GOAT Downswing - The Whip Effect

How to whip it, whip it good. This video on the GOAT Downswing teaches you to create the whip effect in the golf swing for maximum speed with minimum effort! For the RSA Kettlebell exercises, click here: RSA Kettlebell.

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The goats have always done one thing better than anybody else in my mind, and that is they had this whip effect.

The club seemed to lash through the ball.

You could hear this crazy swoosh.

The ball rockets off the face, and yet they did this in perfect balance and seemed effortless while they did it.

This has always been what the goat code is always about for me.

How to whip the club through the ball effortlessly.

And in this video, that's exactly what we're going to cover.

I'm going to teach you how to create the whip effect.

The whip effect to me is what effortless power in the golf swing is all about.

It's about creating that proper sequencing and understanding how to do it over and over again.

We've probably all felt this at one point or another, where you've got that club just ripping through the ball and you don't know how you did it.

And it felt effortless.

I'm going to break it down for you step by step in a formula to teach you exactly how to do it.

And the first piece that we're going to focus on is how to brace for the throw.

And this is a great example of a pitcher who understands throwing mechanics.

And he's talking about or demonstrating how when the lead leg stays bent, it's an energy leak.

You lose the ability to transfer power from the ground, through your legs, through your hips, through your hamstrings.

And this is something I see all the time in amateur golfers, That this left leg stays bent, or lead leg stays bent through the shot, and it robs you of effortless power.

Now, of course, there's been great players who've had that lead knee bent, but the modern power players, when you look at them up close, you'll see that almost all of them, not all of them, but almost all of them, the ones who truly make it look effortless, that lead knee snaps straight through the strike.

Now, you may be thinking, oh my gosh, you know, snapping my knee straight.

It's going to blow out my knee.

It won't happen at all.

You just have to understand how to do it correctly.

This is done in all sports.

Check a look at this.

Here's a javelin thrower.

Watch his lead knee.

Whack.

Look at that.

Look how fast that happens.

Imagine the frames.

It's only happening in a couple frames going from bent to full extension there.

And that you can see how the rest of this body gets catapulted forward as that lead leg drives back.

This is critical for all throwing motions.

If you want to produce effortless power and have that whip effect.

And even in this case, this guy's throwing a rock or heavy ball or something.

Can't really tell what it is, but you can see the throwing mechanics are the same.

He looks like a baseball pitcher, basically.

He's just throwing it up more, but you can see that lead leg snapping back.

And this is something that Tiger has always talked about.

Here's Tiger talking about in Golf Digest about how he's always snapped his left leg, left knee straight in the downswing.

Talks about how it helps in the stinger shot specifically here, but he's always done this on every shot.

You can see that left leg slam straight.

Here the pants are baggy, so it's a little bit harder to see, but he even calls it out here.

I can assure you that my left leg snapped as straight at impact as it appears here.

This is a vital fundamental of the throwing motion.

The first myth I want to dispel is that snapping your knee straight is going to destroy it.

All basketball players, when they jump, snap their knees straight.

Pitchers, when they throw the ball, they snap their legs straight.

Javelin Throw it, snap the knee straight.

It happens all the time in all sports now.

Tiger made it kind of a bad rap thing because he was one of the first guys who really, really did this aggressively.

And then had a knee injury, which had nothing to do with his golf swing, had to do with some extracurricular off-site training, let's call it where he damaged his knee, but the golf swing and doing this correctly.

When you use the correct muscles, your knee will snap straight and be perfectly safe.

Because the correct muscles will just move it through a full range of motion without putting it at risk and injury.

And the trick to this is just understanding which muscles to use.

And that is primarily your posterior chain, your glutes, hamstrings, back.

Now I talk about this in the RSA power program, how to use this posterior chain.

There are exercises and drills and that'll help you get the feel for how to engage these muscles.

Because for most people, the lead glute is something that they just don't even know that it's there.

The glute and hamstring are so vital to the golf swing when it comes to producing this whip effect.

That if you don't, if you aren't able to engage it, and if you aren't able to feel those muscles, you're going to always tend to push the club through, and pushing is the enemy of the whip.

If you want that club to snap through the ball and whip, you must pull with the posterior chain to help.

The throwing motion and transferring energy from the ground through these big muscles down to the fingers in your trail hand as you throw the club.

So now let's take a look at this a little bit more closely to get an understanding of what's happening here.

So you want to film yourself at a quarter angle like I have here.

So just the camera's a little bit in front of me and off to the side.

I try to get these camera angles very similar with Tiger.

It's a little bit off, but you get the idea.

The big key here is understanding as we go down, there's actually even a little bit of increase in that flexion between our bodies, our hips, and our knee and our lower leg.

This is loading that lead hip and lead hamstring even more dynamically during the downswing.

This is a very powerful, dynamic motion to get into that allows me to start loading up my body.

To be able to get ready to fire and throw the club head with the three fingers, First, three fingers and my thumb on my right hand, my trail hand.

And now, you'll see this late into the downswing, there's not really a lot of time left.

Maybe there's a tenth of a second before that club gets back to the ball and you'll see that the knees are still relatively bent.

Now again, my angle is a little bit off from tigers, but you'll get the same idea.

You're going to see that.

These lead legs begin to snap straight very late.

The bulk of this, the straightening action is happening this late in the swing, about the time we get into GDP, or just a little bit before it starts to snap straight.

And that is allowing me to transfer energy and create a massive whip effect to snap that club head through the ball effortlessly.

That's what the whip is all about.

It's what the goat code is all about, Is how to literally whip the club through the ball so that you don't feel like you're working hard to produce power.

You're snapping the hands, snapping the body, snapping the lead leg straight to whip the club through.

Now let's go inside and start understanding how to create this motion in our swings.

The whip effect.

What is it and how do we get it?

That's exactly what this video is about today.

I've always been fascinated by how the goats made the golf swing look so effortless and have perfect control, perfect contact, but it's always been about effortless speed for me.

The way the club whips through the ball is the magic of the golf swing for me.

And it's taken me my whole life to really fully understand it.

And that's what I want to share with you to this point.

In the program.

We've talked about lateral or horizontal force, we've talked about torque, rotational force.

This video is about vertical force and really understanding how to properly create it.

You've seen a lot of long drive guys with their lead foots jumping up in the air and that's vertical force.

But that's really not giving you a good picture of what's really happening.

If you want to create the whip effect, if you want to create the whip.

You actually have to think about the golf swing in a 2D fashion at first, instead of a 3D fashion.

That's where golf kind of becomes tricky, because we're, I've got this club swinging around all over the place in three dimensions.

And our body's moving in all these crazy different positions, our spine's moving all these crazy different positions.

If you understand how to move your lead hip to create vertical force in the downswing, once you're moving correctly in the backswing, you've you've loaded the trail side, you've got side bend extension.

It really comes down to just understanding how to move this straight back.

That is the key.

And as you start to understand this, you're going to understand how everything, your upper body, how it moves in the downswing, how your arms and hands move in the downswing, are all directly related to this.

To really understand how this lead hip works in the downswing and through the hitting area, we need to understand the basic throw, which I showed you at the beginning of this video.

A javelin throw, a baseball throw, they all have this powerful lead block leg action that happens as they go through the release.

Now to understand this, think about if you have a ball, you're outside someplace where you can actually pick up a ball and throw it, take a ball and try and throw it and do this, where you let your knee bend as you go through to step to throw, you'll feel that you kind of lose all this energy.

Everything kind of goes soft and sloppy versus this.

Now this motion, You can see as I snap this knee straight by using my glute and hamstring, and I'm gonna talk more about this in a minute.

But using this glute and hamstring on the lead side to snap to pull back.

While this one pushes forward, you can see how that starts to propel my upper body and thus my arm forward.

But I'm really moving from here.

When you do this, you'll feel just how soft and weak it is.

When it comes to releasing and snapping your wrists, and that's the feeling you want to have your wrists feeling like they snap like that.

You don't want to feel like you're pushing the club through, so you have to use your glutes and your hamstrings.

And I put together a whole RSA kettlebell program, part of the RSA program for power.

And it teaches you how to start moving this powerfully.

Cause if you're like me and you don't use this leg or you've had it injured, It's really hard for a lot of people to engage these glutes and hamstrings on their less or their non-dominant side.

So there's a whole program about that.

You can click the link in the description if you want to learn more about that.

But if you're, if you have a good feeling of how to use your glutes and hamstrings already and you don't need that, then you should be able to feel how if I engage my glute, my lead glute right now, it pivots me forward.

But all I'm really doing is just contracting that glute so that my leg goes straight and my hip goes straight back.

Now, a lot of times people, You may have heard that you should push the ground away from you with your lead foot in the downswing.

And that doesn't make sense to a lot of people because a our feet aren't moving, so it feels kind of weird.

But that's what you're really doing.

It's not so much that you're pushing with the front of your leg, your quad, you're pulling it back straight with the glute and hamstring.

This motion is what gives you the snap in the release.

If you're hitting golf balls like most people and this lead leg stays bent, and it's usually because you're pushing from your trail side.

It's basically impossible to really snap the club, to snap the wrist through the ball, because there's nothing to decelerate the hands.

And that's the whole secret to this.

If you want to understand the whip, it's the same sequence, if you will, of cracking an actual whip.

And as you crack a whip, you actually snap your hand forward.

You don't keep moving your hand like this, but that's exactly how people try to hit a golf ball.

They try and keep pushing their hand through, and anything that you do that continues to accelerate the hands through.

The strike, diminishes the whip and is wasted effort.

The hands need to slow down as much as humanly possible and ensure a space as humanly possible.

Now think about that for a second because it's probably not how you think about the golf swing, But if you take a really good long drive guy, who his hands might be moving at about 20-21 miles an hour, Maybe a little bit faster in the downswing, at peak speed.

At impact, they're moving at about seven, going from 21 miles an hour to a third of that, seven miles an hour in two tenths of a second.

That's the trick to the whip, just like actually cracking whip or snapping a towel.

You've got to snap your wrists at the bottom or let them get snapped.

And that's happening by using this bleed blocking leg to decelerate so that the hands stop moving forward.

So now with the golf club, let's look at this a little bit more closely and get an understanding and a feeling.

So if you have a golf club close by, pick it up because I want you to get a feel for this.

The first thing I want you to do is take the club and just really in your middle two fingers, primarily holding the club.

This finger's here for balance and the thumb's there to secure the other side of the shaft.

And all I want you to do is take the club and let it go in a clockwise circle.

If you're a right -handed golfer looking at a clock on the wall in front of and let it drop and snap.

Watch my right hand as I do this.

You can't really see what's happening, right?

You can see my palm and then it disappears.

This is very close to what the release actually should feel like in the swing.

You'll feel that the softer your wrist is, the faster the club releases through the strike.

And it's just this split, brief moment of acceleration that we're really looking for now.

I want you to feel the the same thing.

But now, instead of letting your wrists snap like this at the bottom, push it forward, do that again.

What do you feel in terms of club head speed?

And there's lots of different ways you can push it forward.

But you'll feel whether you do it with your shoulder extending, your arm, turning your hips, any of this stuff slows the release down.

You'll feel how your wrist doesn't turn over the same way versus like this.

The softer I keep my wrist, the more snap I have.

And that's exactly what I'm trying to feel in the swing is rather than my hands, envisioning my hands.

Moving on this big circle and then coming around on this big circle.

And going at a constant rate of speed, or trying to go really fast with hitting area.

That's not how you actually whip the club at all.

And the visual.

Even though that's actually what it looks like in the golf swing, it's not what it feels like, and it's not what you want to feel and try and practice in your swing.

Instead, you want your hands in an ideal world to come to a complete dead stop at impact.

Now, they're not going to do that.

So just to ruin the surprise for you, they're not actually going to stop.

But as I told you earlier with the long drive pros, they're slowing down by two thirds.

That's a lot.

67, 70% is being decelerating into the ball.

And the feeling of that is that there's nothing continuing to have energy, moving the hands through the strike so that it feels like this, where you can see if I really want to exaggerate, my wrist will actually go backwards.

Watch again.

Now, if you remember, I did a video on the endless conveyor belt, Homer Kelly's idea, and I love this visual.

It's one of my favorite visuals of the golf swing, and it really helps you understand the whip.

And I explained it with that chainsaw of how as the hands reach the end of that arc, as long as they don't keep moving in a straight line, they speed up.

The club speeds up as it goes around that arc.

This exact same thing is true in the golf swing.

As long as I'm not doing anything to keep dragging the handle through, whether I'm pushing it through or pulling it through, as long as I'm not doing that and I have something else to move my hands and club back to the ball, the club will snap through the strike for you.

So how do we get this feeling?

The first thing is understanding that when you take the club back, once you get to the top, you're done.

Your arms don't really have to do anything.

Now, of course, we're still talking about, you're throwing the club from the top, the club head from the top, but it takes a while.

You don't just immediately start releasing everything from here, because by the time you got here, you get nothing left.

You got to understand that as you initiate the throw, all of your body is moving, just like as you're throwing the ball, you know?

But as I'm doing this, I'm not trying to get my arm and hand to run in front of my body, I'm trying to do the opposite.

My body has to lead.

And really, as we get down to it, once you've got the lateral force, some torque, it then all comes down to vertical force, but that vertical force.

I want you to think about it in a different way.

I want you to focus exclusively on taking your lead hip, forward and backward.

If you do this using your gluten hamstring primarily, this will bring your hands straight back to the ball and they'll slam on the brakes for you.

Let me let me explain a little bit further.

So, instead of going to the top and thinking, okay, I'm going to move my hands as fast as I can through the ball, change your visual of the golf swing to, I want my hands to get here and somehow just magically stop.

So in order to do that, when I get to the top, I want to get there and leave my arms and hands up there.

I want to stretch this spiral fascial line as much as humanly possible.

And if I start going like this, well, I've immediately taken that spiral fascial line and introduced slack into it.

But if I do this, so notice my hand is still back here and I'm starting to drive this hip back.

I've actually stretched dynamically that spiral fascial line even more.

That's the feeling.

So once I get to the top, I'm getting ready to throw.

I'm starting to throw supinate with my trail hand, but I'm really getting, you know, I've already shifted.

I've already created some torque.

All I'm really focusing on now is driving this hip straight back.

Now, if I put both hands on the club and I don't do anything with them, I'm just going to let them kind of fall.

and I drive this hip straight back, whoa, look where my hands are.

I did nothing with my hands or arms other than let them fall and pushed my hip straight back.

If I do this, there's nothing to keep moving my hands forward.

There's no pushing.

I'm not turning.

In fact, I'm going to talk about how my shoulders are actually tilting in just a moment.

All I'm doing is driving this hip back.

And as this hip goes back, and this hip goes forward, and these hips work together to do that.

Because now I'm, if this lips hips, going back straight back.

What I do with my trail foot squish the bug.

That helps this happen even faster, and the faster I can move this, the faster it's going to move my hands.

But the more they're going to also decelerate, the harder I post up into this lead leg, that's your visual, the swing.

My arms basically feel like they go straight up and then they stop and just go straight down.

This goes straight back and that moves my hands straight to the ball.

Now, if you have a couple of alignment sticks or golf clubs, you can get a feel and a visual of what's really happening with your shoulders and your hips.

How they work properly in the downswing, so I'm going to put this black one on my shoulders and the yellow one on my hips.

This is going to give you a basic representation of what's happening between my two shoulders and my hips.

Okay, in the backswing, we know, obviously we've talked about in the backswing video how this hip's going down, my spine's going into extension and flexion, or side bend, lateral flexion.

And now they're kind of together here.

But from here, if I do nothing with my shoulders and upper body, I just let them chill out for a second and I start to drive this lead hip back.

What happens to my shoulders.

If my body's relaxed, and this is happening very quickly, and this lead hip needs to move very powerfully.

It's not a soft, gentle motion.

It's quick and explosive.

And that's why that kettlebell workout that you'll see in the RSA program is so helpful.

Because I also couldn't really engage my glute.

I've actually had a left hip injury that I've had since I was 19 in a bad car accident.

And so for me to use this lead hip was really hard for me.

So I had to really work on it to get this glute to be able to fire and engage again.

But once I got it, I really lean into that thing now to push that left hip back.

And you can see that I'm not doing anything other than just exaggerating, focusing on nothing but the lead hip, but my shoulders are being brought back.

Now, if I do this at speed, you'll see that my shoulders tilt.

You can see they're actually kind of pointing perhaps a little bit to the right of the target line.

My shoulders are actually closed.

If I try and use my shoulders at all, you'll see that these shafts kind of cross over.

I only want, I always want this left, this yellow shaft pointing way left compared to the black shaft where my shoulders are.

And again, that's going to happen not by turning.

I don't try and turn my hips.

I don't try and turn my shoulders.

I drive this left hip straight back.

And as I do that, my body falls into side bin.

Now, As I start doing this with speed and you start getting a throw, all of these muscles can actually contract and help do all this faster.

But at first, all you really need to feel is that just driving this hip back.

And I literally mean, in my mind, my visual is I'm pushing against the ground, I'm pushing the ground straight, 90 degrees away from me, and that's pushing my hip back.

Because, of course, my foot is glued to the ground because I've got weight on there, so it's not turning on my hip, it's just moving it in a straight line, straight back, the way.

That is the feel that you need to understand how you your shoulders end up steep like this.

If you see from setup to impact, there's a big change in the angle.

This is that lateral flexion or side bend on the trail side that happens in the downswing, so you have this lateral flexion on the lead side in the backswing.

And then as that lead hip starts to drive back, then I go into it on the trail side in the downswing.

Once you start getting this feel of your shoulders tilting, not that you're trying to tilt your shoulders.

That's going to get you stuck and flipping and all sorts of stuff.

Your shoulders get tilted.

It's just by not doing anything.

As my arms are up here and they're just chilling out and relaxing, and I'm getting ready to drive this lead hip straight back away from the camera.

And my arms get down here.

And there's nothing to keep moving them forward, they're going to snap.

And that's when the full snap happens.

I'm starting from the top.

I'm starting to throw from the top.

Just like if I had a baseball and I was throwing from the top, I'm starting at the very, you know, the very beginning, the farthest part of my stroke.

I'm starting to throw, just like I am in the golf swing, I'm throwing the club head at the ball.

Where most people go wrong is they start trying to push the club, they're trying to extend this arm, extend this wrist too much to push the club through.

And there's no snap in that.

You need to wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

Until this lead hip does all the heavy lifting in that, in this phase of swing, to drive the hands here and then once, there's nothing to keep them moving forward.

Because you're not turning, you're not pushing, you're not extending, you're not twisting, you're just driving this hip straight back.

My hand's done, that club's going to snap, and once that happens, that's when the magic happens.

Let me grab a club and I'll show you a little bit more what I mean.

So now with the club.

I want you to start training yourself how to feel these things and what to listen for when you're swinging.

I'm going to make a couple of mistakes, I'm going to you what's typically common, and I'm going to show you how to also do it correctly.

So again, my feeling for me, as you know, I've studied the swing for 35 years now, something like that, so I've been pretty obsessed with this stuff.

But here's what's interesting about it after all this time.

After all the things I've learned about the golf swing, I really think about my golf swing as just one thing.

I feel that all I really have to focus on is making sure this lead hip drives back if that happens.

And I don't do anything else.

And I mean that almost in a very literal sense, this is where golf becomes hard is when you start adding stuff that doesn't need to be there.

If I literally just go to the top, make a proper backswing, just get the club set loaded in these three fingers and my trail hand.

Like, just like I would throw a ball, how I'd grip a ball.

And then I drive this hit back, look where my hands get brought down to.

I'm literally doing nothing other than driving this hip back.

I'm not trying to swing my arms shallow out.

the club, do any of that stuff, definitely not trying to push against the club, I'm trying.

The more relaxed I keep them, and the more I feel like I don't try to bring my arms and hands down that aggressively to start, the more.

This spiral fascial line gets stretched and that helps snap the club the hands down very quickly.

But once they get here, because there's nothing, no muscular activation, that I'm doing to try and keep the hands or the club going forward.

They stop, and that's what the whip is.

When the hands stop, the club goes.

So let's get a couple of feels for this.

And I want you to pay attention to a couple different things, so I'll do one here.

All I'm going to focus on again is getting this lead hip loaded up, ready to drive back in the downswing.

So there I hit a little chunky, you heard how the ground kind of hit a little heavy.

What did I do there?

Pushed with my trail arm and shoulder.

Watch, I'll do it again.

You'll see that my hip kind of keeps turning through, my shoulders keep turning through, and I'm pushing the club through.

When you hear kind of a heavy hit when you're practicing, whether you're at home, on the mats, or at the golf course, you want to feel that the club just brushes the grass.

And if you find that you keep thunking it into the ground like that, You're pushing, you're starting to push with your trail arm, and while this feels really powerful, it diminishes the whip.

Anything that keeps your hands accelerating through the ball diminishes the whip.

So now let's try a little different move, a little better.

I still tried to push through a little bit with my shoulders.

The more I feel that this lead hip just does this pushes straight back, the more that the whip happens.

That's what you're trying to feel.

Here is a snap at the bottom.

And I want you to get a feel for what your wrists are actually doing.

By doing this.

Shake your hands out.

The wrists should move like this, it shouldn't be something you're trying to tightly control and force.

My hands feel like that through the strike.

That's how quick they're moving, which means when you're doing that at a full swing, you can't really control it.

It's happening way too fast, and this is another thing for you to understand as you're going through the program.

At first.

With the putter, you have a lot of control chipping, you still have a lot of control pitching, have a lot of control.

Wedge plays start to have to release the club a little bit more, and as you get to the 80 yard wedge shot, have to release a little bit more.

And now as you get into the full swing, the further you get from the green, the more control you have to give up, the more.

You've got to start letting your wrists snap at the bottom them and be soft and out of control.

Whereas around the greens, I'm holding onto the club quite firmly and controlling that club face the whole time.

I'm not letting it release at all.

This, completely different.

The motion and mechanics are the same, but my tension level is radically different.

I'm trying to let my wrists snap.

The further I get from the green, the more speed I need, the less control I have.

That's just the nature of the beast.

You want speed, you got to give up some control.

But the more you practice this and keep your arms nice and soft and get this lead hip to work correctly oh not like that that's a push let me try it again there you should feel a distinct separation where it's almost like this you can see i'm squishing the bug i'm pushing this left hip back but i'm trying to keep my hands up here it's hard when you're not hitting a ball at times some sometimes to not want to just bring the club down but the more you get that feeling of your hands just snapping through the ball like that the more you're gonna experience that whip the less you move your hands forward the less you try and turn the less you think about pushing and the more you just focus on getting this lead hip to go straight back to move your shoulders down into the ball after you've made your little lateral shift and created some torque you will start to feel what the goats have felt in their swing