Transferring Power from the Core to the Hand
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How do you use the core of the body to transfer power to the trail hand in the golf swing? The same as in all other sports as you'll see!
Explaining to golfers how to use their core in the golf swing is definitely a challenge, and in today's video, I'm going to show you how to think about how to use your core, how to feel it, and how to visualize it.
I think it's so important to have a good visual in your mind, that's clear, because the core is such an abstract thing.
It seems like it's relatively not moving very much, but as you're going to see in this video, it is the most important thing.
And this video is going to help you understand how to make the connection between your core and your trail hand.
To deliver power and speed to that golf club.
And we're going to look at other sports to help relate it.
So it's something that's going to make it very easy to visualize in your mind.
The first sport we're going to look at is tennis.
I want you just to listen to how hard Jonas is hitting these balls.
Tremendous power and speed, and obviously it's trail, hand and core driven, as you're about to see.
But what you're about to realize is that this is a basically the most powerful motion that the human body can make.
Let's take a look at this more closely.
One of the things I've always wanted to do is chop Tiger Woods arms off and have him swing a club.
Now, of course, that sounds ridiculous, But what I mean by that is if you could use AI to erase his arms, and you could just see the body movements.
It would be so much easier to visualize what's really happening.
Because we get focused on the club and the swing plane and the arms and the hands, all this stuff.
And the reality is, We really need to focus on what's happening at the center of the body and then everything will start to make sense.
In this illustration, with Jonas hitting tennis balls.
This is going to help you start to understand how you make the connection between the core and the right hand and the things that have to happen in the body.
And what's cool about this is that this is basically the exact same sequence that you make in the golf swing.
It's the same sequence you make in throwing a ball, making a punch, hitting a baseball, all of these things.
The athletic motion from a trail side pattern.
It's the same.
So what you're going to see first is he's going to be planted on his right foot as he's making a backstroke, right?
His arm, hands, clubs, or rackets going back.
He's going to make a step.
This is the challenge of golf.
We don't get that stride.
It's one of the things that makes the biggest difference in other sports is it makes the swing so much more natural, but you're going to see how we're going to use this later to our advantage.
And then as he makes a step, that's when he starts to begin to rotate his core.
Now watch.
Now, the ball is just now entering the frame here, and his core is basically pointing just to the side of the camera, mostly straight back at it.
His weight's planted on that left side.
He's not going to drive off the right foot.
He's going to rotate his core.
There's a little bit of lateral movement, obviously right here.
You can see he's pushing off the right foot.
It's a pretty, even though he's making a step, it's a relatively subtle lateral move.
And then as he drives forward, you can see it's not an aggressive leg drive.
There's not a whole lot happening right there, but right here, things change radically.
And now we're going to play this back in just a moment because I want you to realize how fast this is happening, but what's turning the most right now?
There's no question his belly, His core has turned radically just in one frame from right there to there is a massive difference in core rotation, but his hips haven't really turned.
His hips have turned in response to his core turning and his legs haven't really moved much.
It's all core rotation.
And he's beginning to open up his chest and his shoulder and his arm and rotate his core.
And now look where his core is pointing.
It's almost starting to point basically back at the ball or to the left of the ball.
His chest is following.
Obviously, as you turn the core, it's going to turn the rib cage as well, but he's not turning from his shoulders.
In fact, his right shoulder is staying back and open just as his arm is.
Now watch his core.
This is the shot that I wanted you to see.
Because this really starts to illustrate how the arms are almost passive conduits of transferring energy to the racket, to the club, to the ball, because now it looks like he doesn't have any arms at all, right?
But his core has turned dramatically.
And the ball is only moved, if you look at it, it enters the frame here, one frame, two frames, three frames.
Now in that time, his core is now pointing over here.
And if we back up just three frames at 30 frames per second, four frames, it's there.
It's 90 plus degrees of rotation.
Now, how fast do you think that happened?
I'll play it for you real quick.
Whoa, you can't even see it, right?
Watch again.
Watch his core one more time.
You can see how fast it's turning.
And there's obviously no force.
He's not, he's actually trying to stretch the fascia in the body and keeping his arm back, his arm open, his elbow pit up.
And he's keeping the racket back until his core rotation delivers all the force it can.
And then he just looks like he has no arms.
You're going to see this trend over and over because he's keeping his arm and chest and shoulder back and letting the core drive everything.
The core moved more than anything in that stroke.
Now we'll go forward again.
You're going to see this from some different angles.
It's going to be really helpful.
So again, load to the right leg first, taking a little step at the left during the backstroke, squatting down.
This is very important.
Again, you know, Tiger Wood used to get criticized for his head dropping so much during the transition.
It's the most powerful move he makes.
It's powerful and it happens in all sports.
Now again, keeping that chest open, his arm back, his core rotating.
Look where his core is pointing already.
Again, in just two or three frames, it's pointed well left of the ball.
And look how open his arm and chest and shoulder are.
And then again, as you're going to see, all core rotation and then his wrist releases at the last second.
Again, we'll go to another frame or another shot here.
Let's skip forward a little bit.
Look at again, how open the arm is, how open the chest is, and no arms again.
And this is what I meant by chopping Tiger Woods arms off.
Because then you can see what's really happening with the body.
And because this just happens to blur out his arms, because the frame, the shutter speed wasn't high enough, that you can see just how much core rotation he has.
And then his rib cage is actually arched back because he's keeping his chest open.
And that is allowing him to rotate rapidly to sling that arm and hand into the ball.
And we'll go forward one more, Because there's a couple more good angles here where you can see where it looks like his arms just kind of disappear here.
And you can just focus on the body movements.
There's no question that's all core rotation, which is rotating his chest, keeping his head and arms back.
We'll go forward a little more.
Here's going to be another good angle.
So again, arm, chest, back, arm getting into that GDP position, the arm, elbow pit facing the sky, our elbow, arm hanging back, all core driven at this point, and no arms again.
He has that funky, it looks like his arms were chopped off there.
But that gives you an idea of how you're delivering power to your hand from your core.
Now let's take a look at some other sports doing the same thing.
When it comes to creating power, I think few people on the planet know how to do it better than Mike Tyson.
And again, all of the motions that you do in all sports, it's truly a core driven motion.
But again, because most people sit all the time, they don't exercise, they don't exercise their core, they've got back pain and so on.
If you want to get rid of your back pain, the first place I'd start is start working out your core.
But that's another story for another day.
But let's start talking about how we deliver power with the body into our arms and hands, and then in our case, a golf club.
So one thing I want to draw your attention to here.
So Mike's going to throw just a little left hand jab here.
But watch, even on a little jab like this, he's not going to do it like most people will, and just try to use the arm and hand by themselves.
So watch as his left shoulder goes back.
You can see it start to move back.
He shifts back here.
But as he's doing this, watch this part of his body.
So I'm just going to draw a little circle.
That's not very good.
Draw a little circle right here.
And I want you to focus.
This is his obliques, his core region.
Now watch as his arm goes back.
What's his core doing?
It's going forward.
You can see his elbow is moving back closer to the circle, but his belly, his core, is moving forward toward the target.
And then, now that he's got that reinforcement from the core and the initial acceleration from the core, then he throws the punch.
And he's getting his whole body, his whole mass into it, rather than just trying to throw with the arm musculature alone.
Now as he comes down here to throw another punch, watch.
If you look at the uppercut, this is especially true.
And again, I believe it was in Tiger's original book that he said he felt like when he was getting ready to hit the ball, he felt like he was in a position to deliver an uppercut punch.
Well, nobody had a better uppercut than this guy.
And watch how he throws it.
Watch right here.
So right now, what is he doing?
He's pulling that right side of his core back to load up.
So then he can then fire that first.
So his arm is in that GDP position, right?
You're going to see this over and over again in all sports.
That that arm is in this supinated position rather than pronated, which is as soon as you pronate, you disconnect your arm from your core.
So now, once he's in there, he's got that right core pulled back.
You can see he's actually pulling it back, you know, toward the ropes back behind him.
And then guess what's going to fire first?
His arm and hands?
No, of course not.
Watch.
His arm and hands still going back.
See that?
See his elbow still going back.
But this part of his body is going forward.
You can see his belly button raising, his core starting to drive through, his oblique firing.
His arm is still back in that GDP position.
And then, now look at how much this core has moved from where it started.
This part of his body.
And then he throws the punch.
That is how you create power from your core and deliver it to that trail hand.
Let me show you one more example.
Watch this girl throw a punch.
She's not some big, strong guy like Mike Tyson.
But I promise you, you don't want her hitting you in the face with that left hook.
Now let's see exactly how she's doing.
Now, it's going to be very easy to see how she's delivering so much power to her punches here.
So the first thing I'm going to do, this is going to be her first punch.
And all I want you to do is focus on her belt line right here.
Now watch as she goes, loads up to throw this.
Note how much she turns it back and down.
She's loading into the ground and loading that core.
She's pulled that thing back far.
Nothing has turned more than that left hip, which is really, again, just her obliques, her core loading, getting everything pulled back.
And then as she goes to deliver that punch, you can see just how fast it moves back into the frame.
So right now we can't see her left hip.
But then as soon as she goes to punch, first thing to go, look how quickly that snapped.
One frame, she's already turned 20 degrees, 30 degrees, 40 degrees.
Her arm is still back.
This is the trick.
If you're going to use your core to deliver power to your trail hand to deliver to the club, your core has to drive everything and the arm has to stay back.
But most golfers do the exact opposite.
They start with their arms and the core doesn't do anything at all.
And then of course, you're going to have no power.
It's a very athletic move, but you can learn it.
Even if you've never used your core, played other sports, done other things, you can learn how to do this.
And that's what we're going to talk about.
So now you can see once that core is fully turned, then she delivers a punch.
And then her second punch, you'll see she doesn't turn back as far.
So now you can see that left hip doesn't quite fully disappear.
And then there's way less power in this punch.
So if we play that back together, you can see the first punch.
You don't want to get hit by that one.
The second one, not quite as much.
And again, it's just the difference in how much she rotates her core back.
Now let's tie this back into the golf swing.
All right, we got the goat back up here.
And we're going to be able to see all the things that you just saw demonstrated by the tennis, forehand, and boxing.
They're all going to apply directly to the golf swing.
So the first thing you're going to see is that as Tiger goes back, he's going to make a pretty concerted shift into that right foot.
If you focus on his right hip, he's going to move a fair bit.
He's loading into that right foot just like you saw in the tennis forehand.
That's a very natural athletic thing to do.
And then as he's going back, now like the boxers you saw, that right hip, that right core, that right oblique is getting pulled back away from him.
Like you saw with Tyson, he's pulling the right oblique back toward the ropes back behind him.
We have to load that up.
And that's what's going to give us power.
So once he starts getting that thing fully loaded, that is the first thing to go.
Now, because he's loaded into the right, the ground is pushing back into him.
So if you were looking at force vectors, we'd see the ground pushing back this way.
And so he's going to be able to start to shift back to the left off that ground force.
And then he's going to post up on that left leg, just like you saw in the tennis forehand.
And then once that stuff is anchored in, this can really begin to fire as you're about to see.
So now as he's getting to fire that core, everything's driving, turning, rotating, driving that right hand.
But now notice how open his chest is here still.
Most golfers, this right shoulder starts protracting forward.
The right arm starts internally rotating.
The club starts getting dumped.
But good, powerful players who use their core do the opposite.
His elbow pit's still pointing out away from him.
His chest is open.
I'm going to explain what that is in a moment.
He's keeping his hands back, giving his core time to do all the work until the very last second.
And that's when the wrists snap.
As you can see, he's still driving his core.
There's no rotation.
His elbow pit is still pointing straight back at the camera.
He's in that open position that we're going to talk about in just a moment.
And then he's continuing to drive through with that core.
And then the wrists release, fully release.
You can see, look at his core now.
Look at how much rotation his hips have.
And again, he hasn't driven hard off that right foot per se.
There's definitely some lateral movement there.
But it's not like he's trying to push hard off that right foot.
He's using his core.
And then the ground is giving him the base that he needs.
And his lower body is giving him the base he needs for that core, that right side of the core, especially to fire through to drive that trail arm through.
Now let's start to understand how we do this.
So what you've just seen is how the human body can deliver the most power and the most speed.
And it truly is a core-driven movement.
And to feel this in your golf swing is really, really important.
And it's, but for most people, it's just a hard thing to do because we just don't use this part of our body very often.
So I'm going to give you a couple of things that are going to help you start to feel how to integrate this into your swing, even with your putting stroke, your chipping stroke, your pitching, and all the way up to your full swing, of course.
That's where we're going to deliver the most power.
So the first thing that you're going to notice is this importance of this goat arm and this elbow pit being facing out.
When you saw Mike Tyson getting ready to deliver that punch, he didn't just do it with his arm.
He loaded up, got his core turned back away from his target, and then drove it forward.
And the same thing is true in tennis.
Core goes back, and then it goes forward ahead of everything else.
And the same thing is true, of course, in the golf swing.
We're going to deliver power in a trail side pattern in the exact same way.
So what you're going to feel at first is how your arm has to kind of drop into this GDP, this goat arm position.
And I'm going to explain what I mean by that.
So as you're going back, or as you start coming down, as this is beginning to fire first, what you want to feel is instead of your arms ever doing this, any pushing motion from the shoulder or pec or tricep is going to cause the exact opposite.
You're going to feel, if you start going this way, that this core is completely relaxed at that point.
You want to keep this tension so that it continues to drive forward.
And that means your arm and chest have to open up.
What I mean by that is this would be a closed off position, and this would be an opened up position.
Pull that shoulder back to open up your chest and shoulder, and then keep your arm in this position with your elbow pit facing out.
So as you're starting down in your downswing, that's exactly what you want to feel as the starting move.
As this core begins to drive, I'm feeling my chest begin to open as my arm feels like it falls back.
Now, this may be a little bit of an exaggeration, but it'll help you start to feel, if you're someone who comes over the top and gets too steep, you're doing the exact opposite.
So if you exaggerate your core, driving first while your arm stays back, you're going to feel some stretching in your shoulder and your chest.
Keep that open and keep this elbow pit facing up and out away from you instead of pronating.
You'll see how that immediately changes the shaft angle.
So if I start to drive and I let this arm fall back, now, once I'm here, This fascia across my whole body and my core gets so stretched that right at the last second is when it releases, just like you saw in that tennis forehand.
He's wide open, core is leading everything, and then the racket releases.
The same feeling is exactly what you want in the golf swing.
You're keeping this open.
Your arm is dropping.
Your shoulder blade from behind is going down and in.
You can see I'm not going this way.
It's staying back.
And then as I begin to drive, all that core delivery, That force that I'm creating is being transferred directly to my arm because my shoulder, blade and shoulder is down and back and in.
And that allows me to drive a lot of force into this hand.
So get a feel for this, even when you're doing these little pitch shots.
Now, of course, in the pitch shots, we're not delivering that much force.
We don't need that much power from our core, but it's still involved, of course, even in the putting stroke.
There's a little bit of core involvement there to help move the arms and shoulders.
But as you start going on your little pitch shots, You can start getting a feeling of your core beginning to rotate.
And this part of your body, Driving everything through and driving this hand through so that you're able to maintain this extension in your wrist, which is going to help you de-loft the club, get more compression on the ball, the flatter ball flight, bring your spin rates down.
It's all being led by your core and this arm staying in this position.
So you're going to feel that your arm drops just like this into your body.
So it's just like you saw Mike Tyson getting ready to deliver the uppercut.
Your elbow pit's got to be out.
Your palm is going to be out.
Your core is going to be rotated.
And then right at the last second, that's when you're going to feel that snap of the release.
And then you're going to start to understand how to really transfer energy from your core directly into your trail hand in the golf swing.
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