GOAT Code Effortless Power - Using Your Head - Pt 3 of 4

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In part 3 you're going to finally learn what your head actually should do and feel like in the golf swing to truly create an effortless snap of the wrists.


Effortlessness.

When somebody makes something look effortless, especially the golf swing, there's just something kind of magical about it.

It's something I've been obsessed with probably since I was a teenage boy.

First studying the golf swing, that first pure shot that I hit that just rocketed off the clubface, flew dead straight, and I felt nothing.

How do you replicate that on every single shot?

Today, I hope that I'm gonna give you that answer.

As I said, I've studied this for more than 30 years, and what I've always wondered is what is the most effortless way to hit the golf ball?

What does that even really mean?

Well, at the end of the day, when you've hit those great shots, you've undoubtedly felt something different than what you typically feel.

As I talked about in one of the previous videos about how we tend to want to kind of use our pushing muscles to push the club through the ball because it feels really powerful.

That's the opposite of effortless.

When it's effortless, you don't fire those muscles.

In fact, we use completely different sets of muscles, but what does that really mean?

What muscles are we using?

How do we feel that?

How do we conjure up those effortless shots on demand or more specific, better yet, do it every single time.

And how do we learn proper golf swing mechanics without spending years and years and years of our life trying to figure out how to hit a ball with a stick?

It shouldn't be that hard.

Well, I've been fortunate enough to do a lot of other sports in my life at a reasonably high level and learned lots of new, different things from different people.

And the one thing that I've always found is that learning anything else other than the golf swing is much easier.

So, what is it that makes golf so hard?

And today, I feel like what you're gonna learn is gonna put those pieces of the puzzle, because I know that you're out there asking the same questions.

Why can't I hit this little ball?

Why is it so hard?

Why is golf so frustrating?

And I think it's because we've kind of missed the forest for the trees.

We've missed the big picture.

What I mean by that is, And all the other things that I've done that talked about snowboarding and dirt biking and rock climbing, all these different things I've done in my life, they were all very easy to learn relatively quickly, even though some of these movements were very, very complex like a golf swing.

But they all emanated from kind of one motion.

So like the snowboard trick I showed you earlier, The way that I learned that and learned how to do something like that in just 30 minutes was.

I went on a trampoline and I literally just tucked my head and my shoulder and landed on my back, like a little half rotation, like here and landing on my back.

That's the whole trick.

To do that frontside rodeo is literally just this.

And once you have that motion, the rest of it takes care of itself.

Well, I learned how to whip a dirt bike.

You lean the bike over, heads over here, bring your head back over, the bike comes right back underneath you.

It's all one movement.

The golf swing, when it's done right, when it's done well, when it's done by somebody who's truly a master, it looks like one movement.

It doesn't look like a backswing, a pause, and then a downswing.

It looks like it's just one orchestrated thing that has intent and purpose right from the very get-go.

How do we get that feeling?

How do we make our swing smooth and fluid and dynamic and powerful and effortless at the same time?

Well, as I talked about earlier, if you initiate the movement the right way, then a lot of things will just unfold naturally.

In the golf swing, There's so many different moving parts that it's very difficult at first, until you step back to isolate that one movement.

If I just do a perfect takeaway, well, that doesn't do anything.

In fact, it's hard to get from there up to the top of my backswing and then start the downswing.

It's always been about how you load the muscles.

If you load the muscles correctly, they will unload correctly.

But what the heck does loading muscles correctly in the golf swing even mean?

That's what we're going to talk about, at least first.

So the thing that's interesting about golf, or about life, is that our head is what we kind of do everything with.

Our eyes are super important for everything, for balance, walking, movement, everything that we're doing.

Our eyes are processing so much information.

Our brains processing so much information through our eyes.

And the vestibular process, our balance, our equilibrium through our ears, the fluid in our ears, all of these things are working, but they're all up here.

And what are you told to do with your head in the golf swing?

Keep it still.

Don't move it.

Now, that's not necessarily bad advice, because the reason that that is a common thing to be taught is that.

A lot of golfers push from the lead side, like you've heard me talk about for years, and that moves their head way off the ball.

And then they push from this side, and so they have a push-push swing that has no power.

It requires a lot of effort and it doesn't go anywhere and it's impossible to control the club face.

And so then you just grab that student's head and say okay now just move like this.

And that's not wrong for somebody who is moving their head all over the place.

But there's a bigger thing at stake here, and that is.

Is the head a passive part of the golf swing or is it an active part of the golf swing?

In other words is it a cause or an effect?

Now you've no doubt seen golfers as they release the club that their head goes back a little bit.

Some do it more than others as you saw in the beginning of the video or this step two video.

But we've kind of always thought of that.

It's just a reaction to that club flying out of way and you're counterbalancing it.

But what if it's not a reaction at all?

What if it's the cause of everything?

Just like I said when I did that frontside rodeo, all I'm doing is taking my head down and tucking my shoulder, and then everything else takes care of itself.

I don't have to do a thing basically.

In the golf swing what if I just had that same motion?

What if I just moved my head in a certain way and then my body responded to all of that?

Again this is the control center anyway.

Our brains up here, our eyes up here, balance, proprioception, everything is all up here.

And this is the one part we're told to leave alone in the golf swing.

To just ignore it.

Don't think about it.

Don't move it.

What if you were supposed to actively move it and then everything else moved and was moved and told what to do by this?

That's what I'm proposing in this video.

That once you understand this, and once you feel it, you're going to understand how to produce effortless power today.

You're going to feel it.

What it truly feels like on every single swing by moving your head actively in the golf swing.

So let me talk a little bit more about what that means really.

So the first thing you've got to understand is to have effortless power in the golf swing.

We have to have power.

The energy has to come from somewhere.

We have to, I like to think of it as energizing the system.

If your body isn't doing anything there's no potential for power whatsoever.

We have to have, we obviously have to move.

If we don't move, there's nothing going to happen.

Now there's lots and lots and lots of different ways we can move, right?

You've no doubt probably tried them all.

Moving your hands, turning your shoulders, sliding your hips.

There's a million different things that we can do.

And it's so difficult to coordinate all these things.

Which is why I showed that snowboard video.

Because if I tried to learn that complex move through trying to tell each segment of my body what to do, like we do in the golf swing, get your arms here, get your shoulder here, move your pressure here, keep your head there, get your weight over here, move over here, set up this way.

I would never ever learn it.

And, And.

And.

And.

And, And.

And.

And.

And, And.

And.

And.

And, And.

And.

And.

it's dangerous, there's all sorts of risks involved.

There's no risks in golf per se.

You're not going to die hitting a golf ball, hopefully.

But we're trying to learn the golf swing in all of these segmented pieces.

And I have certainly taught it that way, because we haven't been able to figure out a better way.

But that's what takes so long.

But if we had one controller that told everything else what to do, kind of like how your body works in real life, your head and your brain is telling all of this stuff what to do all the time.

If we could do that in the golf swing, we can start to understand how to put energy into the system to have power, but without having to put muscular effort into it.

So what do I mean by that?

If you think of your body as a rotating machine in the golf swing, it can do that for sure.

You can hit the ball great.

There's a million different ways to hit the ball great.

I don't believe that's the most efficient way to just try and rotate.

I don't believe just lateral movement is the most efficient way.

Obviously, both of those things are happening.

And the same thing with vertical movement.

But trying to get lateral movement, rotational movement, vertical movement to all happen at the right time, perfect sequence in thousands of a second, it's a big ask.

But what if those things all happen naturally as a result of how you actively moved this?

This thing is 10 pounds, give or take a little bit.

That's a good chunk of weight.

You got a bowling ball on top of your shoulders.

And if I move this quickly, one way or the other, my body is going to react to that movement.

And if I do that in a certain way, I'm going to start moving all the parts of my body.

I'm going to have lateral movement, I'm going to have rotational movement, I'm going to have vertical movement, but they're all going to be more reactions to what I'm doing up here.

So to get a feel for this and start to really understand what's really happening here, we need to understand the concept of leverage.

Leverage in the golf swing is everything if you want effortless power.

If you want to work really hard for it, take all the leverage out of your golf swing and you'll swing as hard as you can, it'll feel like a lot of effort and the ball will go nowhere.

If you want effortlessness, it's all about leverage.

Leverage is everything.

And so when you think about your body, instead of thinking about it in terms of moving laterally or rotationally or vertically, think about it as a big lever.

My whole body right now is a lever and this is the end of that lever.

And if I do something with the end of this thing, this whole structure can act as a lever against my arm, hand, and golf club.

And that's what you want to think about if you're trying to use your head in the right way to create leverage in the golf swing.

Because what you're going to see is that as I use my entire body as one giant lever, instead of having a bunch of segments, a bunch of smaller levers, I'm going to use my entire stick, this whole thing of five foot nine lever to put force into this golf club.

And that's the key because the bigger lever you can have in your golf swing, the more effortless power you're going to have.

Remember Archimedes said, give me a lever big enough I can move the world.

When you're jacking up a car, if you have a long jack handle, it's very easy to jack that car up.

You have a really short jack handle, you don't have any leverage.

And that is the key to effortless golf.

So I started thinking about this.

How would I use my entire body as a lever?

Well, obviously, I would need to move from my head.

Now, as I showed you in the in the second part of this video, that all these modern power players, their head, and the more powerful they are, the more their head goes back, all these modern guys and gals are dropping their head back.

Now again, I think that that's commonly been thought of as kind of a reactionary thing to how you're moving your legs.

That's not necessarily untrue.

It could be you could do it that way.

But I think it's simpler if we had one thing to focus on.

And that, to me, has always been the key to learning golf.

The more things you have to do, the more things you have to think about, the longer it's going to take for you to learn, if you ever learn it at all.

But if I had one top primary command unit up here that moved everything else, and I only had to focus on what I was doing with this, what would happen in the golf swing?

Let's see.

So if you have a golf club, stand up and I want you to take it in your lead hand only at first, okay?

I'm not going to be swinging fast, so you can do this indoors totally fine.

You're not going to hit anything.

But what I want you to feel is if you were going to drop your head back this way, quickly, what would you want to do in the backswing?

Well, you would want to do the opposite movement of that because that's going to load the body, the lever, in a way that's going to make it easier and faster to move in the opposite direction.

Now, as I've talked about in the Goat Code videos, as I started working more towards Tiger's early 2000 swing, I started feeling that my swing was more lateral.

Now, of course, there's rotation.

This is a feel thing.

But what I don't feel is twisting and twisting.

And this is the same thing that you're going to have in this movement.

If I'm going to load my body this way, I want to feel lateral.

I want to feel a reverse pivot.

Mike Austin talked about how he felt the bottom of his body kind of moved like a pendulum.

I don't think he talked about the head before.

I never heard him talk about it if he did.

But if you think about it in that sense, that it's lateral movement for right now, and it's your head that's dictating that.

So if I, in the backswing, if I wanted my head to go this way, where's my body going to go?

If I tilt my head this way, actively tilt my head, don't try to move my body, I'm just going to tilt my head down.

My hips go this way, right?

So now I've loaded up this side of my body, so that, guess what it wants to do on the way down?

Reverse.

The faster I can make that movement, the faster I can move this lever.

Just think of my body like a big old wrench.

And the more I can do this, what is that going to do to my shoulder?

Well, it's going to tilt my shoulder back, and it's going to move it.

What's that going to do to my hand?

It's going to move that forward.

What's that going to do to the golf club?

Move that forward using a wrench, using my body as a lever.

So as I go back, what I want to feel is that as I'm trying to kind of, and again, these are exaggerations, I'm going to talk more about that in just a moment.

But as I'm tilting my head back this way, I want to feel that my hips slide out this way.

Again, exaggeration, you're not going to do it quite to that degree.

But if you feel this, you're going to feel load and lengthening this way.

And guess what that's going to help you do as you start to go back the other way?

Those muscles are then going to be able to contract, and that's going to move you into side bend, and that's going to drop the head back, which is going to move the hands forward.

Now, Some of the questions I saw about the most recent video were about how do I not hit it fat if I'm working on this move, this squish the bug drill.

Now watch what happens.

So I'm going to, again, exaggerate this.

I'm going to take my head forward this way a lot, so it's very easy to see on camera.

And then as I start to, you know, as I'm, the ground is pushing back against me.

So as I load into this leg, it's very natural for me to have this energy loading up the system, priming the system, putting energy into it, that it's going to go back this way.

And as I do that, even though my head is, I'm trying to reverse pivot at the moment, as I do this, my head's going to go forward just a little bit, just because the ground is pushing my hips back this way.

And then my head is going to tilt back this way.

Now, as I did that, my hands and arms were completely dead, completely dead, no force, no pushing, no effort.

But as I do this a little bit more dynamically, I have a ton of speed without any effort.

My arms were truly whipped through.

And that is the key to feeling effortlessness, in my opinion, is it's always been the arms and club whipping.

When they're tight and you're pushing through, you can put a lot of force and effort into it and hit the ball far, but it doesn't feel effortless.

It doesn't feel that snap, that whip of my arms.

My arms have to be quiet and soft and relaxed in order for that to happen the fastest, in order for that club to release the fastest.

And by doing this, I'm starting to put leverage into my body so that then I have more leverage to go back this way.

It's like jumping.

If you start like this and you jump, that stretch shortening cycle never happens.

And so you don't have nearly as much energy, or you can't jump nearly as high as doing it dynamically all as one motion.

Same thing through the golf swing.

As I go back, I'm, again, exaggerating, because that's priming everything to go back this way.

But the head is what I'm focusing on to get all of this stuff to happen.

Now that's why I want to talk about the head for just a moment, as I mentioned these exaggerations.

First of all, my neck is fused at C1, 2, and 3.

So my head doesn't, I don't have very much, this is called glide, I don't have very much glide, I don't have very much tilt, and I don't have very much rotation.

So when you're looking at what my head's doing, don't try to match it exactly, because it's not going to look anywhere near the same.

I can't physically keep my chin over my shoulder, pointing straight down at the ground when I'm doing this, because my head is stuck, my neck is fused.

So when you're doing this, your head should still be square, or looking down at the ground, unless you have neck mobility limitations as well.

And then as I start working on this tilt that we're going to talk about in a moment, it's going to look differently than what you're doing.

So just be mindful of that.

My neck is stuck.

So don't try to do it exactly the way that I'm doing.

Try to get the big picture, the gist of what I'm saying and how we're doing this.

So you've got the idea of putting energy into the system.

Something has to move that golf club.

Something has to.

And we can do it with our arms and hands.

That's the cheap, quick way, but there's never any power in that, and it feels like a lot of work.

So if I want to keep my arms out of it, where else do I get it?

It's from using our whole body as a lever.

So now what I want you to start to visualize is that you're starting to form a column or a straight line from the center of your foot, knee, hip, and head.

If you're like this, that's way outside the column, and you're going to feel you're going to have to shove your upper body back.

If you go too far, it's going to feel out of whack.

What you want to feel is that powerful load into this leg.

And again, while I feel more this as in reaction to my head tilting this way in the backswing, What's really happening is I'm also turning because I've got the club of my arms swinging around my body.

So that helps my hips avoid looking like this, even though that's what it feels like.

I'm actually going in and rotating, so it's kind of diagonal like I talked about in the old RST hip line videos.

But the feeling or the cause of it is I'm loading up the system.

I'm priming this lever, and so I want to get that lever ready to be able to go back down.

So if you think about it in that regard, if I was pushing straight down on this, would I have more energy to just push straight down statically?

Or if I lifted it and then slammed it down?

That's what we're doing.

We're lifting it and slamming it back down.

And that's going to allow us to move much, much faster with our body with that lever.

And that's going to move the hands and arms and club faster without any effort from all these small muscles in your body.

So as you're going back, get into it and let your head or use your head to start to feel like you're going this way.

Now, as I talked about, again, in the part two of the video where I showed Rory's head starting to tilt this way, you're not going to see that much of it until you really know what to look for.

So this is going to be more of a feel.

It's not going to be some huge traumatic thing.

It's not like you're, you know, I can't tilt my head any further than that, but I know many of you obviously can and get your shoulder down, you know, towards your ear or your ear towards your shoulder.

It's not that significant of a movement.

What you're really trying to do is get your head to tell your body what to do.

And so these movements are going to be relatively subtle until we get to the downswing, and then they're as radical as you want them to be.

And I'll explain what that means.

So as we're going back, again, I'm not trying to initiate the movement so much with my body now.

I'm trying to initiate the movement with my head.

Now, again, I don't want to just try and tilt my head because I could do that.

This is night at the Roxbury.

This is not what we're trying to do.

We're trying to get everything to work together.

So when I was doing that frontside rodeo and just focusing on my shoulder and my head, my whole body is being told what to do.

It's moving.

I'm not trying to keep it static.

You know that you've got to obviously turn your body and swing that club back in order to have some leverage here.

So as you're tilting, feeling that you're getting your head ready to get into this levered position to fire this way, feel that you're staying more on the trail side and getting into it.

But don't just tilt your head.

You can see if I just tilt my head and if I kept my body rigid and static, it wouldn't move.

But if I'm relaxed with it, because again, we want to be able to move very, very, very rapidly.

We want our body to be able to just fire insanely fast.

The faster it can fire, the better.

But the easiest way to do that, the fastest way to do it, is to be tension -free.

The tighter you are, the harder it's going to be to move very, very quickly.

And to feel effortlessness, you've got to have quickness.

You've got to have speed.

So as you're doing this, load into it, but feel like you're ready to then tilt back the other way.

What a lot of golfers do is they get into it okay, but then they try to push off of that right leg and move their head forward.

Or like the old Gary player walkthrough do.

That's the shortest way to hit the golf ball.

You're never going to have any power because that's just pushing the club through, like I talked about in the club through.

When you were throwing the club correctly, if you did that, guess what you would do?

Your head would tilt back and then you would throw.

You would never throw like this unless you have no idea how to generate speed.

That's not going to go anywhere.

That's pushing the club through.

So, just like when you were doing a club throw and your head would tilt back.

To get your hands and arms to go forward and use your body as a lever against them, the same thing is true here.

So as I'm going back into it, and now again the ground's pushing back against me, I'm going back this way and then my head is then working this way.

I'm trying to purposely, intentionally drop my head back this way.

Why?

Because that's the end of the wrench.

And as I pulled on this lever, pull down on my head, watch what happens to the golf club.

I'm not going to do anything more than tilt my head back as I come down.

So I'm getting back, obviously ground's pushing me back this way, and now I'm focusing on tilting my head.

Look where my hands are.

So yeah, you struggle to get your hands in front of the ball.

It's because you're trying to move your hands in front of the ball.

Your hands get moved in front of the ball when you use that lever.

Again, I'm just tilting all this back.

That moves my pelvis forward, and my shoulders tilt back, which moves my hands forward.

And now you can see there's no problem for me to turn the six iron into a two iron at impact.

I didn't try and hold that angle off or try and push my hands forward.

That's going to make sure that you never do this right.

But the softer I can keep my hands by tilting back with my head, the more I'm able to take loft off of that club face.

And that's the key to compression, which is another huge part of that effortless golf swing feel that you're after.

Your arms and hands can't be tight.

You have to de-loft that club face.

You have to have a proper angle of attack.

But what most golfers do is they take the club and then they start just pushing against it with the trail arm, because that's a strong arm.

It's a dominant arm.

It feels powerful.

That's why I kept telling you when I was throwing the club head at the ball in these previous videos, it wasn't my arm doing it because that's not very powerful.

It feels powerful, but it's not.

I want to snap a quickness to my swing.

So the best way to feel this is to go lead arm only and start putting this together.

So I'm going to again exaggerate.

So my first initiation is tilting my head back.

That kind of opens this up a little bit, opens my rib cage and my abdominal wall, which stretches that fascia, stretches those muscles, stretches the ligaments and tendons.

And then they're ready.

They're primed to then fire back the other way.

And the faster I can move my head, further my hands are going to be able to get in front of the ball.

So if you go lead arm only, so I'm again exaggerating this reverse pivot fill, but getting into this right side.

And then as I swing down, all I want you to feel at first is a big exaggeration of tilting your head and tilting your head.

Now again, yours is going to look different because mine doesn't turn very well.

So don't try to do it exactly like that.

Try to get the feeling of your shoulders getting very steep and that shallowing out the angle of attack.

So as you're hitting the ground, it should brush it.

It should clip it.

It shouldn't be a thud.

If it's a thud, you've activated something from here down to push that club down instead of using your arm, your body as a lever.

So as I go back, so I'm just brushing the grass.

I'm keeping my, my wrist really soft and you'll hear a little snap there, right?

It's a little whoosh, but I'm truly doing nothing with this part of my body.

My left arm doesn't work very well anyway.

I can't put that much effort into it.

The snap and the swoosh and the acceleration that you get into the back of the ball to properly strike it, properly compress it, all of that's passive.

You can't force it to happen.

And that's the damnedest thing about golf is you, the more you try to force it, the worse off you're going to be.

You have to let the golf swing happen.

In fact, I think our truly effortless, proper golf swing is an act of faith.

What I mean by that is all of this stuff is really being initiated very early, just like when I did that rodeo.

My initial move off the jump is this, And then I hope that I did that right, because everything else from what happens after that is kind of outside of my control.

It's an act of faith.

I have to huck myself off this jump and then hope that I hooked myself correctly.

You're hucking yourself off the jump starts right at setup.

You're committing to getting this lever primed because I'm going to move it back this way so that I can then use my head, this giant bowling ball, all this weight to move it back the other way.

Imagine if you had a 10 pound weight on the end of this golf club.

Think about that for a second.

How light would this club head feel?

Your swing weight would be like D negative 5,000 because they're all the, the fulcrum would be moved so far up here that you would feel like this is a feather.

That's the point is the lighter this feels the faster it can move.

If this thing feels like it's 50 pounds, which, you know, we could make golf club heads that heavy.

And they would hit the ball really hard when it hit it, but you wouldn't go to move it very fast.

The lighter this feels the more you can move it the faster you can move it.

So by putting a counterbalance up here, you would be able to have more leverage and be able to move this much more quickly.

Now, imagine that that lever wasn't at the end of your club, but it was all the way up here, that far away from the club head.

That's how powerful having a 10 pound block of meat on top of your shoulders is if you use it.

If you leverage it correctly by tilting it to try and move the rip the rest of the wrench this way.

Moves the hands forward, brings a club perfectly an impact.

And your hands are always going to be able to be delfted because you're not fighting this.

Then when people chicken wing it, scoop it, flip it, all that stuff, they're here and they're just firing this right arm, pushing away and then scooping through.

None of that stuff happens when you do this correctly.

And that's why it's really important when you're first getting this feel.

To be left hand.

Only because I don't want you to put any muscle into it at all.

Once you get a feel for how that club will snap by using your head to tilt and tilt, and again, it's not just tilt.

And it's gonna look different when I'm doing it versus you, because my head doesn't work like that, so it's more than just tilting like that.

There's obviously rotation happening, but that's the feeling of getting this leverage.

Once you have the feel of how the club and your arm is just dead and it just snaps like that.

Every single time.

Through the swing.

Put your trail hand back on there and then you can start to speed all of that up.

Because the faster you can tilt, the faster you can throw.

And you put those two together and you start adding more and more and more club head speed.

But they have to work together.

That's why I was talking about in part two of the video, how their head it looks like.

It's moving in sync, perfect sync with the hands, all right.

The more I tilt my head back, the more it moves my hands forward.

So I want those two things to be one in the same.

And you've got to have a little bit of rhythm and tempo.

And that rhythm and tempo that's lacking in your swing is not there because you're using the muscles to try and push the club through.

But as soon as you take all of this out and keep it as relaxed as you can for right now, keep your arms totally dead.

Then what you'll find is that rhythm and tempo is natural.

And so if you take your left hand and you just kind of go back and forth and I'm not doing anything with my arms and hands.

I kind of have a grandfather clock, right?

I'm a pendulum back and through, I don't have any difficulty timing the bottom of my swing arc.

I can get it to brush the grass all day long without in the same spot.

Because I'm not doing anything with my arm or hand, that's the easiest way to be.

Most consistent is the less you do with your arms and hands, the more consistent you're going to be.

Which those of you that have been around since the dead drill days and long before that, know that this is always a big, key, fundamental piece to that.

The reason that a lot of golfers gravitated to the trail arm throw and kind of start doing it incorrectly, using too much show on push is because I had a hard time keeping their arms relaxed.

The reason you had a hard time keeping your arms relaxed is because you didn't have.

Something to energize the system, something to put force and leverage into your body.

But if you use this head trick to start energizing your body and creating movement, I can move my head very quick, and the faster I can do that, the faster I can tilt, the faster I can swing my arms and hands.

Don't have to do a thing.

So you start putting the dead drill and the axiom and and the goat coat and all of these things together.

And they kind of all get tied together with a nice little bow.

When you just take everything out and make this the centralized control piece.

So now, once I have that feeling of that left arm snap, now, I'm gonna add my right arm.

Now, you can hear a different swoosh, right?

I gotta tilt quick, I gotta get my head to drop, get my body to be dynamic and quick and relaxed.

But the faster I can do that, the faster I can speed everything up.

And this is where that squish, the bug drill, came in, so helpful for a lot of times.

I tried to explain it well, but clearly I didn't.

So guys were saying, how do I not hurt my back?

or how am I, you know, not standing up or pushing off of this foot?

And I said, it's not rotation that you're really trying to feel, that's turning and twisting your pelvis, what you're really trying to feel is this thing to get out of the way.

And guess what, that when my head drops really fast, what am I doing?

I'm squishing that bug again.

Baseball players know that you've got a huge stride, so you're not going to stay back and pivot on that back foot.

But in golf, we do, we don't have a huge step, so that's why you see so many modern power players doing this.

They look like they're staying back on that, but what they're really doing is tilting their head and their whole upper body together.

All as one, with this kind of being the controlling factor.

And as that goes back, I want to squish that bug as quickly as I can because I want my hips to get out of the way.

I'm not driving off of them for power per se, although you can, but I prefer to move really relaxed, I prefer to move very quick, so what I want to do with that squish the bug feel is that's as quick as I can move.

And I combine that with a tilt and my arm comes right down.

To GDP, those of you who can't get your arm into GDP, this is why, because you're trying to move your arms into GDP.

They've got to get moved there.

You can do it actively, to a degree, but then again, I'm trying to feel as effortless as I can.

So for me, I want to keep my arms, all these smaller muscles as limited in their involvement as I can.

And I want to use as much big muscle, big leverage, big bone structure and as much physics to my advantage as I can.

So I'm not saying you can't fire your arm like that, I just don't want to do that because I want to just use this giant lever.

And I find that the bigger, simpler tool that I have versus all these small, little, intricate, delicate tools that I have access to, I find this is a lot easier for me.

I'm dumb enough that I just want one simple tool.

I want everything to be a nail and I'm a hammer, so I don't want like different sets of micro tools that's kind of what your arms and your hands and your shoulders you can do all sorts of different stuff with them and still play great golf I want it simple and so for me simple is this giant thing acting as one lever being guided by this as you get a feel for it as I mentioned left arm only get that snap add the right arm speed in there and that's it your arms and hands should be snapping you can hear it all I'm doing tilting back snapping tilting back the faster I go that was moving there now here's what's interesting about that you guys know I have a horrible body a horrible back I can do this without any pain okay when I feel pain in my back or my hip SI joint knee any of those things is when I start pushing from the trail side of my body every single time I will experience some sort of pain or soreness in that this is a very passive I hate to use that word passive but it's that's the best way I can describe the feeling of it it's a very relaxed feeling in my body and my core I'm definitely using these muscles I'm using the fascia to spring back and fire really quickly but as far as my spine goes I feel minimal tension in fact I feel really really really relaxed throughout this part of my body and that's how I'm protecting it from injury and you start tightening up muscles and you start firing and twisting and pulling there's so many things that can happen to cause injury soreness any of that stuff it's so easy to do when you start applying a lot of force a lot of torque on the body but by doing this and tilting in a what feels like a pure side bend motion without rotation and that's why this squish the bug feel works for golf because as I'm getting into pure side bend what's going to happen to my foot as my shoulder goes down my foot's going to come up it's going to make it easy for me to pivot and now I'm still in pure side bend with minimal to no rotation of my body so that's how I'm feeling even though this looks crazy when you see especially in younger kids they can move way different than us so Ariel Collins beautiful phenomenal movement in a golf swing most of us aren't going to move like that we're not going to be able to get our head down to our belt line like she does but that's the feeling but you do it to whatever degree or level that you feel comfortable with if you've got a really bad back like me you may not want to tilt back this much that's okay just a little bit you can see tiger especially as he got older has less and less when he was younger and really really fast he had a lot he has back problems now from well we know what that's from but those things have prevented him from being able to move like he used to but he also used to hang on the side and then try and get back that's why it's very important because some of you are going to think well if I'm going to tilt this way why don't I just stay on that side again you can by now you should know better that it's virtually impossible to hit the driver with any proper launch angle and any distance on it so if you load this way it's very easy to get back over here because the harder you tilt this way and that's really what the golf swing should feel like I'm doing this that's what I like about stack and tilt stuff is they they understand side bend but staying on this side no other sport in the world does that you need to load into it so what really happens is as you're going into side bend and your body is turning because your arms and everything are motating it I'm really just feeling this in the backswing on my trail leg and then as I turn it looks like I rotated in the golf swing what I really did was tilted my head let my hips slide out and turn so now at the top of my backswing I look like I'm a golfer except with a goofy looking head but that's all I did is I kept dropping my head down to the ground this way the more I do that the more my head's going to lower the more I'm going to load up these muscles and so on from down the line it might make a little bit more sense so again I'm just going I'm dropping my head to the ground and my arms are turning me around and so now I look like I'm in a normal golf position but all I did was try to exaggerate dropping my head to the ground and then as I come out of it I'm reversing that and going the other way I'm unloading what I loaded give that a feel you just need to do it to whatever degree that you're comfortable with but with the more that you move that wrench the faster you can do it the less and less you're going to feel in your arms and that is the secret to effortless golf

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Norm
Based on this and other videos, I got comfortable with the effortless swing concept at the range today. With a driver my distance was same as my old full-effort swing but 3-8 miles slower swing speed. So… it felt effortless but I couldn’t get more clubhead speed. How do I increase my effortless swing speed so the ball will truly go farther?
June 18, 2025
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Craig (Certified RST Instructor)
Hello Norm. Tough to say without seeing the move. You can post our driver here and I can tell you where the power leaks are.
June 19, 2025
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Norm
What I feel and see are not the same. I feel I’m swinging straight back and leaning in on through swing but doesn’t look like it. I’ve always had a lot of head movement. Swing speed has always been slow 85 mph max (I’m 77y.o. now). On these swings the device says I’m at 76 mph but the distance is almost 200 yds, which was what I was doing with my previous full-effort swing. (Also 20-30 mph headwind at time of these swings). Please let me know your thoughts and the options for having you see all my swings. Love your Wednesday webinars.

June 23, 2025
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Craig (Certified RST Instructor)
See video. Thanks for the compliments on the Webinars .

June 23, 2025
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James
Very interesting, and makes total sense that the head should influence movement. I recently saw a video saying Dechambeau watches the putter swing back and through, not keeping his eyes fixed on the ball. Now I wonder whether he thinks he’s doing that, but it’s actually the other way around — he he slight head movement is what’s swinging the putter??
March 2, 2025
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Tyler
Okay.....I'm just jumping into this Goat theory and I have to admit that I haven't been doing the drills or anything in order yet. However, you sent an email about head movement and hitting the ball 280 so I watched part 2 and 3 pertaining the head.....so, while watching football yesterday I messed around with it trying to get the feel. Fast forward to today and I had 30 minutes to kill so I went up and did some left handed swings in my simulator room at my school. Then I added the right hand and it just felt good so I turned on the ol' skytrac. 10 swings with an 8 iron and the lowest carry I got was 159 and I got up to 167. My normal carry is about 155. Felt terrific. Swing speed up about 3 MPH I would say and spin is down. I'm thinking you are on to something with the ol' Noggin.
December 9, 2024
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Chuck
Awesome man! That’s the kind of start we want to see!
December 10, 2024
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Jeff
Hey Chuck, I have a question about the body position at impact (lead side swing vs trail side). In a lead side swing, am I correct in saying that the lead side at impact is stacked over the shoulder, hip, knee & foot)? With a trail side this is not the case.
December 1, 2024
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Chuck
They both can have rhe lead shoulder stacked. It just depends on the club you’re hitting and trajectory you are looking for
December 2, 2024
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charles
What is the video you made with the slow motion wrist release
August 14, 2024
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Chuck
I think you are referring to the "J release" video
August 14, 2024
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M. (Certified RST Instructor)
Hi Chuck, in this video you show us the importance of properly using your head to produce effortless speed! I like all the connection you make with other sports to support your message. While watching the video it suddenly hit me that there is one other important (bio)mechanical law that also helps a lot to get the effortless speed in the downswing, gravity. This multiplies it even more. Friendly greetings, Marcel
August 9, 2024
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Chuck
Yep, gravity alone will produce about 13 mph of hand speed in the downswing
August 9, 2024
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Atle
When you fire from the top with all the stretched muscles and tilt the head back (like around 24 mins into this movie), does this include firing the hamstring as that contributes to tilting the hips and spine? It looks like the hamstring is passive,- is it?
August 9, 2024
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Atle
Looked through it again and see that you covered this well. Thanks
August 9, 2024
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John
Hmmm. If, as a right-handed golfer, you drop your head to the right before shifting back to the left in transition, would that cause huge pop-ups with driver? I think that's the part I messed up.
July 18, 2024
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Chuck
That could happen but what that typically really means is that you are firing your arms to start down and that is forcing you to hang back on the trail foot too much
July 19, 2024

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