Core Activation - Chair Drill
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This drill teaches you how to coordinate how to move your upper and lower bodies together as one - just in opposite directions!
In the golf swing, there's one major challenge, and that is coordinating your upper half, your shoulders and your arms, with your lower half.
How many of you out there struggle with understanding, how do I get my hips to work?
I know they're supposed to be open, but how do I get them open like the pros?
My shoulders are more open.
Most golfers struggle with trying to get this to move in sync with this.
The problem is, it's the part in the middle that actually connects the two that you should be focusing on.
The core is what really works in all athletic sports.
It's where all movement really emanates from, especially powerful ballistic movement like the golf swing.
The problem is, most golfers, because we live in this more than we do anything else, the chair has killed our core activation.
Learning how to activate your core again is going to be one of the most important and most protective things for your back that you can ever do in your golf swing, but it really is the key to unloading, unlocking power, effortless power, is learning to move from here.
Again, part of the issue is that you just don't really see it move that much in the golf swing.
It's happening so quickly, and it relatively moves so little, because everything else is moving so much more, your arms and hands and shoulders, but they're really being moved in response to what's happening here.
The problem is, again, because we sit all the time, we don't really activate our core, we don't do much work for most people's core is really weak.
So much less being strong enough to produce good power, most golfers just don't even know how to activate it.
So we're going to go through a series of steps here to help you start to feel your core again and learn how to apply it to the golf swing.
And it's going to start with our number one enemy here.
We're going to actually use this to our advantage because learning how to sit correctly, like using your core to engage, to have good posture, to protect your back is very valuable, But you can actually learn how to move your core like you do in the golf swing, and learn where and how you're directing force, which is really what the golf swing is.
We're creating force in whatever direction we, you know, aim that force makes or breaks our golf swing.
But what's cool about a chair, the typical office chair that swivels, you'll need one that swivels, which most of us all sit in one all day anyway.
So you've probably got this already glued to your butt.
Anyway, You're going to learn how to start to engage your core while sitting and start getting a feel for how you activate.
These kind of strange muscles.
That kind of do all sorts of stuff for us in our life, but they're super important for the golf swing.
So here's what I want you to do at first.
First, just engage your core.
I've talked about just poking yourself in the belly with your fingers.
It'll, it'll wake up your abs and wake up your core, poke yourself in the side.
So you start feeling these muscles start to engage to, you know, as if you're being punched the side, you start to contract them.
Now, This whole area of our body, front and back is what's helping create that rotation and force in the golf swing.
And it's helping deliver power from each part of our body and coordinating that power, because that's really the trick.
Your arms and shoulders by themselves can't do a whole lot.
They're not going to generate a lot of power.
Your legs by themselves.
Don't move the golf club.
If I stand up and just move my hips, my arms aren't going anywhere.
So it's really understanding how to start rotating from here.
That's going to move everything together in sync.
And that's the trick.
How do I coordinate these upper and lower halves?
So what I want you to do is sit on the edge of your chair and do this with some socks on, on a slick floor, if you can, because it'll help you start to understand force vectors.
And that's just a fancy way of saying, where are we directing force?
And really what you're going to realize is that you're, you're, the way that you're directing force is in response to how you move your core.
So what I want you to do first is turn from here, not your head, not your shoulders, turn from your core, and that will turn your rib cage.
That will turn your shoulders.
But I want you to try and feel that you're moving from these muscles that you just poked yourself with.
Now, once you've turned back as if you're making a back swing, so I'm right-handed golfer.
So I'm turning back like this.
Now with your feet just lightly on the ground, I want you to then turn this back to the left, as if you were making a downswing with some force and velocity.
Do this again, turn back.
And now from my core, turn really fast.
So again, I'm not turning my shoulders.
This is a shoulder turn and my hips can't turn because they're planted on the chair.
So that's why as you're doing this, as you learn to fire your core really quickly, look at what's happening to my feet.
I'm turning this way, but my feet are actually moving in the opposite direction.
That's a force vector.
So my lead foot is actually pushing the ground away from me, while my trail foot is pulling back away.
Now this seems really strange at first until you understand the concept of torque.
If you're rotating from here and this didn't provide that resistance, well, there would be no force that you could really generate.
It'd be like swinging a golf club in outer space with zero gravity.
You would be just kind of spinning around, but you couldn't generate any force.
What your feet and your hips are doing in the swing is they're providing counter resistance to this motion, rotating this way.
And that's why you see golfers like Scotty Scheffler and Tiger Woods and numerous others.
Their trail foot often slides back and then it gets pulled back around as the hips get pulled, pulled around in the follow through.
But what you want to start to feel is this, the faster you turn this, the more your feet are going to naturally want to provide that counter movement, that torque, that resistance so that this can rotate faster.
Now, When you're not on a wood floor and of course, you're standing up and you've got weight on your feet, and you've got golf spikes on, then your feet are going to tend to stay more planted.
But the more you unweight this trail foot, the more it's going to want to slide back.
And that's what you want to feel.
And this is how you start to feel it.
So if I plant my feet on the ground and start to do this, create this resistance, you can see my left foot is sliding forward.
I put more weight on it, it will move less.
But the faster I rotate from my core, the more my feet are going to move in the opposite direction.
So as you're working or sitting at your desk, as you start to learn how to feel this ballistically, and when I say ballistic, I'm really talking about making it an explosive movement because the golf swing is truly a ballistic, quick, fast, explosive movement.
So as a backswing, I would want to be loading up really quickly.
I don't want to turn back really slow because then I'm not stretching this fascia and taking advantage of that free energy as that fascia starts to rebound.
If I turn back really slow, Then I've got to use a lot of muscular pushing force in the downswing to try and get me to go the other way.
And that's almost always going to come from you driving with your shoulders incorrectly.
So instead, if I load back really quick, well, guess what my force vectors would be doing in the backswing?
My trail foot's going to be going this way while my lead foot's going this way.
Watch.
So I'm going to go back really quick.
Turning back really fast, starts to get my feet to move in the opposite direction.
And then as I go back in the downswing, the faster I turn, the more my feet get pulled in the other direction.
So that's what I want you to try and feel when you're sitting in your chair and have nothing else to do.
Start working on your golf swing, start getting a feel for your core to start to activate.
And as the faster you turn, the more your feet are going to start to slide in either direction.
Richard
Tom
Craig (Certified RST Instructor)
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