Rotation & Footwork

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How do you "rotate" correctly in the golf swing? It's probably NOT what you think it is. To rotate properly we need to create TORQUE and to create torque our feet must work a certain way as you'll learn in this video.


Often when golfers think of rotation, they truly take that at its very literal sense of trying to spin the body around.

And that's not really what we want to do in the golf swing at all.

We want to create torque.

Now let me explain to you what that is and how it works.

Now I've talked about in the GOAT power sequence, what you need to feel is, and what all elite players do, most elite ball strikers go lateral, then rotational or torque, and then vertical.

Now, a lot of golfers try and just think of the golf swing as a spinny motion, like around and around.

Like you can see this golfer here on the right side of the screen.

And I want to show you a comparison because a lot of golfers do this.

It's very common.

You can see he's really struggling to maintain his balance because he's kind of spinning himself around like a top.

And that's not what we want to do in the swing at all.

So what do we want to do?

Well, let's take a look here.

So I've got a line drawn on both of our right legs at setup, and what you're going to see right away as we start back, note that I actually kind of sit back into it.

I kind of, I call this sinking.

I sink into my right leg and feel my core and my whole body get kind of heavy because my body's relaxed, And so I'm really starting to be able to relax the muscles so that I can contract them very quickly in a moment and then release them again very quickly.

But a lot of times, golfers just have tension right away, everywhere, and then your muscles don't move correctly, they don't stretch, the fascia doesn't stretch properly and so on.

But notice where my right hip is now in relationship to where I started, and where the golfer on the right is in relationship to where he started.

He immediately started rotating off the ball with no lateral movement.

So he's taking this rotational idea of the swing to the nth degree.

And you'll see this causes him to run out of range of motion in his right leg, which makes it kind of get into a straightened, hyperextended position.

So now you can imagine this is a weak position for the right leg to be on.

If you wanted to drive off of it, it'd be really hard.

So you can see his left knee is kind of buckled in.

This left leg is really angled in here.

And so now he's just kind of twisting himself up like a pretzel a bit.

I'm also going to rotate, but later in the swing, the first thing I'm doing is really loading into my trail leg.

And then, as I near the top of my swing and I start running out of range of motion, I start rotating a little bit more.

But now here's where the big difference is.

Now we actually kind of look like we're doing the same motion to a degree, say, we're kind of driving back, falling back into that lead side.

I'm kind of sinking down into the ground is my feeling, and I'm doing this initially by letting my core relax, get ready to really engage and sink down in.

And I'm using gravity to start bringing my arms and club down.

So I'm kind of getting a free ride for just a split second here, while also pushing off my right leg.

Now, as I do that, notice how far my right hip is from where it started compared to the golf on the right.

It actually looks relatively similar, right?

But we got here in two very different ways.

And when you look at what's happening at impact and before, right as he gets into it, notice how this left arm is totally bent back, left wrist is bent back, right arm's fully extended.

He's got no right arm left to hit with.

I've still got flexion in my right arm and wrists, so I have something to hit down on the ball with.

I've got something to hit with physically with my right hand.

But what I'm really trying to do is throw the club head into the back of the ball, which we'll talk about in just a moment.

But the biggest thing I want to draw your attention to as we move on from this is our feet.

Because your feet are a telltale sign of how you power the swing.

So now let's zoom in here quite a bit.

And we're just going to focus on our feet.

So put them side by side here.

And what you're going to notice is that as I go to the top, I'm shifting into my right.

And then now focus on my left heel.

Where is it going?

See how it's lifting as I get into the ball of my foot and then rotating toward the target.

Now let's look at the golfer on the right and where is his heel going?

His is going the opposite direction.

How could we be doing two totally different things, both of us trying to play golf and trying to hit a ball with a stick?

Yet we're doing it in two wildly different ways.

You see that, see how his left heel is going back and my left heel is going forward.

This is the difference between somebody just trying to spin their body around and somebody who is throwing with their trail hand.

In a throw, you're going to create resistance.

You need torque in the golf swing.

And resistance is what allows you to throw aggressively with your trail hand and have effortless power.

Because the throwing motion is the most powerful motion the human body can perform.

So now let's go and take a look at understanding how this all works together, how we do this in our swings, And how you will start being able to throw with crazy power without having to feel like you're working hard in your swing.

When we visualize the golf swing in our minds.

We often think about rotation because that's what we see.

But the forces that we don't see are actually the ones that really matter the most.

And that's what you need to focus on.

So today we're going to talk about rotation, or really, what we're going to talk about is torque now?

torque is one of the most important parts of the golf swing for creating power.

And so if you don't understand this concept, I'm going to give you a really simple way of understanding it.

So I've got a towel here and what I want to do if I was just to sit here and turn this around in a circle.

It's rotating, obviously, we're rotating it this way like it would be perhaps in the golf swing.

But you can imagine if you do this for yourself.

There's no tension in this towel, there's no power in this towel.

But if I held the bottom tight and then began to twist it, immediately, it begins to tighten up.

And I feel that this towel now becomes tight and stiff, and it wants to spring back the other way.

That's a good way of thinking about torque.

Your golf swing is not just sitting here and spinning freely in space.

We need something to anchor us, and then we need to be able to create resistance so that we can create torsion and power in the golf swing.

That is what your feet do if you're just swinging.

If you're suspended in the air from a from a harness and just spinning back and forth, you would not be able to create any power.

We need our feet to create this resistance so that we can create torsion and that's what's going to give us speed.

So what does that look like in the golf swing?

Well, again, most people think about their their feet as not really doing much in the swing.

So they just kind of rotate back like this and rotate back like this, like they're rotating on top of their feet.

What your feet actually need to do is provide that resistance so that as you're creating torque in the swing, you're going to have something to resist to throw against.

And that's really the key.

If you're just trying to spin your body back and forth, it doesn't create any power.

But if I was to throw this clubbed at the ball, would I want to throw it like this, where I'm just spinning my body?

You'll see that there's no snap in my wrist if I'm just spinning around.

But what would happen if I create a brace with this leg?

Then I can have something to be able to hit against.

And that's why you've heard the old timers in golf for years say hit against a firm lead side.

What they're really talking about is creating torque in the swing.

So as you saw at the beginning of this video, the feet, the laid foot in a powerful swing will actually kind of go like this.

The heel will kind of shift toward the target a little bit, and that's actually giving me a brace to hit against.

So what I want you to feel is not that you're going like this to start the swing.

That's creating rotation too soon and it's not creating enough torque, enough resistance.

Instead, as you're getting ready to throw this club head with your trail hand, I want you to think about shifting onto the ball of your foot and then rotating your heel this way.

This is an exaggeration, of course, but this will get you the feeling.

In fact, both feet kind of do this to get you that brace that you need to hit against.

Let's take a look at Tiger Woods doing this in a couple of different examples, from a couple of different angles, to help you understand and visualize this a little bit better.

The first angle we're going to look at is from behind.

This gives you a little bit of a unique angle before we look at the face-on view, so to help you understand what's really happening here.

So right now, Tiger is trying to torque around that right leg.

He's twisting that foot into the ground, And he's really loading up and coiling around that trail leg.

What's going to happen is you're twisting that trail leg, it feels like you're twisting the trail leg in the ground this way.

So you're creating that initial torque around that leg, coiling around that leg.

Which is as soon as you took weight off of the heel, that right heel, trail heel is going to go in.

Because it's continuing to rotate in this direction.

Which I talked about in the axiom videos that you guys saw years ago about how the movement is clockwise for a right-handed golfer.

And then that's going to get both feet initially rotating to the left.

So now if we look at his left heel, you're going to see a little subtle shift there because he's not hitting this ball very hard.

But that movement is continuing in that torque, and he's starting to create resistance with that lead leg.

A lot of times I see golfers start to straighten that lead leg immediately.

Notice how long Tiger keeps that knee flexed.

And then right as he gets ready to really snap the rest of the release, everything happens at once.

This is like a punch to me.

Throwing that clubhead with the right hand, you drive with that right foot, you're snapping the hands right at the bottom, and that's what's getting you the power.

Now we'll take a look at an iron swing of Tiger.

And this one's interesting because he's hitting a knockdown here during the Ryder Cup.

And what you'll see, we'll zoom in here on his feet quite a bit.

What you'll see when he's hitting a knockdown, He's going to have a little bit more lateral movement, so the movement will be a little bit more pronounced than what we just saw in the previous shot.

So watch again here.

He's screwing that right foot into the ground, you'll see his toes start to lift up and now notice his right foot first starts to rotate.

The heel goes in just a little bit, there you see the inside of the right shoe by his heel start to become visible, and now look at his left foot.

Where is it going?

It's going back to the lead side, or, excuse me, back toward the target now again, this is stuff that's very easy to measure in a force plate.

But we don't often catch this in video because it's one of those things that's happening very, very fast.

You kind of got to know what you're looking for here to see it be very visible.

But as we move to a driver swing, as we get into the more powerful, bigger swings, it becomes even a little bit more pronounced.

Just depending on how much power you're wanting to put into the swing.

So now you're going to see Tiger's lead foot, you're going to see both feet.

We'll zoom in here again to make it a little easier to see, you're going to see both feet.

Start to shift toward the target.

So his heel, you'll see him pivoting on the ball of his right foot here, and that gets his heel starting to come up.

The right heel moving toward the target.

And in sync with that, the lead foot, the lead heel, is pivoting.

Notice how much it moves from where it started there.

It's pretty significant with a driver swing because he's trying to create even more torque and more resistance to be able to have a powerful brace to throw against.

So as you saw in Tiger's swing, the feet are literally doing this in the downswing.

What I see all the time is golfers doing this.

They go to the top of the swing and they do this and both heels shift this way.

Now at some point in the swing, Once we get this initial torque done and we're releasing everything right at the bottom with a big snap, the lead heel will snap like this, but we're going to talk about that in a later video.

We want to just talk about the footwork that's involved here first so that we're creating rotation.

This move that happens in swing is really when we're creating vertical force, but we'll talk about that in another video.

Here, What I want you to start to get a feel for is as you start loading into this trail leg to be able to drive off of it, you want to have this leg providing resistance so that this has something to drive into, And that's where you get onto the ball of foot and push it into the ground as you pivot this heel out.

You should feel instantly when you're doing this, that you feel power, that this trail foot's pushing the ground this way, and this foot's pushing the ground that way.

So if I was on like a sheet of ice, my feet would do this, they would slide in opposite directions.

That's the initial move.

Once you've made this shift into the trail side and you're starting to drive back laterally.

This needs to brace against this driving force because this lateral force that you're going to get off your trail leg needs to be converted from this lateral motion.

If I didn't resist, I would just keep sliding through.

I want to convert this lateral force into torque.

And as I start to squish the bug and pivot on this trail, hip as we get later into the swing to snap that wrist, that motion needs resistance from this foot.

Push the ground away from you as you are starting down to resist that initial lateral drive from this leg.

And then as you start to snap, that foot's actually going to start to push back this way.

But again, we'll talk about that in another video.

The biggest thing that you need to get a feel for is not just spinning your body on top of your feet that are dead.

Your feet are very much alive in the swing.

They're extremely important because without them, you're just sitting there and spinning that towel in free space.

There's no torque, there's no resistance, there's no torsion.

So get a feel for just going to the top of your swing, one of my favorite drills.

As I go to the top and kind of stop and then I shift like this now.

This may look kind of funny, but you'll see a lot of throw.

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64x64
Mark
Another great video and the way I am interpreting this instruction is both feet are screwing into the ground in the same clockwise fashion on the backswing (the left less that the right due to less pressure on the left), AND CONTINUE TO DO SO AT THE START OF THE DOWNSWING, both feet. This seems really powerful to me and also seems to drive the start of the downswing. Is my interpretation correct?
March 5, 2025
64x64
Chuck
That's pretty close. I'm working on a video to help explain the feet and pressure movements that will make this more clear for the whole swing
March 5, 2025
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Michael
Dear Chuck, wonderful concept, one little thing confuses me - in your video about longhitters versus Zach Johnson you insisted that the hips need to rotate AWAY from the target at impact - here it looks like lateral bend until the finish?
February 25, 2025
64x64
Chuck
When you lateral bent and extend your pelvis will rotate
February 26, 2025
64x64
Stephen
Hi Chuck, been a member for quite a few years and have improved steadily. I got a lot from the Axiom series but never got the weight shift properly. This video, where it explains that it actually shifts behind and laterally tied it all together. Hitting the ball with much more compression and speed. My question is that as I squish the bug I don’t feel a throwing motion per se but it is releasing with speed. Should I consciously try to throw or is it happening as a result of proper sequencing and just let it happen. The Goat theory IMO is the most comprehensive and effective presentation of the golf swing I’ve ever seen. Keep up the good work! Thank you.
February 21, 2025
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Chuck
Thanks Stephen. The throw is not something that should be felt in the arm per se. that is where people go wrong. The core is doing all the heavy lifting and transmitting energy through the arm and when done correctly the arms should feel whipped and effortless
February 23, 2025
64x64
Tyler
At set up, is the weight over the ankles? Then as you start to make your backswing does the left foot pressure go more on the ball of the foot and the right foot goes more into the heel? Then on the way down does the left foot go into the heel while the right foot goes into the toes?
February 19, 2025
64x64
Chuck
The weight should really be in the middle of the feet over the arches, and it moves back toward the heel and toward the ball of the foot, and then reverses in the downswing
February 20, 2025
64x64
Bryan
I cannot hit a fade with this feel for some reason any tips?
February 19, 2025
64x64
Chuck
I would have to see it
February 20, 2025
64x64
Dennis
I was watching this vid again this morning and I had been thinking it was just a lead foot heel-to-target move. Watching for like the 20th time, I'm seeing the connection w/ the trail foot! In socks and on a wooden floor, the clockwise pressure in the trail foot reaches an endpoint where the heel goes around the clock and slides toward the target and this works in tandem with the leadl foot! An 'aha' moment! BTW, I'm coming to your Swing Speed class in Tucson and Craig has been helping me since September-- 2025 going to be a great year for me! Looking forward to meeting you and swinging faster!
February 19, 2025
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Chuck
Looking forward to meeting you Dennis good observation. Yep the whole body is creating this movement. It’s not just a move of the left foot.
February 19, 2025
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user46967
Ideal method taught on foot work and how weight are shift initially. Achieved plenty on this video. Many thanks ????
February 17, 2025
64x64
Matt
I checked myself on video from Face on and sure enough I was doing the exact same as the individual you pointed out. I tried this out over the weekend at the range and consciously having to think about it felt really odd, but when I did it right, it was noticeable how my lower body works. Lots of work to do to sync this up with also the supination and than squish the bug, but this may be a small detail to focus on to change that sequencing.
February 17, 2025
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Chuck
If you do the med ball throws and kettle bell exercises i demonstrated this movement will happen naturally
February 17, 2025
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Scott
Chuck... I understand that lateral movement early is necessary, but as you demonstrate in the medicine ball drill, isn't it the case that your core starts rotating earlier rather than later in the swing?
February 14, 2025
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Chuck
All of these things are happening way faster than your mind can process it, so in that regard, it's effectively all happening at the same time
February 14, 2025
64x64
Mark
Great Video Chuck! Is this foot movement a result of other things or are you intentionally moving your feet which causes other good things to happen? I am always looking for movements that are the root of other things....
February 14, 2025
64x64
Chuck
The feet are really moving in response to the core rotation and wind up at this phase of the swing
February 14, 2025

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