Level Shoulders at Impact
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For hip spinners, this drill will help you hit the ball more solidly than ever before. If you also have a high left shoulder into impact, or too much secondary axis tilt, this drill will save your back while helping you compress the ball properly.
- Hip spinners tend to get too much axis tilt, causing a lot of thin shots, especially with longer clubs
- Hold a club against your sternum and belt buckle, and tilt back until the club touches your leg - that's enough tilt
- If you're a hip spinner, getting the correct amount of tilt at impact will make you feel very vertical
- Along with proper axis tilt, try to feel that your left shoulder is lower than your right at impact
- Drilling these positions will familiarize you with what it feels like to be in proper impact position
For golfers who have been hip spinners for a long time and gotten all the secondary axis tilt that I talk about in the Hip Spinners video, one of the things, The next drill or progression that you want to get into is starting to work on how your shoulders and spine feel at impact.
And the alignments that we get into at impact.
For hip spinners, They're always in a position where they're kind of coming out of the shot and it leads to a lot of thin shots.
They really struggle with the longer clubs, Especially Fairway Woods off the deck.
Because of the fact that they've got so much tilt that their left shoulder tends to pull up and out of the swing.
And so they get their hands, they get their hands too far in front of the ball at times, not able to strike down on the ball and so they end up with hitting a lot of really thin shots.
They don't really hit the longer clubs very solidly.
So the next progression, once you get your hips feeling like they're staying shut using the belt buckle drill, getting yourself stacked into this impact position, stacked over this left leg, The next thing that you want to start working on is your axis tilt and your alignment, or your level of your shoulders at impact.
And so the first thing we're going to talk about is the axis tilt that we need at impact.
A lot of golfers get way more than they need for a standard stock golf shot.
Now, if you're hitting a driver and you're wanting to launch it as high as you can, because you're trying to hit it as far as you can, that's okay.
However, unless you're a long drive professional, You don't need to hit it as far as you can every.
We need to hit it solidly every time and down the middle.
That's what golf is really all about when it comes to the driver for a player who's trying to score well.
If you're just out there trying to have fun and hit it further than your buddies, totally different animal.
Go back to the ball in your driver series and have fun.
But if you're trying to score as good as you can and as low as you can.
And trying to hit the ball solidly every time and hit it very straight and under control, you're going to want to get rid of all this tilt and this high left shoulder coming down.
So that's the first thing we're going to talk about.
In order to feel that, We need to figure out about how much axis tilt we need at impact.
Or this is just the angle of what it's going to appear from the sternum to your belly button at impact.
A lot of guys have a really hard time with understanding how much axis tilt they need.
I use this simple little guide, this simple little drill as a simple way to figure out about how much tilt you need.
Take your stance width, Place the club between your sternum and your belt buckle, and then just start tilting your spine back until that club runs up against your leg.
Now if I come down into impact with open hips, that's about how much tilt I need.
It's a total, it doesn't have to be exact, But that's plenty of tilt unless you're doing other things wrong in your swing to get you shallow enough, coming down into impact and keep you behind the ball.
So it's a great way to just find, Okay, I just need this much tilt and I'm normally here, so that club head's now way outside my leg, as you can see.
That's too much tilt.
We don't need that much tilt and it's going to hurt my hip, in fact it hurts it just drilling it.
I want to be stacked over this left side and get myself into a position where now my spine, to me and to you, as a hip spinner, feels very vertical.
That's very important because if you're used to being this at impact, which tons and tons of guys are, I see it every day on the lesson tee.
This is going to feel vertical or even lean toward the target.
You need a video camera to check to make sure that you're doing this correctly.
So just make sure that once you find how much tilt you need, set yourself in that impact position.
I feel very tall, I feel very vertical at impact.
My head's still going to be behind the ball, but I also know that now I'm actually in a stacked position where I can compress the ball better.
Now the second piece for that is if my spine feels very upright for a hip spinner, Your shoulders are going to feel very level, and this drill in particular that I'm going to give you is going to feel even more extreme.
That you're going to feel that your left shoulder stays lower than your right all the way into impact.
So what does that mean exactly?
As I go to the top of the swing, you can see that this part of my club is higher than the head of the club.
This is just simply that my left shoulder is lower than my right.
As I start down, I want to maintain that.
So that's a simple feeling of keeping my chest shut, my hips shut, part of the hip spinner drill.
As I come down and start pulling my arms down to get back in front, I want to feel that this left shoulder is still below the right and then get myself into this impact position.
This is again, it's an exaggeration, A drill to get you the feeling of to stop coming up and out of the swing and pulling your shoulder up and out.
Because that's going to open up your chest, which can cause you to lean back more, get your arms more stuck behind you and lean to more blocked shots.
So what you want to feel as you're coming down, shifting into that side, I feel that my left shoulder is lower than my right, continuing to pull that left arm, I can fire the right arm here.
Now I'm into an impact position where I'm stacked over the side, my spine feels vertical or even lean toward the target.
I feel a lot of weight on my left side and my shoulders feel leveled impact.
Now because my right hand is lower on the club than my left, because that's how we take the grip, my shoulders won't be, my left shoulder won't be lower than my right.
But that's what it's going to need to feel like if you're a hip spinner.
So this drill is very, very important to feel, keeping the shoulders shut, the hips shut, shifting into the left side, pulling the arm down and keeping that shoulder nice and into the shot, Rather than pulling up and out of it every single time and never being able to release the club until the ball is already gone.
So if you, if you're a hip spinner and you combine this with the other, the T drill of hitting down on the driver, start getting more on top of the ball, Combine that with the belt buckle drill and now the level shoulders drill and keep your spine vertical, You'll start to compress the ball like you never have before, and if you've always been kind of a high ball hitter, you're going to start to understand that a lot of that, your spining is going to dictate your swing plane and path.
If you lean too far forward, you're going to tend to come over the top and swing out If you lean too far back, which a lot of our better players do, They're going to come too far from the inside and hit a lot of blocks and hit a lot of thin shots at the fairway.
So you're going to get everything a lot more neutral and you'll start hitting the ball much more solid.
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