How to Get Your Golf Swing in Shape for Spring
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Winter is the BEST time to make improvements to your golf swing! It's critical that you practice far more with a mirror AWAY from hitting balls than anything else. You'll make faster improvements and bigger strides than you ever will pounding balls on the range!
- Practicing indoors is the fastest way to improve
- You should NOT be hitting balls when you first start working on a new movement
- Winter is the BEST time to work on your golf swing!
Hey, guys. Chuck Quinton here. I just want to go over how to put these drills together and how to take them to the course, because it's one of the biggest questions that we get all the time and I want to show you in real world applique what it looks like, and I want to walk you through some different things that I emphasize when I'm working with students.
I want to start with the swing on the left here because we're working on some things that are core and fundamental to just about every single golfer that we see, so for those of you who RSA members, you'll recognize this as the whole kit and caboodle drill. This is putting everything together in one full swing, but just doing it left arm only.
So, as we go back, the key things that we're focusing on here are the core body movements. So, one of the really big emphasis that I place on the take away is, if that club heads moving, it's because the buttons on your shirt, or in this case zipper, are turning. Otherwise, that club does not move. What I'm trying to emphasize here is creating early rotation so that your body's turn is controlling the movement of the club, not your arms and hands. You can see here, she does a great job. As that clubs moving, her zipper is turning away from the target. Already at this point, she's made a 20 degree turn, or so. And we see all the time where that left arm is just crushed across the chest and the buttons or zipper just haven't moved at all. So this is great, she's really focusing on rotating her body.
Right now, because this is all brand new to her, she's having to really, really concentrate on these two things: turning her ribcage, turning her buttons away from the target. Many of you may be focusing on pulling that right shoulder blade back here. I describe this movement a lot of different ways. Sometimes, I like to just tell people, turn like you're going to talk to me, and I'll stand over here behind them and, "Just turn your ribcage so that it's a natural movement, rather than making it so complicated."
Now you can see at this point, she's started to shift her weight to her right, and made a great big shoulder turn. This is absolutely picture perfect, spot on. We put her right arm down on here, this would look as good as any tour pro on the planet. But she's done a really, really good job of focusing on that rotation, her job is of turning is not over yet. Notice she's still turning, still turning, still turning. Here, she's already made a 90 degree shoulder turn when that left arm is just past parallel to the ground.
Again, perfect. This is what we're looking for. You have to rotate your ribcage to get that club moving correctly and staying in the correct sequence. If you just start swinging your arms and hands, or set your wrists, or rotate your wrists so early, like everybody tends to want to do, the entire sequence of the golf swing is devastated. So, if you focus on just turning your body and shifting your weight, all these wonderful things are going to happen.
The only critique I'd have here is, she's lost that axis tilt. Her hips have slid just a hair to the right too much. That's caused her lower part of her spine, and her pelvis to slide to the right, which causes the upper part to tilt to the target. But, all-in-all, lots and lots of great things to take away from here. Huge shoulder turn, great weight shift. She's minimized her hip turn. Everything here is fantastic.
You'll notice here, we're working on down-cocking. We need some more lag, we need some more power in her swing as well. So we're putting this together, making her focus on softening her wrists while she shifts back to the left, so you can see her hips, her legs, starting to shift back to the left. Now she's got massive amount of lag for days, which, of course, when she had her right hand on there, she was throwing the club away very early in the swing, like, again, so many of us want to do. So, taking that right hand off and just focusing on these last three fingers doing a little bit of a pulling motion while your lower body shifts back to the left, you've go Sergio Garcia-esque lag. Easy peasy.
So, tons and tons of lag, notice how strong that left leg is getting posted up on here. It's in neutral joint alignment. Remember, we can draw ... That's not my best effort at a straight line, as you can imagine. Let's try this guy. Straight up from the center of the ankle, center of the hip socket, still got tons of lag. As she comes into impact, we need a little bit more forearm rotation and of course, those of you that have attended the clinics know that she owes me $100 for that right ankle coming up. But, we're not going to harp on that one.
So, a little bit of forearm rotation would square this club face up, and just continue the release. But, the big things we're emphasizing here are what I want to talk about. For most golfers is during that initial move during the take-away, getting your upper body to turn. If that club is moving, it's because the buttons on your shirt are moving. Once we do this, and we do this for about 20 or 30 minutes, just doing these drills. I had the mirror here, as you can see, I had it flipped around so she could see it. And then I moved it out-of-the-way so I could film a couple times, so I could play it back for her and then keep making little changes.
This is how you learn. You learn in front of this mirror. So, as I'm sitting at my house now in Colorado, watching it snow outside, I can still work on my golf swing. It doesn't matter that it's snowing outside. In fact, it's more important that you do more of your work inside during this time of year than anything else. You're going to make far better progress doing these drills inside in front of a mirror, than you ever will outside hitting balls, I promise you.
So, after 20 or 30 minutes of doing these drills, so that it's really starting to get ingrained, we'd start going back and adding that right arm on there. Now, for most of us this is a huge trouble maker, and it's going to create a little bit of issues here. But, for the most part, you'll notice that I've really emphasized having her hands very light on the club. In fact, her right forefinger is not even wrapped around it. I'm wanting her to feel exactly what she felt over here when her right hand wasn't on the club at all. You'll notice, she's done a great job during the take-away, looking very similar to what she did when her right arm wasn't on there.
It's just about identical, put the club at about the same spot. And you'll notice, she's still made this great big shoulder turn. Her chest is starting to face away from the target. She hasn't overturned her hips. She's starting to shift to the right. All these things look awesome. And so we know that these things are starting to set in from the drills. She's still focusing on turning, turning, turning. Huge turn, huge turn. Absolutely beautiful at the top.
And this is all done in a short period of time, because we spent the vast majority of our time not on this side hitting balls, but on this side in front of the mirror doing drills. And as soon as we put all this stuff together, she's still able to down-cock. Notice how light her right hand is. Her fingers are barely touching the club. And now notice this beautiful down-cock, tons of lag as she starts to shift her hips back to the left, coming down, getting posted up, right hand still barely doing anything on the club. Now, notice she's still got plenty of lag at this point in the swing.
So many of us have the club already down here, because we're pushing so hard with that right wrist right immediately at the top of the swing, and that kills our entire golf swing. You take that right arm off, you keep drilling, and drilling, and drilling. I know it's frustrating. I know it's hard to train that right hemisphere of your brain to use that left hand. But, you've got to do it to achieve all these wonderful positions you see.
Getting down into impact, the right hand, obviously barely on the club here at all. A couple little things we would tweak here, the left arm on impact. But, this is awesome work in such a short period of time. And she gets into a nice release position. Good extension. Good post step there. Right arm is not dominating, it's not causing her to chicken wing. All these things are built on this side of the practice tee, not where you're hitting balls. So, this winter focus on my winter golf series training program. It gives you all these same core fundamentals. For those of you that are in RSA, really key in on going through the whole thing in sequence. Go through all the clinic videos, and look at all the drills that we did in the kit and caboodle video, because that's going to show you how to achieve all these great positions. And you can do it this winter and make huge changes, and be ready for next season.
Lars
Craig (Certified RST Instructor)
Lars
Craig (Certified RST Instructor)
Asle
Craig (Certified RST Instructor)
Donald
Craig (Certified RST Instructor)
stephen
Chuck (Certified RST Instructor)
Ken
Craig (Certified RST Instructor)
Frank
Craig (Certified RST Instructor)