Hip Spinners - Belt Buckle Drill
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Understand the key differences between how the hips turn in RS1 vs RST and how to move efficiently in the golf swing. If you struggle hitting fairway woods off the deck, this video can help you understand why and teach you how to really compress the ball.
- Belt Buckle Drill #1: Go to the top of the swing
- Belt Buckle Drill #2: Make the lateral shift
- Belt Buckle Drill #3: Focus on keeping your belt buckle closed as you use your arms to come into impact.
- Driver Drill #1: Tee up the driver half an inch from the ground
- Driver Drill #2: Place a second tee four or five inches in front of the ball
- Driver Drill #3: Practice hitting the ball and clipping the second tee
A lot of golfers have been taught to take their hips and turn them, or rotate them from the top of the swing as fast as they can.
For certain types of golf swings, that's necessary for the original rotary swing.
You wanted to feel that you took everything and rotated it on the way down because your arms were in a deep position.
And they were going to stay there during the downswing, as you were going to primarily motor the downswing with the rotation of the body.
Now, That's a great way to play if you're not willing to take the time to learn how to do everything as efficiently as possible and learn to train the arms and hands on what to do with the golf club.
So if you're kind of a higher handicap player, Don't really like to practice that much, and you're kind of gearing your game towards.
I play once or twice a month, I don't really like to hit a lot of balls, I don't like to practice that much, that's what the original rotary swing or rotary swing 1.
0 is for.
The rotary swing tour, we're seeking optimum efficiency.
We're seeking to do everything to the maximum ability of how our body is designed and what it's capable of doing in producing the most efficient, powerful and safe golf swing that we can.
And so in doing that, of course, We've done research in figuring out what segments of the body need to fire and which sequence, and how they need to do that during the golf swing to move very efficiently.
And one of the things that's perpetually a problem for our better players and typically, golfers who are kind of in the single digit handicap, at some point or another, they take that idea of rotating the hips and getting the hips really open at impact too far.
And so they start getting into what we call a hip spinner, And that's basically where somebody goes from the top of the swing and turns their hips as fast as they can.
And this causes a couple problems.
The first one is when you go to the top of your swing and you just start rotating, well, Almost invariably, you'll be short of neutral joint alignment at impact, where my hip is not aligned up over my ankle.
And so you risk injury, you can tear your labrum, You can do all kinds of things to your hip that are going to cause discomfort and eventually pain or injury.
So obviously we know that we need to get that hip all the way into neutral, Where it's designed to be to pivot safely and efficiently, and be able to fully activate the muscles and the glute and the hip.
But the other thing that it does is that it tends to keep you, Give you too much.
Secondary axis tilt, Where your spine is feeling like it's leaning way back away from the target because your hips have moved way out in front of your upper body.
Your upper body can't keep up because your legs are so powerful and your hips are so powerful, you can spin your hips really fast and get hung back.
And so what this leads to is a lot of blocked shots coming way from the inside, getting stuck, as you've heard Tiger talk about millions of times.
And this is certainly still a problem in his golf swing today.
So as he does that and you spin those hips and you've got all this tilt, you're going to be coming too far from the inside.
And it also leads for golfers who aren't quite as skilled as Tiger or just single digit handicapped to a lot of thin shots, especially with the longer clubs, the fairway woods off the deck.
People really struggle with this when they get to the top of the swing and spin their hips.
So we have a couple of drills that I've developed.
That help you start to change the feeling and sensations.
And are going to really dramatically help you feel.
So much more.
On top of the ball and able to compress the ball rather than just spinning your hips, Which is a really powerless feeling because you don't ever hit the ball solidly, because your angle of attack is wrong and your spine is leaning too far back.
So here's the first drill that we're going to do.
The first one is really, really simple in concept.
Now in practice, a lot of guys struggle with this.
So here's how it works.
I call this the belt buckle drill because I'm just going to reference the belt buckle on your pants so that you can see where your belt buckle is pointing at impact.
For guys who really want to drive and spin those hips around, what I want you to feel is that your belt buckle points at the ball or even behind it at impact.
Now there's no way that you're going to do that.
However, You're absolutely going to feel that your hips are shut as you come down into impact.
By doing this drill.
If you're used to having them very open and getting into this position.
This hurts my back just trying to demonstrate it to you.
So you're going to feel that as you go to the top of the swing, as you come down, I want you to feel that your belt buckle stays pointed away from the target or away from the ball.
So you're going to shift your hips, But then keep your belt buckle closed while you start to pull down with that left arm and fire the right.
Depending on what you're working on, you're going to feel one over the other.
And so as you come down into impact, I still feel that my belt buckle is pointing this way.
Now this is a feeling to get me into the proper impact position, where I'm stacked.
Because what's going to happen is if you just go to the top and rotate, one or the other is going to win.
Again, you're rarely going to rotate your hips and shift laterally at the same time.
One's going to take over the other, and it's typically rotation.
What most people find in their golf swing when we start working with them in online, in-person lessons is that they always end up short of neutral, so they're always leaned back too far.
They can't get on top of the ball and compress it properly.
So we have to get them to feel that they just shift laterally while keeping their hips shut.
We call this a closed hip slide.
This is a little bit of an exaggeration because it's a drill.
But as you're feeling this, you're going to feel that your hips are very shut.
So we look at this from down the line, go to the top of the swing.
I'm going to shift, feel like my belt buckle stays closed, come into impact, and I want to feel that I'm just totally posted up and braced up on that left side.
My left glute's fully contracted during this drill to get the feeling of stabilizing the hips rather than spinning the hips.
That's a very important distinction between the two golf swings and how you probably swing now, if you're a hip spinner and what you're going to feel in the future.
You want to think of your lower body as providing stability, not just rotation.
And if you're a hip spinner, you're going to feel zero rotation.
However, when you do this drill and you hit half shots, which is how you're going to start, you're going to see that every single time your hips are going to be way more open than you think.
So the drill is going to be, at first you're going to start halfway, just a little short halfway backswing, shift, keep the hips shut, and try and stop just after impact.
And you want to feel that your hips are still shut.
Now invariably what's going to happen, you're going to look like this and your hips are going to be 90 degrees open.
And so you're always going to be coming in stuck and having that feeling of your spine leaning too far back.
And you're not really getting on top of the ball at impact.
So this drill is going to be really challenging at first and you have to really exaggerate.
Keeping that belt buckle feeling closed as you start to pull yourself back into impact and let the arms and club release past the body.
That's where the release comes from.
If the hips don't stop turning, the arms are typically going to release late.
And so you're going to have speed at the wrong point in the golf swing.
We want all of our speed to happen right here.
So that's the first drill.
We're going to feel hip shift, get into neutral, And then pull our arms down into impact and keep that belt buckle, feeling like it points away from the target all the way into the release.
You want to feel very stable here, okay? The second drill is done with the driver.
This one's a very simple drill, again, in concept, but a lot of guys really struggle with this.
And all it is is you basically tee up your driver and then five inches in front of that ball, four or five inches in front of that ball, put another tee in the ground about an inch off the ground or a half inch to an inch off the ground.
And what you're going to try and do is hit your driver, hit your ball that's on the tee, and clip the second tee.
That's simple.
So for a lot of you, you're going to feel like you're hitting way down on the driver, way more than you're used to.
If you're a hip spinner and you see yourself in this position at impact with your driver every time, this drill is going to seem impossible.
But you also are going to realize that you struggle with getting your spine feeling a little bit more level at impact or vertical, rather than getting tilted so much back.
And that's probably why you hit a lot of thin shots and blocks out to the right.
So you're going to feel as you come into impact with your driver, that you're way more on top of the ball.
A lot of guys have this extreme subconscious fear of getting their head in front of the ball.
And so they work so hard to keep it behind that they put themselves in bad positions.
Obviously, you don't want your head in front of the ball at impact.
However, for you, if you've spun your hips and then got all the secondary tilt, you're going to feel like your head is in front of the ball.
That's why you need a video camera.
You need to check it to make sure that you're not getting your head in front of the ball, but still making sure that you're not leaning so far back at impact that you have too much tilt.
So the other key to this drill is for your driver to tee it a half inch off the ground.
How I measure that is I just put my fingers underneath the tee so that that's all I can fit between the top of the tee and the ground.
So you're just going to feel like it's teed up, probably for a lot of you, about the height of an iron.
When you start doing this drill correctly, You will hit the ball perfectly solid in the center of the face and be able to clip and remove the second tee as well.
Now, you don't need to take a big trench divot here.
It's not the point.
The point is to start to improve your impact alignment so that you're not leaned back so far.
However, at first, you will definitely be hitting down on your driver.
The goal, again, To improve impact alignments and to improve how solidly we strike the ball with the driver on the club face.
That's critical.
So, once we start doing these two drills together, you're going to start seeing that you can really, really compress the ball again and you're going to save your back, save your hip.
So, these two drills are critical for hip spinners to start to learn to get yourself stacked at impact, Get into a little bit more neutral alignment at impact, rather than having this dramatic tilt going back, and that will really improve your ball striking.
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