound already.

This is happening really, really, really fast and maybe like a tenth of a second.

So to do that, you've got to have that force coming from those muscles that you stretched and the biggest, most powerful muscles in your hips, your glutes, your hamstrings.

They have to fire very quickly to do that.

They have to be stretched.

And that's why it's so important to get into that trail side properly and to exaggerate doing it deeply.

And then you have the ability to drive hard off of it.

And now Tiger is 100% squishing that bug.

He's not driving laterally.

He's not as, or he is driving laterally, but somewhat.

But it's more rotationally than anything else.

He's squishing the bug.

He's keeping his head back.

And now you're going to see his head go back further.

So you notice he's moved in front because he's had a super powerful drive, Which has moved all of his mass in front of the ball, or in front of where it was, because now his head's out in front.

But now it's going to tilt back.

That's the pendulum effect as the hips finish driving and his shoulders and everything are staying back.

As that club begins to whip, the head goes way back.

So now he's moved back quite a bit.

To do that, you've got to feel that you're staying back.

If your upper body is pushing and moving into the ball at all, You kill this entire whipping effect because you can create a true golf swing whip effect with a trail side dominant pattern.

And this is how you do it.

You have to stay back and that squish the bug.

Feel that you can undoubtedly see.

Happening in Tiger Woods swing when he was the best driver of the golf ball on the planet, is exactly what you're learning here in this video.

You want to know where a silky smooth Jake Knapp gets all his power?

Watch.

First of all, this camera is going to move with him, but you can see immediately his head and his hips, his mass, Everything is moving into that right leg, and the left leg is becoming more angled in this direction.

Because he's moving everything off the ball to his right.

Again, the camera's moved a lot, but you're going to see even with that, where's his mass?

Where do you think he would feel weight?

If we draw a line down from the center of his noggin, it's over here over his foot, over his back foot, completely behind the ball and then you would think, He's got to freak out to get back over to the ball, so he's got to start driving with his shoulders.

But instead, he's going to squish the bug.

Look at his right foot.

His pressure is on moving onto that ball, that right big toe, to keep driving that hip far around so his arms can stay relaxed, so his wrists can snap and his arms can snap.

That's where that effortless speed comes from and to do that, you have to have something else driving the arms and it's got to be the hips, it's got to be the right hip, primarily squishing that bug feel, this is where you're going to get power in a trail side pattern.

As you saw, the golf swing for modern power players, these younger fit athletes, They're staying back even more and their head's going back even more because that helps swing the hands faster as a pendulum.

Your body, if I do this really quick by driving off my leg and let my upper body fall back very quickly, It brings my hands out in front of the ball way more by just having tilt.

But I haven't done anything with my arms.

But look how far my hands could be in front of the club just by tilting back and driving powerfully with my trunk.

Now if I do that and I drive really hard laterally, it can potentially make the club face a little bit more square longer through the strike.

I don't think it's that big of a benefit to be able to, because you sacrifice speed.

I can do this way faster than I can do this under control.

At some point as I'm driving laterally, This lead leg needs to brace and resist that lateral movement for me to overpower that with my powerful trail leg.

And so that lateral movement doesn't ever really get converted into any energy.

That's going to accelerate the snapping of my wrists.

But if I stay back, so again, We're doing our modified Happy Gilmore little baby step drill, and you should be able to do this back and forth all day.

That's how much load I want in this trail leg.

So once I'm here and I start to drive a little bit laterally, if I just stayed and pivoted instead of driving laterally, what would happen.

So I'm going to again keep my head back and I'm going to stay on this trail leg and I'm just going to pivot.

This is the drill that you saw Tiger doing.

He's trying to avoid any movement to get in front of that ball.

He's wanting to stay back.

That tilts me back both into side bend and into extension, quicker and the quicker my upper body tilts, the faster my hands can move and the quicker they can snap and that's the key.

That's the formula for effortless power.

So all I'm trying to do is get this to happen.

I'm not trying to get into my lead side at all because that would involve pushing with my upper body.

And that's the one thing that you can't do if you want effortless speed.

You can hit the ball hard like I said but it won't be effortless.

So if I'm moving this way, I'm pushing from the right side of my body.

This is going and this is for those of you whose leg, lead leg is always bent at impact.

This is what you're doing.

You can't put weight over there or your left leg will never snap straight.

The way it snaps straight is it's light.

You don't want to put a ton of pressure on that and then try and forcefully snap that knee straight.

It's going to tear up your meniscus and it's going to feel terrible and you're just not going to be able to do it.

Because once you start pushing here, this lead leg, These muscles have to activate to kind of stop you from going too far, the opposite of wanting to straighten.

It needs to stay in this flexed position.

So that's why I see guys like this all the time and they don't get any snap because they're club pushers.

If you push the club through like this with your body, your left leg is never going to straighten.

But if I stay back and squish the bug, it looks just like baseball, right?

This is what they're doing.

Now, of course, they have the benefit to the stride, But it's that lateral drive off, this powerful trail hip and then pivot quickly on that big toe, and that's what brings the bat back up front.

But you look at baseball players, their arm's still totally bent.

They're not trying to push the bat through.

If they are, they're having to work really hard to generate speed versus somebody who's very efficient.

And in golf, we want the exact same thing.

I don't want to push the bat through, push the club through.

That's not going to generate hardly any power compared to staying back and snapping it.

So what I'm trying to do is pivot on this toe and stay back.

And that brings everything back forward.

But now I'm able to get my, I'm able to add rotational force to my lateral feel and get way more speed from it.

So again, the trick to this is how do you load?

If you don't load to be able to move laterally and rotationally forcefully in the downswing, you won't just magically figure it out halfway down.

You're not going to have any power.

So you have to load them in a very specific way.

This first part is getting way over here.

Don't be afraid to shift all the way off the ball, especially if you're not using your lower body and especially if you don't have any power.

Exaggerate this.

And that's going to be one of the drills, the drill at this we're going to talk about in a moment, how to hit balls with this.

You're going to do that.

You're going to get as far off the ball.

I want your head over your foot.

Now, as I've moved that far laterally, my foot's super light.

Obviously, if I start to turn my upper body to get my arms into a little reasonable spot up here, what did you feel happen?

So get all the way over just pure lateral and now start to turn your shoulders.

I can see my hip or feel my hip turning.

I'm not trying to turn my hip right now, but I can feel it twisting and loading that right hip both as I'm on it horizontally.

I feel the outside of my glutes, your glute medius.

And then as I begin to rotate, I begin to involve more hip muscles and I'm stretching them dynamically.

That's the trick.

These muscles have to stretch in this right hip and guess what they want to do on the way down?

They want to snap so fast for you.

They do all the work.

The stretch shortening cycle is the biggest ingredient that's missing in every amateur player swing who doesn't have power.

They don't take advantage of stretching those muscles and then letting them snap back.

Well, it's not true.

They do, but they do it in the wrong muscles.

They do it with the upper body.

We pick our arms up and then we try to pull them down, or push them down, or try to spin our shoulders by pushing that trail side through.

If you do this, I'm loading into it and now as I turn, I feel a little bit of rotational force, let those muscles unwind for you.

If you want more lateral movement in your swing, which is fine, you like that feel, you've got issues where you can't rotate, you like the idea of driving the club straight down the line as long as you can, You just don't put as much rotational force or load into your backswing, and you just focus more on lateral.

You want to be more rotational and you want to have that squish the bug feel so that you can put maximum speed into your swing because in a trail side pattern, if you're going to drive off the hip, it's the hip speed that helps drive everything to put power in the swing.

So the faster you drive off this hip, The more everything else is going to speed up.

And so when you're loaded and you want to be able to drive really, to get maximum power out of it, You have to add rotational force and torque into your golf swing.

Because there's only so much.

I can do laterally, and eventually, laterally doesn't give us nearly any speed, but if I can rotate quicker, that brings my hands down to the ball quicker and all I got to do is just let my wrist snap, let them be passive and just snap them.

So that's what you're trying to decide.

The balance for you is there's no wrong or right way, but if you want maximum speed, you've got to squish the bug, you've got to create more rotational speed in your hips and when you do that, You'll start to realize that.

The biggest thing in order to get the club to snap truly effortlessly is you're going to want to stay back with your mass.

The exact same thing that has struck fear in every single handicap golfer on the planet.

Because they're so terrified that they're going to hit it fat, that they don't want to get into this trail side because they hit a million golf balls flat.

You just do this.

Of course you're going to hit it fat because you don't know how to use your legs.

You just pick the arms up and you're like, gosh, I don't understand why I'm hitting it fat.

Well, you're not using your body.

So what happened is people got tired of hitting the ball fat because it's the biggest problem in golf.

They want clean contact and this became in vogue.

It works.

Very hard to generate power.

You better be super athletic, very powerful and very flexible to really get the maximum out of that golf swing.

It's a very dynamic swing to start here and try to get back here, but they're still doing the same thing.

They are doing this.

They're using their body as a pendulum, like Mike Austin talked about, to help move the hands.

Because the softer we can keep the hands, the faster they can snap, and that's the whole key.

So as I'm doing this or as they're doing this they're doing everything they can to get back here.

Why not just start here?

Get really loaded into it, because if you're really loaded into it, you're not going to hit the ball fat.

Because you're going to feel powerful to drive laterally, and that's going to move the bottom of your swing arc forward.

Of course, You don't have to do it to that extreme degree.

But the reason that you're hitting it fat is because you're not loading the muscles.

That would make it impossible to do so.

You're just picking up your arms and then pushing them down, and that's what causes fat shots.

And that's what almost every single golfer I play with regularly tries to do to power their swing.

If you watch most amateur golfers who don't have power, even if they're like a bigger guy, their knee will do this on the backswing.

This is not loading these muscles this is lengthening these muscles.

So they go up like this it's all upper body push.

I want to stay back and snap you're going to learn to hit balls.

So to put this into practice you want to do as far as lateral and rotational.

It's a very simple adjustment and you can feel it when you do this drill and then you turn, you should feel this hip loading.

That's what you're trying to do everything with to power the downswing.

The more mass you get over here the easier this is.

Now you're again thinking there's no way I'm going to get back to the ball.

with my trail shoulder hanging back over my foot.

Let me show you some examples of how most all tour pros are not trying to get on top of the ball.

The powerful ones the ones who have effortless speed they're actually staying back.

Here's Tiger Woods when he was truly at his best.

Iron play everything was incredible.

But note how deep he is into his right side.

Note where his right shoulder is.

The outside of his right shoulder is outside his foot.

If we put the same line on the outside of his lead shoulder, it's towards the middle, inside of his foot.

This would feel like you have much more weight on your trail leg.

Now he's hitting a short iron here.

You can make all the arguments you want between iron play or different irons.

But the big picture is he's deep into this trail side and he's going to get deeper.

Notice now.

Notice how deep he is over his right foot.

And I've also drawn the center line there.

That's on his sternum or the center of his sternum basically about where his chin was.

You can see he moves deep into that right side to the point, his right foot kind of rolls a little bit to the outside there.

That's how deep he's getting it.

See all that?

So watch his toe there roll to the outside and he's going to drive off of it of course.

So he's way back.

Remember the old RST necktie drill?

There's the poster boy for it.

That's where that drill basically came from.

And now as you see him drive back forward, he's certainly still staying way back behind the ball with his upper body.

He's not trying to drive his upper body into the ball he's trying to stay back.

Now for most golfers they never feel this side bend because the trail side lengthens.

This side of your body has to shorten as I talked about earlier.

You get into side bend with that lateral drive.

Tiger's got a lot of lateral drive but just from his lower body.

In other words all of his power is coming from the release of his wrist and his lower body.

His arms and shoulders are truly doing virtually nothing.

Who knows more about effortless power than Bubba Watson?

Now check out his setup alignment.

Notice his right shoulder way behind his foot.

His center of his sternum almost on his back of his foot.

Watch as he goes back.

Notice how deep he gets into that right leg.

His nose is hanging right over the center of his foot.

That's how much he's getting behind the ball.

That's how much he's loading up that powerful right leg, and you can see, just like Golden Bear, there's no weight on that lead foot at all.

It's completely come up in the air.

He's up on his toe.

He couldn't care less that it's there.

He's purely coiling around that trail leg building power from it.

And then from there, he's going to use that to drive off of that trail leg, but watch his upper body stay back.

If he started driving and pushing the club with his upper body and extending his right arm, and pushing with his right shoulder, and pushing with his whole upper body, would start moving forward.

And that would cause him to cast the club.

But instead, his head's moving backwards, further back than where it started, more into side bend, and he's still maintaining all his pressure on his trail foot.

Now of course he's hitting a driver but the point is how he loads.

The iron swing is going to be obviously a little bit less side bend, of course, because he's going to hit down on the ball more, going to get a little more pressure on the lead side.

But the mechanics, the force where he's driving from, doesn't change.

His power source is that trail leg and he's trying to stay back to be able to snap the wrists, and that's where you get effortless speed.

How do we put this into practice and hit balls?

Here's exactly what I want you to do.

I'm going to give you a couple more exaggerations and like setup cues that are going to help you start to understand how to glue this together.

So what you're going to do at first is you're going to make swings and you're going to get everything off the ball.

Your head, your whole upper body, Everything over this right foot so that you can pick this foot up.

Just like a baseball player who's getting ready to stride.

Because that's what you're going to do.

You don't have to take a big stride because that makes it harder.

But you're going to take a little one, even if it's just picking up your foot and just kind of tipping it over.

Just getting that initial feeling of just by picking up my foot, how my head stays back and I create a little bit of a stretch.

That's what you want to feel.

So as I do this, if I take a really big one just to exaggerate, I feel all of these muscles at the front of my body and my core, all of these start to stretch and that's a great feeling to start to feel, oh, Once these muscles stretch, they're going to want to snap back.

And you're going to let that happen.

Because as your body begins to drive back off of this powerful leg, you're not going to have to worry about hanging back.

In fact, I want you to try and hang back.

Would you do the opposite of what you think you should do?

Stop hitting it fat because you think that's what you have to do, but you actually, to get your hands ahead, your head has to go back.

The more my head goes back, The less I got to do with my arms and then I can get my hands way ahead of the ball as far as I want, but I'm actually hanging back.

That's how you get If you don't get shaft lean by trying to create shaft lean, it's the opposite.

Everything in the golf swing is counterintuitive.

You have to do the exact opposite of what you think you should.

You want your hands to get in front of the ball, get your head back.

Now, as I go back, my hands are here and that's how I'm going to hit the ball.

I want you to not be afraid to get over here and if you can, even pick your foot up and just learn to balance.

There's a high level, There's a guy named Teacher Man Hitting who's an excellent baseball coach and he wants you to do this, and it's the same feeling I want you to have.

You want to be balanced over here so you can take that step and then begin to load these legs even more, begin to stretch your upper body or your core.

And then from there, squish the bug and let the club release.

Your hands must snap.

If you feel that you're trying to push the club through at all or a better check for this, you go to the top of your swing and you have the urge to do this.

You'll feel this.

If this is you, you're going to know right away whether you're pulling with the side or pushing with the trail side.

The more that you tend to kind of be a better golfer, You're going to tend to pull a little bit more because, you know, at least you're trying to get your weight over there.

Worst golfers kind of do this.

So they're trying to push more with the trail arm.

This does nothing.

This has to stay truly relaxed.

So go to the top and just kind of VJ Let your arms just kind of go dead.

And then as you start to shift and drive off of that trail leg, pivot onto the toe and let the hand snap.

That was no effort.

The more I stay back, the more I stay more relaxed, my hands can then snap.

The more I try to drive them through or turn through, the worse it gets, the more power and effort I have to put into my swing.

So your goal to hit balls with this and one little setup cue that will help you with this.

Because the whole trick you're going to start to find is that your arms and hands as you go to the top, if you start trying to pick them up because that's how you're used to generating power, it creates tension in those muscles that we need to be truly relaxed.

They need to be truly moved by the body, by your trunk, by your big muscles in your legs.

So one little cue to exaggerate this at first is take your lead arm and externally rotate it.

And we're going to, again, big exaggeration, We're going to tone this down on your normal setup and then take your trail arm and do the same thing, externally rotate that one, externally rotate that one so that both elbow pits are kind of out.

You'll feel that this gets your body, your arms more connected.

They don't have to be this connected, it's an exaggeration, But this will get you the feeling as that as you're going back and getting onto this trail leg.

And you're probably going to want to start out with most of your weight over here and then make a little shift.

So you're going to feel like you're way off the ball when you're doing this drill, way behind the ball.

But if your arms are like this and you begin to turn to load that hip, my arms aren't really doing anything.

I'm still trying to exaggerate taking them back like this because what I'm trying to do is not pick them up.

The moment I pick them up, I'm going to fire them.

It's not going to be able to, you're not going to be able to stop that and you do not fire your arms in the golf swing.

You want them to be as soft and relaxed as humanly possible.

So as you're starting to kind of pick them up, you're going to want to yank them down and that's going to be the end of your effortless power.

It's going to be the end of your snap.

But if I kind of like Hogan talked about, he didn't do this.

He actually did the exact opposite, But he kind of talked like he felt in his book, that he wanted this kind of feeling where your forearms are bound together.

That's the exaggeration of this drill is to feel that so that you're, You're move into your trail side and load into that hip, and a little bit of turn is what moves your arms up.

So as I'm doing this down the line, I'm just exaggerating, keeping my elbow pits out and just turning and loading into this trail leg, you'll find it's as far as you can go.

You know, and obviously as I get dynamic with it, it's going to go a little bit further, but that's how you create a very compact feeling in your golf swing so that your body, your upper body, your shoulders are being moved by your trunk as you get into side bend.

And then as you begin to rotate, as you squish the bug and pivot on that foot on your right big toe or trail big toe.

So you don't want your arms kind of swinging real loosely and aggressively.

That's going to lead to pushing.

You can do that again, but it's not going to, your arms aren't going to whip.

And so as you get used to this feeling, you're going to realize that your arms don't have to do anything in the swing.

And in fact, you're going to realize that the less you do with your arms and the more you let them snap snapping, the more you're going to realize you don't want to activate your arms at all in the back.

So you want to do as little as humanly possible with them.

And that's going to be when this thing starts to really click and to feel it, go back, get all your weight over here.

And then as you start to go down and drive off the hip, just let your wrists snap so that you're barely holding onto the club.

So that's where you start to apply, you can at the top, start to apply a little bit of force throwing with your hands like we talked about earlier, again, as little effort as humanly possible, getting into that leg and then from there.

And if you really start to do it right, You're going to feel like the club head is kind of trying to fly out of your fingers through the hitting area.

Again, when I, a lot of times when I talk about that tiger talking about how he had a tight grip, he was comparing to this, to other masters winners at the masters dinner.

And so his hand, they're talking about guys who felt like the club was going to fall out of their hands.

Now think about that's been talked about for decades.

Like Sam Snead back in the day, holding it like a baby bird.

You don't have to hold it that loose, but if you, the more effortless speed you want, the looser you are going to realize you want to hold it.

Tiger saying he holds onto it very tight, I think is very relative compared to a guy who's holding it where it's literally floppy and sloppy.

Tiger feels like he holds it tight because he knows how to throw it.

He knows how to stay back and drive off that trail hip and release his wrists and snap his wrists.

And so he feels that he's not, he's not holding it tight, but his wrists and arms are tight, like locked up.

He's holding it just tighter enough that he has control over the face because he has so much speed.

When you generate effortless speed, what you're actually going to feel when you're trying to hit, say like a controlled shot, like a knockdown shot, three A lot of times when I see golfers do this, and I've done this myself, they kind of just make like a little half swing and then drive it through with their arms.

And so you start to push on these shorter shots.

If you tend to kind of take deeper divots on your easier swings like that, that tends to happen a lot.

But on a shorter shot, what you're really doing is you're still loading and making a full turn, But you're actually slowing down the release of the club by holding onto the club a little bit more control.

But you won't know what that means until you feel it.

To get the feeling of it first, you want to feel like that club is trying to pull out of your hands.

And that's why Tiger has that old callus or blister in his finger.

I feel my finger getting rubbed raw every time I hit balls when that club feels like it's trying to slip down my hands like that.

Because that's how the feeling of the zip that I want on the ball or on the club is that.

And that's the fastest way to move.

The club is.

It has to be throwing out through your hands, and your hands have to be relaxed.

So again, I think Tiger's kind of relatively speaking there when he's talking about holding it tight, but you'll get the feeling of this keeping your arms relaxed.

And there's just no effort in that.

And as I kind of practice a little bit more, a little bit of throw in sync with this motion.

And this is kind of the basic feeling of it is I take some lateral move, get into side bend, start squishing the bug.

My hand is starting to throw the J release, pivoting on that toe.

And there I am.

My hips are wide open.

No stress on my body.

It's not hard to get my hips open at all.

But there's a catch, which some of you may not be able to feel or even activate the muscles in your hips right now.

I see this constantly in my lessons in person.

And so I always do an assessment now if they're struggling, on whether or not you're able to fire these muscles.

Because if you can't, you can't have effortless power.

You're going to have to push the club through.

You're going to have to push it with your arm, your shoulder, your whole upper body, whatever, because you're not going to be able to use the muscles in your hips.

And that's going to lead to always, always struggling with your golf swing.

To have access to the most important muscles in the body and a trailside throwing pattern to generate power.

So if you can't, if you kind of feel in this, you're just, I'm not sure if I'm using the right muscles.

I put together a program because I've been doing this for so long and seeing so many men who have pancake butts.

We've lost our glutes and we can't activate them.

And so if your pants form a straight line going in the back and there's not a little hump there, you're probably not using these muscles.

Probably haven't used them in potentially decades.

In any meaningful way.

And that's why you've lost all your power, especially as you've gotten older, because you're not using these muscles.

So I put together a program that walks you through both.

A way to start to engage these muscles and wake them up and feel them in a way that directly and immediately applies to the golf swing.

Because that's my hang up on these golf fitness programs.

They have you throwing medicine balls around and stuff.

And, but then they don't tell you how that directly relates to your golf swing.

And that's because everybody kind of swings so differently.

But for me, all I care about is a formula for effortless power.

And this is it.

You can't do anything more powerfully than this.

Keeping all this relaxed makes everything snap faster, gets a true whipping motion, and it's truly effortless.

But you have to be able to do this.

So I put that together in a way that every single exercise and movement that I have you do, we immediately then go and swing the golf club.

And I start explaining to you what it is you should feel and how you should feel it in your golf swing and when you should feel it.

And then we go back and do another exercise.

It could be for the core, it could be for hamstrings, it could be for glutes, muscles that we just typically don't know how to engage properly.

We do an exercise to get you to your brain to fire that muscle and truly become aware of it.

And then we go immediately to the golf swing and say, okay, now this is what I want you to feel in your swing, why we just did this exercise and how you need to feel these muscles.

So it's a unique program in that sense.

It's not, I'm not trying to build a bunch of muscle per se.

I'm going to help you build strength, but it's more about activation and engagement.

And it's because it's something that many of you won't need.

If you're in good shape and you're an athlete, you've played other sports, you're still active, you probably already know this and you're like, oh, Chuck, I get it.

I feel it right away.

I don't need this.

But if you do need this, it's part of the RSA program because it's really a way, even if you are really fit and you can engage these muscles, you may not know exactly how to engage them or feel them, why we're doing them in the swing this way, Then you'll start to be able to translate these exercises and the strength and things that you have into being able to apply a ton of force into the golf swing.

Because that's really what it comes down to is I want to hit the ball as far as humanly possible.

I'm obsessed with it.

I hit the ball a long ways.

It's fun, But it just makes the game so much easier to be consistent, and you can't be consistent if you can't use your trunk.

So if you're interested in that, I put a link in the description down below.

It's part of the RSA program because it's really just an accelerator course.

It's going to get your brain to start being able to do these things and feel these things much, much faster than if you're going out on your own, if you don't know how to feel the kinesthetic awareness in your hips.

So I put a link down there below.

Check that out and we will see you on the other side.