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How Much Shoulder Elevation
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It's time to help you decide how to power your golf swing. And it all starts with how you use your arms in the golf swing going back. In this video, I go in depth on how the amount that the arms move vertically during the backswing directly impacts how you will be able to and should power your downswing, no matter how you swing the golf club. Check out the video now because the consequences of using leverage or rotation improperly can be disastrous!
- Shoulder elevation (arm height) is a variable, not a fundamental in the golf swing
- Raising the arms so the elbow is at the base of the pectoral muscle is ideal for most golfers
- Golfers using the body very aggressively should keep the arms lower to keep them from getting stuck
- In an aggressive swing, imagine swinging the club with the weight of the body, like a sledgehammer
- Golfers protecting the body from stress by using it more passively should get higher arms for leverage & potential energy, harnessing gravity in the downswing
- In a passive swing, imagine swinging the club like a hammer, with wrist snap for speed through impact
- Drill with an impact bag to see the difference & choose the right elevation for your swing
In this video, I'm going to talk about how much shoulder elevation, or technically arm elevation you want in the golf swing.
We've already defined what shoulder or arm elevation is, just your arms moving up and down in front of your body and the amount that they move up and down.
You're starting basically with your hands at roughly belt height, and at some point they're going to end up chest, shoulder, height, however much.
That's a variable in the rotary swing tour, in any golf swing for that matter.
As far as the rotary swing tour is concerned, it's not a fundamental what your arms do because they're dependent on what your body does.
Everything is, by definition, To be a fundamental has to be the primary concern, and of course, it's going to be dependent on what other things do in your swing.
We have a set specification of how high we prefer to see the arms go, but it's a variable depending on other things in your golf swing and what you feel.
And I want to talk about that today and go to two different extremes.
One would be a lot of elevation and one's going to be very little elevation.
Then everything in between, you're going to see how it sets in line with how we would typically teach a student to show them how much elevation they should have.
So first off, Let me just show you what we teach in the clinics as a specification for showing where your arms should be.
Because it's the best blend of both worlds as far as how your golf swing is going to sequence in the downswing.
So let me show you what that is first.
The first thing we would do is we would talk about how much the elbow moves.
It's an easy reference point.
So from a dress to the top of your swing, we teach that the elbow is going to move basically up to the base of the pectoral muscle, your chest here.
So that when you flex your right arm, you could kind of imagine a bench right here if I stood straight up.
The base of my peck is right here and my elbow is going to be roughly on that.
That's going to allow you to use everything to the fullest advantage, your arms, your body, everything for power in the golf swing.
But that's not necessarily the only way to swing by any stretch of the imagination.
You can look at somebody like Davis Love who has very, Very high hands and you can look at somebody like Tiger who has much shallower hands and then everything in between.
And RST allows for either of those things.
The RST fundamentals apply to any golf swing.
It's core functional biomechanical body movement and physics of the golf club.
So how much you move your arms up and down, again, it's just a variable.
So let's look at what that predetermines you for.
And the best way I define it is if you want to use your body aggressively in the golf swing, You want to use your core and your shoulders and your hips and everything, and your arms to hit the ball as aggressively as you can, then the less elevation you have, the better.
For the simple reason that if your arms are trying to come down from a very high, lots of elevation position where my elbow, again, this is our reference point, is even with my shoulder now instead of the base of my pec.
What's going to happen if I start to fire everything really aggressively coming down, my arms are going to tend to come in late.
I'm going to end up in this kind of looking impact position where my arms are buried back here behind my body.
And then I'm going to tend to block it quite a bit and hit Blyces or block slices, we call them Blyces.
They're terrible shots.
You don't want to hit them.
The club's always coming in late.
And you may start to figure out through timing how to flip your hands enough to save that shot.
But the reality is if your hands are here and your body's working really aggressively, the physics just don't match up.
Your shoulders have only got to move about six to eight inches to get into that impact position, and your hands have got to move six feet.
And the club's got to move even more than that.
So as you start trying to time aggressive body movement, and the club's making its movement back down to impact, it's very hard to synchronize all of those.
By the same token, if you have your arms very high and you, or excuse me, if you have your arms very low and you don't use your body very aggressively, you're not going to have a lot of leverage in your swings.
You're not going to have a lot of power.
So this is where the give and take comes from.
So again, let me define what's ideal.
We're going to go to the top of our swing and we're going to have basically the amount of elevation.
That's going to put our elbow at the base of our pec.
This is going to allow me to use my body and my arms and bring everything still squared up back into impact.
I can be aggressive with my torso.
I can be aggressive with my arms and everything else is still going to match up.
Okay.
Now let's say you want to be really aggressive with your body.
I'm going to show, talk about the pros and cons of that in just a second.
But if I wanted to be really aggressive, I want to hit the ball really, really hard with my body.
I like that feeling.
I want to do it for whatever reason.
Maybe your instructor has you doing that or whatever it is.
The shallower your arms are at the top, the more bent over you are a little bit, because that's going to help steepen the shaft.
As you come down, if my arms are really shallow, so now my elevation is lower than my pec, It's going to allow my arms to get back in front of my body because they have less distance to travel.
My body can now move very fast and my arms don't have to get all the way back down in front of my body.
In order for me to get back into a proper impact position.
A perfectly okay way of doing it.
Here's the negative side of that.
The more aggressive that you use your body, the more stress and strain you're putting on the body.
The more likely you are to be injured, the more flexible you need to be, the stronger in your core and your hips and your back that you need to Again, if you want to swing like that, knock yourself out.
Not necessarily my preference.
I like kind of a blending motion of all things because from this position, you can see that my arms are not really in a position of leverage.
This is leverage.
This is potential energy because they're high.
And now I have a lot of gravity, a lot of time for gravity to help accelerate my arms and hands down to impact.
From here, I don't.
So from here, I'm going to have to use my body very aggressively to get any speed or power in the swing.
Again, if that's your preference, knock yourself out.
Not necessarily my preference.
RST again is looking for a blending motion, An optimal blend of getting power from all of these sources without necessarily relying on one or the other, but also taking a tremendous amount of stress off your body.
So again, having a little more leverage, Potential energy by having a little more elevation and slowing the body down a little bit.
While speeding up the arms, is way less stress on the spine and way less stress on the hip.
So that's the ideal blending of the motions.
But now let's look at the opposite.
Let's say that you don't want to use your body at all because you've got a bad back.
Or you're not very flexible and you can't get into these really steep side bend, Tiger Woods, Dustin Johnson kind of positions that you're going to get into if you use your body aggressively.
And you want to take as little stress on the golf swing as possible.
You want your back and hip, everything to be as protected as possible.
And so you don't want to spin your body really fast.
Well, what do you need to do?
The obvious answer is you need more leverage.
And so what we do with that is we're going to have a little more elevation.
It's okay to be more upright.
Again, think kind of Davis love.
And then now I've got potential energy because if I just use gravity, my hands move incredibly quick.
And if I just go from here to here and just let my arms drop, they didn't take any physical effort on my part, but gravity did all the work.
And now all I got to do is keep my hands soft, let the club down cock as it's coming down.
So I get a little more leverage from this.
And then I have a lot of power and speed at the bottom.
It's more about speed than thinking so much power, even though they're technically kind of one in the same, as far as the golf ball is concerned, we're just trying to get the club to move quick.
You can either move your body quick to move the club quick, or you can move your arms and hands and everything else quick.
They can still accomplish all the same things.
So again, think about it in terms of what you want to feel in your golf swing.
If you want kind of the ideal blending, I want to be able to use my body, But I don't want to rely on it and really wreck my body and stress it out and put a lot of strain on my spine.
I'm going to go for that kind of two or three inches of elevation here.
I'm just going to bring my elbow up to the base of my peck and I'm done.
Or I'm going to be really shallow, use my body really aggressive because that's what I want to do.
I'm going to keep my arms a little more shallow.
Or, I'm going to take all the stress off my body and elevate my arms quite a bit, and then my body's got to slow down and mellow out.
Because if you use your body aggressively, again from a high hands position, you're going to get stuck and everything's going to come in late.
You don't need to use your body a lot from a high hands position.
Again, RST strives to be down the middle of the biomechanical ideal movements, but you can go anywhere in between.
So, again, how much elevation you need depends on what you want to feel in your swing.
Lots of body, little elevation, no body at all, lots of elevation, lots of leverage, let gravity do the work and bring your hands down and use a lot of lag.
And the one simple drill that I want to think about is, I'm going to show you here, is how I think about slinging the club into the bag, or into an impact bag, so let me show you what that looks like.
Alright, so I've got my impact bag in here and this is how I'm going to learn either movement, whether I learn to use my body a lot in the swing and not have a lot of elevation, or I'm going to have a lot of elevation and use leverage.
And so I'm going to start with the one of having a lot of leverage, a lot of vertical energy potential here for my hands to move quickly down.
And the best feeling I like to describe for that is kind of slinging the club head into impact.
Think of the club as a tool, like a hammer, that you would swing and you'd use your wrist.
You wouldn't use your body to swing a hammer, You're going to use your wrist and you're going to keep your wrist soft and stuffle, and you're going to snap it to get a lot of speed.
That's kind of the high leverage kind of potential golf swing as far as RST is concerned.
You don't, again, you don't want to use your body aggressively, that's more like swinging kind of a sledgehammer.
We're thinking the club's not that heavy.
So I'm going to show you the best image.
That I would think of is to think of slamming or hitting a nail with a hammer, and that the hammer, This is just a really long hammer and you're going to try and continue to make it long by creating a lot of leverage and width.
So what I think about there is.
I don't want to have this position where I come into impact and my body is really turning aggressively and I'm really pushing against the shaft with my torso.
Also, I want to think about my torso slamming on the brakes and I'm slinging the club into impact.
So let's take a look what that looks like.
So I'm going to go lots of leverage, lots of elevation going back.
And now you can see my body slammed on the brakes.
It really didn't do anything.
I felt zero stress on my body.
But you can see I still launched the impact bag without any problem.
I just had a lot of lag coming down and then I slung the club into the bag.
So that's one way of swinging the golf club.
No stress on the body, lots of leverage from the wrists and the vertical movement of the arms.
And it's a great way to swing the golf club.
Now let's look at the opposite.
I'm going to now not elevate my arms so much.
So if I just try to do that from here, I'm not going to have a lot of time for my hands to accelerate.
So I need to make up for it with body movement.
So let's take a look what that's going to look like.
So I'm not going to elevate as much, and I'm going to use my shoulders and hips and core and everything else to bring the club back down a little bit more.
So now you can see a very different impact position, and the club kept traveling.
Because my body is aggressively moving through impact, and I used a lot of torso and a lot of shoulder rotation to move the impact bag.
Theoretically, theoretically, You could possibly get more club head speed by being a little bit more aggressive with the body on the top end.
As far as the irons are concerned, it's six of one and one half dozen of the other.
It's kind of all the same.
But if you're going for max distance off the driver, you want to leverage every single part of the golf swing as best you can.
This can take a lot of athleticism and strength and flexibility and fitness level, and those things I described earlier.
But you can certainly do it.
Again, The RST is looking for the ideal blend of everything, and that gives you plenty of tour caliber club head speed, as much as you need.
But if you're really trying to well on it and that's just what you're into, you're going to need to use your body a little bit more aggressively.
Think the long drive pros.
They use every ounce of muscle that they can muster to try and move the club as fast as humanly possible.
They use a lot of lag, a lot of leverage, and they also use a lot of body.
They use, you know, You need a stronger grip typically.
So they don't have to rely on squaring the club face because they tend to get their body out in front a little bit.
Lots of stuff to time there.
But that would be theoretically the most potential club head speed that you could possibly generate.
Again, it's also the one that's going to put you at the greatest risk for injury by far.
You can see how my body was really working and slinging into the bag there.
From down the line, I won't hit this quite as hard.
I don't want to launch it into the wall here, but I'll do again the low leverage one that we saw where I'm going to use my body a lot more.
So my hands are going to be a little shallower and now you can see, my body is going to get into the same impact positions.
I just used my body and then one where I go a little more leverage and that's more slinging it, the old cracking the whip concept.
That's going to take a totally different approach to the swing.
So again, RST is ideally in the middle, a little blend of all of these things.
But if you want to go to one side or the other, perfectly fine, you just need to understand the pros and cons of each.
And again, what you're going to need to feel in your golf swing.
One you're going to feel more body rotation, one you're going to feel more of a slinging of the club and impact.
So, Hopefully, this helps you understand how much elevation you want in the golf swing and helps you go further down the road of deciding how you best want to swing the club and what you want to feel in your golf swing.
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