How To Stop Rushing the Golf Downswing: Tricks | Weight Shift

Hey, guys. I’m Chuck Quinton, Founder of rotaryswing.com, the most successful online teaching system on the planet, and I want to talk to you about something that’s an extremely common and extremely frustrating problem if you have this. That is, rushing the downswing from the top. How many of you go to the top and the first thing you think is, “I want to kill that ball?” Even if you tell yourself, “No, I don’t want to kill it. It didn’t do anything to me. I just want to be gentle and slow,” you still rush from the top and you have this huge hit impulse, and you cannot figure out how to break it. I’m going to tell you in this video exactly what’s causing that and how you can fix it, so stay tuned.

In this first part of the downswing, what tends to happen is your body is going to use what you give it to sequence the downswing, and what that typically is, is tension. Your brain uses tension in your muscles to know what muscles to fire in which sequence, and so that’s a huge part of what Rotary Swing is all about. Is we teach you to load your muscles in the proper sequence in the golf swing and that’s how we walk you through in the RST Five Step System. So as you go through, you take step one. We learn how to do this part correctly. Then this part, and we stack these pieces on correctly, so that you learn the golf swing in the proper sequence, so that you don’t ever have this hit instinct anymore.

What causes the hit instinct in almost every amateur golfer on the planet is too much tension in their dominant or trailing arm. This is in most cases, the right arm, for right-handed golfers. Most golfers, being right hand dominant, they go to the top, and the first thing they want to do is fire with this right arm. It’s in a position where it’s loaded, it’s got leverage, because you’ve elevated your arm at your shoulder. You’ve bent your arm at your elbow, and you’ve got angle in your wrist, and all of these things are potential energy sources for you in the swing, and because you’re right-handed, you want to use them. So the trick is to learn the swing in the proper sequence.

The reality is, your right hand, the right side of your body for right-handed golfers is important, but it’s not the primary star of the show. It’s there to help add power to the golf swing, and in a lot of ways, it passively adds power to the swing, because by the sheer fact that it’s connected to the club and your torso, is you begin unwinding your hips in the proper sequence, as we show you in the RSD Five Step System, what happens is, the arm is transferring energy to the club just by the sheer fact that it’s attached to it. You don’t have to actively throw the arm from the top.

The trick is understanding how to load up correctly and that is, think about it this way. What muscles do you want to fire first in the downswing? That’s the key. You’ve got to think about the way the Rotary Swing does, and we think about everything from a very logical standpoint, a very scientific standpoint, so if we want to unload our lower body correctly, you’ve all heard that a million times, right? “Your swing starts from the ground up.” Well, then you need to load those muscles that you want to fire first in the downswing, you need to load them first in the backswing. It seems commonsensical, right?

So if you didn’t want to load your right arm up to get rid of this hit impulse, the last thing you’d want to do is snatch the club back with your right wrist and pick your right arm up, because all I’ve told my body is, “This shoulder girdle is really tight, my arm’s really tight, my wrist muscle, forearm muscle’s really tight. So let’s use them to fire the downswing.” You’ll never, ever get rid of your hit instinct and have a proper, smooth, effortless transition in your golf swing until you start loading the proper muscles.

The first thing that you’ve got to understand, this is what we cover first in the RST Five Step System, is you must shift your weight. Every hitting and throwing athletic motion in the world involves weight transfer from the back leg to the forward leg. It’s the most efficient way that we’ve found to propel an object with our arm. Transferring energy from our trunk. So if you’re not shifting your weight and you’ve got the idea that this is the ideal way to swing, you’re going to have a really hard time getting your body to sequence correctly, because you’re telling it right from the beginning, “I don’t want to shift my weight.”

You don’t shift your weight, you don’t give your arms the chance to fall from the top of the swing, which is again, a critical part of sequencing things, is that if I want my arms to shallow out my golf swing plane. Of course, we all want a proper swing plane coming down, right. Instead of this motion, where it’s very right side dominant and you’re taking your right arm, and pitching the attitude of the shaft this way to come over the top. We all know, we see the tour pros and guys like myself, we let the club shallow out and that’s all done by reducing tension in this right side, and allowing my arms to stay soft while shifting my weight.

That is what drops the club down, so there is no hit instinct in Rotary Swing, because you’re going to learn as you go through the Five Step System, how to load your body correctly first. You’re going to load your glutes, your hamstrings, your quads, your core first, because that’s what you want to fire first. So I want you to take a look at this preview of this next upcoming video I’ve got. If you’ve liked what I’ve had to say so far, I’m going to give you a little preview of some of the Five Step System Videos, so that you can start to understand just how different the approach to a golf swing, Rotary Swing really is.

Okay. You’ve made it through the first videos. We’ve got weight shift in our golf swing, which is a huge help in the swing. It helps everything sequence correctly. Now you’ve got rotation. The whole core of the rotation, which is really, the golf swing. If you rotate correctly, the rest of it’s really easy. So if you’ve gotten these first two videos, and you’re doing these drills, and you’re doing them properly, everything’s starting to go really, really well on your golf swing, and it should be. Make sure you’re doing these drills in sequence.

So now the third video is getting this lead arm and we’ve talked a lot about the lead arm in other videos, so I’m not going to go in detail about it, or how important it is to work with the lead arm, but we’re going to get this guy to start working with the other drill. We’re stacking things. We’re making these drills progressive. We’re adding new components to them. So still shifting our weight, now we’re turning, and we’re using our hips to unwind. We’re going to get our left arm to play nicely with this stuff. If you’re left-handed, obviously, this is going to be your right arm.

So lead arm, I’m going to shift my weight. I’m going to turn to the top. And now, I’m going to try and leave my arm up here. I don’t need it. I don’t even have a club. Forget golf for a second. Just leave it up here. I’m going to shift my weight back to the left, post up, and look where my hand is. I didn’t try to move my hand down here at all. In fact, I tried to leave it up here. This is the key to understanding how you power the swing efficiently and how you get the club to come down on plane, and do you get the club to come on path, and how you get the club to square. All of these things that you struggle with your whole life, swinging over the top, et cetera, is all fixed by doing these moves in this sequence.