Clinic - RST History
History of the Rotary Golf Swing from the RST golf clinic by Chuck Quinton.
A lot of people ask me about how did I come up with all this stuff? And why is it the way that it is? Because it is really unique.
You know, if you guys have studied any golf swing stuff, read any books, what other DVDs or golf websites, etc.
We always tend to have kind of some golf junkies in here, study a little bit of everything.
And I've been to every instructor Under the Sun and every golf clinic and so on.
I always tell them this is the last golf clinic you'll ever attend.
Because everything else that you see after this will just seem really, kind of foolish, it won't make any sense.
And there's a reason for that and a lot of it.
There has to be a catalyst for anything like this to kind of culminate and come about, and the catalyst for rotary swing was.
I was pissed off, I was frustrated.
So my whole history is that I started playing golf competitively when I was about 14 and got offered a golf scholarship to go to college.
And I took the opportunity because I grew up in Oklahoma and the golf scholarship that I was offered was in Colorado, so that was a no-brainer.
Get out of Oklahoma and go to Colorado Deal.
So I took them up on the deal and was promised the world because I grew up dirt poor.
In a golf course, that was four dollars and 35 cents all you could play all day.
Shoes and shirts were totally optional, so my grandmother dropped me off the course.
Every day.
I'd play 45 holes a day, I'd read every golf magazine that they had in the Pro shop, and then I'd go home and watch golf my way.
VHS tapes.
That's how I learned how to play golf.
And I developed this nice, big classic.
Reverse C.
That, at the age of about 19, started causing hip and back problems, which I thought, Hey, that's just part of golf.
I'm an athlete, right? I'm.
I'm supposed to have some pain and, you know, some wear and tear on my body, but I'm 19.
Hitting a ball with a stick.
Why am I having all these hip problems? By the time I was 31, playing professionally for a while, I played professionally for quite a while.
And I was told by an orthopedist that they want to replace my hip, and I was 31.
I'm now 40, I still have the same bones that I started with.
And I'm not letting anybody cut my femur in half.
That was pretty ridiculous for being a golfer and needing to have my hip cut in half at the age of 31.
And I did a lot of other sports.
I used to snowboard professionally when I was 19.
I was trying to play golf and snowboard, and snowboarding seemed way cooler at the time, so that kind of got more of my focus.
But I never once got hurt snowboarding, and I was jumping off giant 40-foot cornices and all kinds of crazy stuff.
But anytime I play golf, that's when I got pain.
But I could mountain bike and snowboard and all this stuff and never have any injuries, so it seemed kind of odd.
But as I kept going through, when I moved to to Florida, I was trying to find an instructor that that could help me deal with my pain.
But also help me deal with my golf swing.
From the time that I ever picked up a golf club, I hit a cut or a slice, depending on how bad of a cut it was.
But that's just how I learned how to play like everybody else did, nobody could explain to me exactly why they wanted me to do something, or exactly how.
So, I just kind of tried to mimic what I saw Jack Nicklaus do, or what I read in a golf magazine or Golf Digest.
And all I did was kept cutting the ball and cutting the ball, and cutting the ball.
So I just kind of accepted, hey, that's just how I'm gonna hit it.
But when I got to NCAA level and I saw that everybody was hitting it 20, 30 yards past me because of my weak little fade.
I said, Hey, I can't compete like this.
And I was a reasonably long hitter, but you know, there's guys hitting it 30 yards past me.
It's pretty tough when they're hitting three clubs less into a green, so I decided I want to learn how to hit a nice, controlled draw.
That's gonna be what it's gonna help me get to the next level.
Of course, I didn't think anything about putting, which I should have, because that's what I really needed to do.
But to me, I thought, if I hit it 30 yards further off the tee, we're gonna be good.
So I started trying to find instructors that could help me learn how to hit a nice control draw.
Pick up some distance off the tee and explain to me how to do it.
Because I'd be I was willing to work all day long.
If you want me to sit out there and hit balls for eight hours a day, I'd sit out there and hit balls for eight hours a day.
So I sought out a bunch of instructors, I went to do a bunch of different instructors, trying to find the guy that was gonna help me get to the next level.
And so my criteria was pretty simple for us to go.
And, you know, for me to invest all my time and resources into hiring you as my coach.
We're gonna sit down and talk for about 30 minutes and tell you about my game, you're gonna tell me about your teaching style, then we're gonna go play a round of golf.
And nobody would take me up on that.
I insisted that before you'd go, you were gonna give me a lesson, I was gonna see what you did.
To me.
It's kind of like learning algebra from somebody can't, who can't add.
If they can't play golf, that doesn't make any sense to me.
I want to see that you can still play, or at least at one point, could.
You're gonna demonstrate to me that you at least have some ability to do what you're telling me to do? Nobody took me up on that and out of the people that I went to.
These are all the same people you see on the Golf Channel, the same people you see in all the golf magazines.
All the big-name people who have taught tons and tons of champions.
Not a single one would let go out and play with me, except for one guy who I found, who was a kind of a junior level instructor at Let Under.
Ledbetter, Ledbetter wouldn't go play for the record.
And I went out and played with this guy and he beat me by about five shots.
He shot a 67 to my 72 and I said, This is my guy, this guy went out and just throttled me.
I played as well as I could.
It was a cool day like this, really windy, and he just absolutely scorched the course and made it look so effortless, and I said, This is a guy I can learn from.
So I spent the next two years grinding away in the hot Florida Sun, eight hours a day, pounding balls, playing every single day, and never got any better.
In fact, I got to the point I couldn't break 82 days in a row.
So as you can imagine, to put that kind of time and effort and energy into hitting balls and playing in tournaments and not being able to break 82 days.
And when I came to him, I was a one handicapped, when I left, I was like an eight.
I mean, how do you, how do you do that? And so some of you can probably relate to this kind of stuff.
You go out and you take lessons and you kind of get worse, or you kind of see a short-term improvement.
Then it kind of falls back and you just kind of keep going through this same cycle and it's insanely frustrating.
And that's exactly what I went through.
So at some point I realized this isn't working out, although I should have realized much sooner.
And I said, I'm gonna, I gotta go somewhere else.
This guy was a great golfer, But he couldn't teach me because he couldn't tell me why he wanted to do something.
Tell me exactly how to do it.
He couldn't explain the cause and effect.
Relationships.
I was kind of just doing it on blind faith.
But when you start shooting six, seven, eight shots around worse, you kind of start losing some faith.
And I lost a lot of faith and I said, I got to go.
So I went to another instructor, another prominent guy here in Orlando who's taught PGA Tour, PGA major winner who beat Tiger Woods in a in a major.
So this guy surely he's good, right? He just taught so-and-so this big champion.
I took one lesson with a guy and he said, Oh, your swings fantastic.
All you need to do is you need to get fitted properly for clubs, so that's it.
That's been the whole missing piece this whole time, but I just need to get fitted properly by the company that sponsors you.
Okay, I'll do that.
So I got a whole new set of Nike clubs, guess what, didn't change a thing.
So here I am, same deal.
Here's a guy who I thought must know everything he just taught.
This major winner didn't know anything.
They taught a lot with band-aid fixes, and that's the kind of stuff that doesn't work well for me.
So I started looking at the swing differently and I said, Well, I'm pretty convinced that none of you guys know what the hell you're talking about and you can't explain anything to me.
And so I'm just gonna start over from square one because I've gotten so bad at this point that I really have to start from scratch.
And I said, What am I really trying to accomplish with the golf swing? what am I really trying to do? And for me, at first I started thinking about it from a really high-level perspective, like, what are the requirements of the golf swing? What are you really, really trying to do with every aspect of the swing, for your setup, for the swing plane, with impact, all of those things? What's the physics of it, or should really dictate what you're really trying to do with the swing? So, for instance, I looked at something that we've all heard millions of times, like how wide should your stance be? That seems like a really common, sensical thing.
What's the most common thing you guys have heard? How wide should your stance be shoulder-width apart right now? If you've seen the videos on the site, you realize that doesn't really make any sense.
Because where your legs attached to your hips, so what do your shoulders have to do with stance with? Doesn't make any sense at all.
Some people have really broad hips and narrow shoulders, some people have really broad shoulders and narrow hips, and everything in between doesn't really make any sense.
Because your stance with should be based on requirements, not off some random thing about how wide your shoulders are.
So what would be some requirements of stance with? What are you really trying to accomplish with your the width of your stance? Stability? right? Stability is the number one thing, that's a number one requirement.
So if I stand like this, would you agree that I'm going to be very stable? No, I think you'd have a hard time knocking me over from this wide of a stance.
I'm going to be very stable with a really wide stance.
but there's another requirement of stance with that.
This is going to make this a difficult proposition.
So what else do I need to do with my stance with needs to be wide enough that I'm stable? But what I'm pretty centered rotates always a guess, but it's not the right one.
Shifting your weight, right? Any athletic motion that involves hitting or throwing involves weight shift.
I don't care what it is.
If you're hitting a ball with a tennis racket, you're hitting a baseball.
Every hitting and throwing motion involves weight shift.
That's why this is not a stack and tilt clinic.
If you want any power, you must transfer your weight because it creates momentum and allows you to transfer that momentum up to the final release point.
So we want to transfer our weight, so now if I stand really narrow, transferring my weight, it's gonna be very easy.
Right, right, foot, left foot.
I just transferred a hundred percent of my way.
All I gotta do is lift my foot up so now I can transfer my weight really, really easy.
But I'm not very stable now because I could easily topple over.
So somewhere in there is a set of requirements that says.
This is how wide your stance should be.
It should be wide enough that you're stable, narrow enough that you can transfer your weight without what happening.
Swing.
What you saying by swaying is, you don't want your head moving all over the place, right? Because I can stand like this and still transfer my weight, but now my head's moving all over the place.
Spine angle That's depends on what spine angle you're defining, but possibly so.
The big three things are.
We want to be able to be stable, we want to have our stance narrow enough that we can transfer our weight without our head moving all over the place.
So if we can accomplish those three things.
And we can come up with a set of fundamentals based on that, which are going to be dependent on your body.
So for everybody, if you go about two inches outside and narrow or outside of neutral, excuse me, if you are two inches outside of neutral.
That's narrow enough that you can easily transfer your weight without your head moving.
And yet you're stable enough that you're not going to fall off balance when you swing the club.
And so it has nothing to do with your shoulder width now, coincidentally, for some of us, that may be about shoulder width apart.
But that really doesn't answer the question of how wide your stance should be and why it should be that wide.
Everything with RST, that's a simple one, everything was developed in that same concept.
What are the requirements of what we're trying to do? A swing plane? Why a swing plane need to be at a certain angle or does it? What are you really trying to do with the swing path? what are you trying to do with? Impact, position? The physics of the golf club, the strike, the biomechanics of your body, all of those things form the fundamentals for why you should be set up a certain way, why you should swing a certain way.
And that's why RST is the only thing that has the answers to why.
Because we had to go back and ask ourselves, why does it need to be this way? Another one as you mentioned your injury stuff, right? So as I mentioned, I had a lot of injuries from, and they were all golf related.
I could do any other sport, not have any of these injuries, golf.
I had problems with my body all the time from a very young age.
And so that's why we brought in a group of experts.
So RST wasn't developed just by me.
We brought in orthopedic surgeons, PhD biomechanists, neuromechanics guys to help understand what kind of stuff they deal with all the time.
And so one of my big things was.
I wanted to be injury free because I thought it was pretty silly that I was getting injured all the time and being relatively fit.
And yet I couldn't go play golf without, like you said, need a massage right afterwards? And so I brought in about seven guys, orthopedic surgeons and neurosurgeons, and I said, Hey, what's the most common golf swing related injury that you guys operate on? What do you guys think they would say? Back, hip, knee? Three most common ones? back me.
If everybody guesses those three, none of them are correct.
The number one golf swing related injury that all these orthopods operate on was lead shoulder impingement, you believe, that left shoulder for a right-handed golfer.
They deal with an impingement there.
And what happens is you've got the subacromial space between your collarbone and your humerus, and what happens is you take your left arm.
And what is the first move everybody wants to do in the takeaway? Push it across their body, right? What does that do? That subacromial space, it collapses it.
Unfortunately, you've got a nerves that are passing through there.
You keep doing this, keep swinging this arm across your chest, you start creating bone spurs.
And then what do you want to do on the downswing? You want to push really hard from the right.
What does that do to this arm? Gets it further stuck, right? So you've already swung it across your chest, now you're turning into it as hard as you can, it's buried against your chest.
Now those nerves are getting crushed, so they go in there and they grind out all the bone to make a little more room for this nerve passageway.
But again, it's a totally preventable golf swing related injury.
I said, Well, why? Instead of pushing arm across your chest, why don't we pull this arm? Stays nice and neutral and you would never have any subacromial issues.
It make sense.
So every part of the swing was looked at that way.
That's why it took me years and years and years, the last decade, to really start to understand how to put all this together in a golf swing.
That is biomechanically and anatomically safe and correct, and uses the laws of physics.
Because, as you see, we're not going to beat Newton, Newton's always going to win on this deal.
So until somebody outsmarts Newton, we're going to work with the laws of physics that he has established.
So long story short, got really frustrated, started over, looked at it from the beginning, objectively, from a foot view looking down saying hey what am I really trying to do and based on that that's the stuff you see on the site the fundamentals the videos that you see on the website are simply a result of this product
John
Chuck
Andrew
Craig (Certified RST Instructor)
Curt
Craig (Certified RST Instructor)
Curt
Craig (Certified RST Instructor)
Curt
Craig (Certified RST Instructor)
Curt
Craig (Certified RST Instructor)
Chris (Certified RST Instructor)
Craig (Certified RST Instructor)
James
Craig (Certified RST Instructor)