Upper Cut Punch Drill
Sorry, you need to be a member to access this video.
You Are Just Seconds Away - Become a member here!
Already a member? Log in now
The Upper Cut Punch Drill will teach you what Tiger Woods means when he describes his swing as feeling like an upper cut punch. This will feel very strange to you if you are used to pulling with the lead side for speed and that is who this drill is most effective for.
When Tiger Woods was asked about what his golf swing feels like to him, he described it as delivering an uppercut punch.
And that is exactly what the goat code feeling is in the golf swing.
To feel this, what I want you to do is start with your golf setup at your trail arm only.
So for right-handed golfers, your right arm and rotate your arm so your elbow pit and wrist are out.
This is a goat arm position and connect that arm to your rib cage and feel your back muscles engage as well, so your arm is nice and connected to your body.
Now, from here, as you go back, take your lead arm and put it on your trail shoulder and push it down slightly.
So as you start rotating back, I want you to hold your shoulder down so you don't start lifting it up.
This is going to help you feel connected and it's also going to force you to stretch your core.
I want you to imagine a rubber band from your lead hip to your trail shoulder.
And as you go back, you're starting to pull these two apart, so you can imagine that this rubber band is stretching.
But you're not trying to lift, you're trying to rotate your rib cage and pull your chest and sternum away from this lead hip while keeping your arm down and connected, and hold it just like this the whole time, don't do anything else with your arm.
Now as I go back and I load into my trail side and I start to recenter, now, I'm back on my lead side.
Now.
This is the key for understanding the uppercut punch all of your weight needs to get back over to your lead side.
So you can see that my trail heel is kind of popped up here because my lead glute is now activated.
I'm pushing my heel down into the ground while keeping this arm connected.
And now here's the key.
What a lot of golfers try to do is try to turn their hips.
The only hip rotation you're going to have is really just this initial part when you're starting to get back over to lead side, your hips turn.
But now what you want to feel is that this hip is nice and anchored and braced.
So that that stretching that you created and even increased dynamically during the downswing as your lead hip moved further away from your trail shoulder.
Now that it's pulling you down, that is what is going to snap on the way down.
So you'll see that.
If I hold this shoulder down, keep this arm connected, don't let it rotate like this in the back, so you hold it just like this, go back, shift back over.
You'll see that my heel kind of pops up.
Now I've firmly planted on my lead side and I'm lowered down into the ground so that I can explode up.
So you'll see that my sternum is exploding up as my lead hip goes into extension.
We need that force from the leg to drive that arm in and you're not, again, spinning your hips.
Your hip's done turning and it's bracing, and then it's going to explode up.
Now, your hips will continue turning here, but you don't want to feel like you're turning to drag your arms through.
You are loading into the ground to punch.
Now, where does the uppercut punch feel?
At this point, I'm in the goat delivery position, but what I want to feel after this is that I would be continuing, the momentum would continue to pull my arm through, and that is where I deliver the punch.
So, I'm imagining there's somebody right here and as I come through, that is where all the speed is coming through.
In the uppercut punch feel.
Now, of course, we're delivering all that force down here as the club and wrists are releasing.
But there's so much energy coming through that you'll feel that you're gonna deliver an uppercut punch right here.
Now, when you grab a club, you can go through this exact same motion, so preset the club in that goat delivery position.
With your trail arm, go back, keep that shoulder down, don't lift it, keep it down.
So it forces you to stretch your core away from that lead hip, back into that lead hip.
And now, as you start to get ready to fire, you're going to feel all of that force, your whole body, delivering that force right into that trail.
Hand all the way into the ball.
So go back, load into it, and fire.
And the faster you get this extension from your leg and your chest popping up as your core is helping drive that arm through, the more speed you're going to generate.
And when you look at your sternum graft, that's where you see that drop as we load into the lower, into the left side or lead side, and then explode up.
That's where you see that huge spike in vertical movement in your sternum graph and that's how you get it.
Now let's take a look at how to put this into practice in the real world and how you can drill this in a fun way.
Did you hear the difference in those two punches?
The first one had a snap and a pop to it, and the second one was kind of a thud.
And that's the difference between how most golfers hit the ball by trying to push off their trail side instead of getting into their lead side.
And being able to snap and use their core to fire their arm through the ball very rapidly.
So a great way to practice the feeling of the golf swing is actually using a punching bag.
Now, of course, if you don't have a punching bag, you can just simulate this feeling that what you want to feel is not that you are continuing to drive and push off your trail foot forever.
that will lead to a push in your swing and your whip factor will go way down because your hands will keep being pushed through impact instead of stopping and snapping and releasing through the ball and a punch is exactly the same thing that's why tiger described his swing as an uppercut punch and an uppercut punch you don't keep pushing off your trail side you use that initially to get you over to the lead side and give you some momentum and some lateral force that then is converted into that snap that helps drive the sternum up and that's what you're driving through in the golf swing you're driving your body into that ball and then up and through it as the momentum continues to pull you through so if you if you ever want to practice this in a more practical and fun way find a heavy bag grab some gloves and start learning how to snap your punches instead of pushing your punches and it'll give you the same feeling that you're looking for in the golf swing
