Should You Try and Keep Your Head Still in the Golf Swing?
Ahh, the dreaded slice. It’s a lot like slow play – ruins the game. The slice is an easy fix that seems impossible to cure until you understand the cause. Once you understand the cause, the cure comes swiftly and I’m going to share with you the cause you’ve never heard before that will instantly stop you swinging over the top.
The most common cause of the slice happens when you try to power the downswing with the arms and shoulders. This is the simplest way of thinking about it. What you must realize is that your arms and shoulders don’t really do much in the golf swing, in fact, the more relaxed they are the faster and more on plane you will swing.
But, if you don’t use your arms and shoulders, then what powers the downswing? It’s not just one thing, there are hundreds of muscles involved so trying to break it down muscle by muscle won’t do you much good.
Instead, it’s easier to have a big picture of what you want to do to produce speed in your swing and the rest will start to fall into place. That’s because of the fact that HOW you produce speed IS your golf swing. And until you understand how to produce speed correctly, you’ll always struggle with the same over the top move over and over.
So, how do you produce speed? The simplest way of thinking about it is that you want to swing in a way that allows you to snap your wrists. The release of the wrists is where about ⅔’s of your swing speed comes from and most golfers never get the proper feeling of how to use them to produce effortless speed. That’s why you try to muscle the club with the arms and shoulders.
While this feels powerful because it requires more physical effort, it’s slower and leads to all the common swing faults – over the top slice, chicken wing, flipping, fat shots – that plague most golfers. Snapping the wrists feels effortless because in order for them to snap, tension must be low in the arms and shoulders – the opposite of what you’re likely feeling now.
However, you won’t simply “stumble” upon this feeling of how to snap your wrists unless you do the exact opposite with what you’ve been told to do with your head in the golf swing. If you’re like most golfers, you’ve been taught or heard you should keep your head still in the swing.
Nothing could be further from the truth or more damaging to your golf swing than this piece of advice. The reality is that your head is an active part of the golf swing and one of the most important parts of your body that you MOVE in the swing if you want effortless power.
That’s because the head is both very heavy and very far away from the clubhead. This gives it a tremendous amount of leverage on the body and club that can not only turn your entire body into a powerful lever to create force, but it also acts as an active braking mechanism to slow the forward momentum of the hands DOWN!
What?! You’re telling me to SLOW my hands down? That’s blasphemy!
Well, keep trying to move them back to the ball as fast as you can and see how that works out for you! There’s a reason I swing at 125 mph at only 5’9” and nearly 50 years old and it’s NOT because I’m working hard to do it. Quite the opposite.
I’m using my head to SLOW my hands down and act as a cantilever against my entire body to turn it into a giant lever and this allows me to swing with effortless speed. And guess what, it’s what ALL powerful golfers do in their swings!
It’s a lot like snapping a towel. The visual of snapping a towel will help you stop driving your body through the ball and instead allow the club to RELEASE through the ball effortlessly with tremendous speed. Just like in snapping a towel, you want the feeling that your hands are pulling BACK against the club but you can’t simply do this with your hands like you would snapping a towel due to the momentum of the club.
So, how do you create this snapping feeling? With your head of course!
Yep, your head is the cantilever to the club head in the swing and by feeling that you are moving the head back away from the clubhead will slow the forward momentum of the arms and hands enough to snap the wrists for truly effortless speed. It creates a true “pendulum” effect in the swing that allows the arms to stay relaxed while generating tons of speed.
This is how golfers like Tiger Woods, Rory McIlroy, Kyle Berkshire and others create tremendous speed while not looking like they’re working hard to do it. The GOATs were the best at making the golf swing look easy and that’s largely due to how they released the club. And once you feel it for the first time, you’ll never go back to your old “muscled” swing because you’ll hit the ball much farther with far less effort by simply learning how to snap your wrists – with your head!
This is much easier to explain in video than in text, so I’ve prepared a video that walks you through the basics of this concept that you can view here. Take a look at the video below to understand why the old advice of keeping your head STILL is the worst advice for your swing if you want to stop slicing. If you want effortless power, you’ve got to learn how to use your head to your advantage and start MOVING it correctly in the swing.
Watch the next part of this video series on active head movement in the swing to learn how to hit your longest drives literally this week!
https://rotaryswing.com/lp/stop-holding-your-head-still-in-the-golf-swing/
