Lydia Ko | Minimize Head Movement
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In this video, I'll show you how Lydia Ko rotates her body and minimizes head movement in the swing, allowing her to be a more consistent ball striker week in and week out.
- Watch video #1 of the play your best golf series in 6 weeks.
- Drill
- Get ready for video #2
We are back with this week's tour analysis with Lydia Ko who just became the youngest player in LPGA history to win two majors, so congratulations to Lydia. She's an absolutely phenomenal talent and so great for the game of golf. Since we're in the midst of a six-week video series here on how to become a better, more consistent ball-striker, I figured who better to showcase than Lydia now.
We're gonna be showing you some of her head movement that she has in her golf swing, much like we discussed in video number one. We're gonna be talking about what we're gonna be working on in video number two that's coming out later this week. Let's go ahead and get started now.
As we're in the midst of six weeks to playing the best golf of your life, becoming a more consistent ball striker, we have Lydia Ko picking up her next victory. I thought to myself, there's no better person out there for us to start to talk about consistency, because she is a fantastic ball striker, does a really great job of controlling the bottom of the swing arc and has very very good control of the club face, which leads her to number four on the LPGA tour in greens and regulation. When you're hitting that many greens and regulation and you're number one in putting, that makes for a dangerous, dangerous arsenal there and a winning combination.
Congratulations to Lydia for all the hard work she's done, she's absolutely great for the game of golf. Let's get right into it here, again we're gonna talk a little bit about head movement. Lydia does make a little bit of an unorthodox move with her head. Again, the important part is that the movement that she makes is not creating any sort of inconsistencies in her swing. Ill get further into that as we start to go through things here.
I'm gonna mark what we call the tush line, I'm gonna mark the front of her head, then from a face on perspective, I'll mark the head and we're gonna draw what we call the right hip line. These are pretty common lines you'll see us use when we do these tour analysis. You'll notice there's a little tiny bit of space here between the right thigh and the right hip line that's drawn straight up from the ankle. The unorthodox move here is she's gonna make more of a sitting move. I know we talked about that in video number one, is that we don't want to have any downward head movement. What she does here is she's gonna sit into her right side. That's going to start her golf swing.
From a face on perspective, you're gonna see that she sits. You see the movement of her tush going through that line, now you can see that her head moves downward through that line where it originally started from. Is that a bad thing? No, it's not a bad thing because again, what we're trying to do in our golf swing, our main goal for consistency is to make sure that we keep our head quiet, yes, number one. But number two, we want to maintain the angle to our spine through the takeaway, through the back swing, through the down swing and even into the follow through, we want to maintain that spine and go as long as possible. That way, we know that our hands and arms are getting lined back up at the bottom of the swing arc, which in turn is going to allow us to get good, consistent contact round after round.
Of course, there are other variables that are involved with consistent ball striking, and we're gonna get into that later this week when we start to release video number two. The important thing is is that this downward movement, yes it's increasing her spine angle a little bit, but she maintains the tush line throughout the golf swing. She's gonna actually keep her spine in check the entire swing now, so she can see that she maintains the angle to her spine all the way to the top. Then in the downward half here, you're gonna see her head stays right in that same position to where she started. You see how her hips are still back against this line. Absolutely critical for consistent ball striking is making sure you maintain the angle to your spine. That was really the main purpose about talking about head movement, is head movement is one of those things that can have your center, your spine moving all over the place. Then again, it makes it very difficult for you to get the bottom of the swing arc in the same spot every single time.
Let's go ahead and look at this from a face on perspective. You're gonna see that little gap between the right hip line gets nice and filled in there. Then she's only shifting off the golf ball maybe an inch, inch and a half or so with her head. You see her head made that downward move, just a slight one, just to get loaded into her right leg. Then she's made her head move laterally about an inch, inch and a half or so. Again, so why is it okay for our head to move an inch, inch and a half or so off the golf ball? I showed you in video one, if you don't allow your head to move and you're going to try to rotate around your axis, you're gonna try to rotate your shoulders, chances are you're gonna see that your spine will lean more towards the target which is dangerous, dangerous, dangerous.
You can see here at the top of her swing, she's been able to maintain axis tilt which is absolutely critical for safety in the golf swing and also allows you to rotate around your axis without starting to compress your lower vertebrae and gets you into a loaded, powerful position. That's basically it, that's the run down of this week's review. She does make a sitting move into her right leg so she's gonna have a little downward movement of her head. But she does keep her hips back, she does load her right side beautifully here. You can see that she keeps that leg flexed, much like we talked about in video number one.
I hope you guys are out there working really hard through video number one. Again, we are going to be focusing in on video number two, releasing tension in the hands and the arms, just like you see Lydia here when she starts to release this club, you can see that she carries very little tension in the wrists and the forearms so that she can allow them to release, roll over the top of one another and extend down the target line beautifully. That's what we're going to be working on in video number two guys. I hope you had some great success with your reps. Let me know if you have any questions or comments below and I will certainly help you out along the way. We will talk to you guys later in the week.
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Chris (Certified RST Instructor)
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