Pro Secret #3 - Swing Easy, Hit Hard

Learn how pros like Ernie Els use physics and leverage to swing easy and hit it hard!

Swing easy and hit it hard. It's been the RotarySwing mantra since I founded rotaryswing.com back in 2005, I'm all about hitting the ball as far as I can, while putting as little effort into it as humanly possible. And in today's free golf lesson, you're going to see a student start to experience that for himself and see how you can take this into your golf game. You're going to learn some things you've probably never heard before. So make sure you stay all the way then to the end of the video, where I'm going to talk about some really important concepts and you're going to watch just how amazing and how quick you can produce club head speed. Just watch the student here. I'm going to show you a highlight of what you're going to see toward the end of this video. Make your hands travel on a really wide circle. Feels a little goofy right now. Let your hands drop and get close to your thighs and move them in a tighter circle. Yeah, very good. So you can, you can hear the difference right now, burn this image in your head. So you know what it's going to feel like for you to learn how to hit the ball effortlessly, farther than you ever had before. Check it out.

Your hips are definitely getting very open. It looks like, yeah, your shoulders popping up pretty hard, pretty early your right shoulder. And that's causing a little bit in the foot because basically at some point you run out of stuff to move. And so you can see right here, not bad, but there's a little bit of a flip in there. And it's really because you're rotating so much so soon, like your right shoulder, you were ripping out from under your chin very early, and that helps you get your hips very open. But if it happens too soon, you run out of rotation. So let me, let me look at down the line real quick and I'll explain what that means.

Yeah. All right. It's definitely kind of weird follow through as well. This is just a sequencing, like a timing thing. Okay. W you can swing really fast. And I can tell that you've been trying to like, get as much as you can out of your swing, you know, you're going for it, which is great. But the true mastery of the golf swing is to move as slowly as you can, while swinging as fast as you can. Right? And right now you're swinging fast and your body's moving fast and you need to understand that to really be efficient and to get everything, to kind of dial up the right efficiency level at every level of the swing, you have to actually kind of calm some things down and you'll actually swim faster. And that's the hardest thing in golf to understand. It really is because it's a very complex machine.

When you think about all the forces are going, we have rotational forces right. Coming from our hips. Our legs can generate rotation. Our shoulders to generate rotation or core could generate rotation. And all of those things have to happen in the swing, but they have to happen in sequence and same thing. Now you've got rotation creating speed, and then you've got your arms that can do a lot. Right. And when all, and getting all of those things too, to interlock together perfectly is the secret to what the pros do really well. Okay. And the one thing that you undoubtedly know about professional golf is it, when you watch them swing, what, what does it look like?

Effortless? That's it right? That's the trick. That's the secret to it? Amateurs tend to swing, especially at a really high level, better amateur golfers, like yourself who are good. Now you've got a good golf swing, but taking that secret step over like the boundary line to understanding what it's really like to be able to be truly efficient and consistent, because those two go hand in hand, you know, if you're a swinging hard on every swing, it's hard to be consistent because you're just maxing out every shot. Right? So, so you have to understand that we've got to get, like some of these pieces are interlocking and some of them are kind of out in the fray and just interlocking a couple of these little things together, leads to huge boosts and speed without any effort. And that's the secret, right? So in your case, what I was saying is that you're stalling out, but you're not stalling out because you're stopping you're stalling out because you're running out of places to go.

You don't have any more rotation available to you. Right? Right. If you start down and take your lead shoulder and start rotating the right away, by the time you get to impact, there's nowhere else for you to go, right? And so of course your arms and hands flip over, because the only thing left that you have, okay. And that's the trick to what's going on with what your swing is, mechanically, all those things. It's, it's such a subtle, fine thing to do this, but here's, what's really has to happen. You have to feel like that first half of the swing in your mind is waiting and it's letting your arms drop back down to get the club shallowed out. And that connects all these pieces back together. Right? When we take it back swing, like it's set up. Everything's, it's all glued together. Cause we haven't started separating any of these joints.

Right. And then as we make that back. So when we think of it like a zipper on your jacket, as you make a backs where you start to unzip all this stuff, cause it's all getting stretched out and pulled in all these different directions and they're moving in different angles, all of this different stuff that's happening, right. And as you pull them apart and all of these pieces are disconnected, what you do in the downswing as you move these disconnected pieces as fast as we can. No, that totally makes sense. And instead we need that transition to do this and then we move it. Does that make sense? No, that makes total sense. So I realize it's a little what's that? So that's a lot what it feels like it's hard to put into words, but that's definitely what I feel like. It's all your art, right?

Yeah. Very hard to articulate this. So, but what, what has to happen is you have to feel it and you have to experience it, but you have to understand it first. You have to understand that runs it being ourselves. And we've got to zip ourselves back together. And then once they're all zipped together, everything can move together. Otherwise you've got a jacket that's moving in two different places because it sends it. So to feel that, and it's going to feel strange at first, but you're, as you go out, what you need to do is this part needs to wait. You need to feel that your arms can drop back down because this is part of zipping, everything. This is very unzipped and this is getting zipped back together. Right? So as you start down, it's not here. And then turn because you'll, you'll, you'll, you'll run out of term.

At some point you can only turn so far and you're turning as hard as you can go. Okay. So now instead, you've got to wait for everything to kind of sink back up and get zipped back together. And then once you're in here, then you can release and get everything through the ball, but you can't do that while everything's owns it. So I want you to feel that as you start down that you you're slow from the top. Essentially. Now slow is very relative. I don't, I don't like that word because it's not really sloughed. What's happening quick, but it's giving your arms back in sync with your body is key. If your arms lag way behind your body, cause you're turning as fast as you can. As early as you can from the top, then your arms are unzipped the whole way to impact.

And then they just pull you through and flip over that first little transition move is the key. If you can, back in the day, I know you've been playing off awhile. I've been playing off way too long, but I was like years and years, like 20 years ago, people used to teach the swing where you would kind of go back and they would pick the club up and then you would drop it in and wait, reset your arms and then try to turn through and stuff that, yeah, that was crazy. Cause it didn't work. But the idea that I think that those instructors back in the day, the old school AB stuff, and I was learning, we're trying to put this puzzle together in a way that what they observe happening, but they did, they did it in a way that was very unnatural. Nobody's going to like be able to reroute the club like this.

Right. It's a pancake. And he spent all that time with Charles Barkley trying to do it. Doesn't work. You can't do that, but that's kind of like what you're going to feel. Okay. So like in my swing, for example, when I had to go to the top, I have a tendency to swing really hard and fast because I can. And so I, and I like it. I like to swing really fast. And so I always tell myself to like swing and slow as I can because I'm not trying to, I'm actually trying to slow my swing speed down so that I have more control because my tendency is to swing as fast as I can every time, because it feels awesome. Right. But I can't always guarantee where that's going. So, so what I do in my own swing, and again, this is more of a feeling it's not a mechanical thing.

We're just trying to re zip that jacket back up. Cause I go to the top, but I just feel like I do this. Now this in and of itself does not work. That's stupid. You can't just drop your arms. That's what I feel. But of course I already know that my hips are moving my way to shifting. I'm starting to turn. So my feel and real are very different, but that's what I have to put in my brain that I just have to wait, just wait, wait, wait, wait. Once my arms get down here and I let gravity and a little bit of muscular effort, bring them down. I release the club and everything is all sinked back up. And I can get through the ball very easily and effortlessly, but it feels in my own head and I've measured this. And in fact I was doing it this weekend with a launch monitor and out on the range with a laser range finder.

If I swung what I felt like was like, you know, 85, 90% capacity, my eight iron was going like 180 5, but this is like 3000 feet altitude. Okay. So any range balls though. So as a trade-off, but, but my normal eight RNs C-level is like 1 75. So it was probably a 10 year gap distance. Right. But I swung slow when I felt slow and just waited on everything to sync back up. You can get everything glued together and it felt so much more effortless and it felt like I wasn't gonna hit the ball far. I did all the exact same distance and my good really, really good one for, I just, none of it perfectly would go maybe one 90 at that altitude. So the point is that I felt like two completely different golfers, more than I felt like I was like, what? You just looked at you and I'm going at him swing and everything.

I'm having a hard time keeping it balanced. It feels really quick and fast. And then one feels like I'm just waiting and then let the club rip out of the bottom. And the ball goes the exact same distance. Okay. So you have to think about in terms of a feel, but the only way to really experience this is to go out on the range and see balls. You hit balls the way that you normally do, and then kind of let everything sink up and wait and feel like your arms. As you come down to start to kind of drop back down here to get that this is part of zipping up your coat, right? You're getting everything back connected to your body and just this little bit of connection as you start to come through, help start moving your arms together and seek with your body and allows you to apply force together.

It's kind of like if you're throwing a punch like this waiting for a second and letting your body move your arm and throwing a punch, that makes total sense. So I don't know a better way to describe it, but that's the best I can do. No, that's good. I definitely feel like that. My swing, like, like you're saying like on the way through, it's like, everything's kind of doing its own thing. I'm just trying to do my best to get it back without like you're saying like have it work together, like, like a zipped up jacket. So that's definitely, I totally feel that my swing. Okay, good. And so you can see that, right? Like you start turning right away and it's just to school. It's just a little bit out of sync and you've got to wait just a second. Be patient. The thing you got to realize about the golf club is that it's a lever, right?

It's a really long tool. And so much of what most golfers try to do. And there's a balance to this stuff. You have to use your body to provide power, but then you don't want to overuse your body. Right? You're really overusing that rotation, that initial rotation to try and accelerate the club. And you can do that, but it's just inefficient. So when you start thinking about what really needs to happen, that call had just needs to move quickly and to move quickly, doesn't mean, you know, swing like Bryson, just Shambo, right? Like he's an extreme outlier, but you look at the, the loop Donald's of the world and you know, the guys do sweet and fast, but don't look like they're wailing on it and can play at a high level. They're just trying to get that club to move fast at the last second.

When you think about moving quickly, we're getting the club to move quickly. It doesn't take a ton of brute force. That's my point to it, right? Like we're not hitting a baseball, we're not swinging a baseball bat. This thing is very light and the golf balls very light. So you need to think about, I don't need to build up all this power from the top of my backstory, because that's what you're doing. You're going to the top of your backswing and then just, just firing everything at once. Right? And well, it feels like a lot of effort and power. It is a lot of effort, but it's not really getting the club to move as quickly as it can cause quickly, really not that much. Right. I mean, you can just sit here and do, and that's pretty quick right now. That's a flip, but it gets you the idea that, okay, well, I don't have to use my body at all to move quick.

And then as I start thinking about what I want to happen down here and I start saying, okay, well I can be really patient all the way to here and just get a little extra momentum. And then the club still moves quickly. Right. Instead of thinking about, oh, I got to swing as hard as I can think about being patient and getting some quickness and some speed instead of trying to move the sledgehammer. Does that make sense? It makes total sense. So let's try a couple of just little practice swings, but just get the feeling of going to the top and just kind of waiting for a second, letting your arms zip back into your body and then got the club come through. Okay. We'll try that one over here. Yeah.

There you go. Second mental tower. There you go. Hmm. Do you want a base on all right. Let's just take a quick look. Gosh, that was way more than I thought it would be. Huh? Well, this is a lot easier when you're actually hitting balls, because then you get to see is the trick to this. W when you're hitting balls, you can actually see the ball go and like, okay. I felt like I swung really slow, but the ball went really far. Really? When you're making practice swings, it's never going. You're not going to believe it. You're not going to be like, okay, that's really going to get me the distance that I need. So this is one of those ones where you definitely want to be out there in balls.

So we have a club shallowing out pretty here and it's coming down from the inside, but I'll explain a couple other things of why this all makes sense in a minute, but this is the idea. Like you actually actually have more of a normal follow through there because you're swinging the club through anymore. Right? You look more balanced. You look more you know, under control. Now, obviously these are slower swing, but you can see it as a club shallows out really well here. And then you get this nice little zip, the speed. So it felt like shoulder to opening up a little bit there, but it's better like before that right shoulder was just, you're pulling the hard up under your chin as fast as you could. Okay. So that's closer. Now, let me talk about a couple things really quickly to help you understand why this produced the speed, but yet it feels like you're swinging slow.

There are two things that in the swing that help produce speed effortlessly down in the hitting area. And the first one is this idea of your hands in the club that traveling and concentric circles and all that means it's just, you know, your hands are traveling on a smaller circle than the club editor, right? It's going on a bigger circle right now. If your hands were traveling really close around your leg, right? Like super close. It's a really small circle, right? The club head, when it's being moved in this small circle, your hands move in small circle versus your hands moving in a big circle that forces the club to accelerate. Right? Okay. It has to keep up with your hands. They're traveling on, on circles that are concentric, but one small one's big. It's the same concept as the merry-go-round right? If your kid's in the middle of the merry-go-round, you don't have to be going that fast.

But because the outside of the merry-go-round is a test, just like the club has detached via the shaft. Your hands in the outside goes really fast, but you can be really efficient as always those, those circles that your hands are traveling on is relatively small to make that circle small versus, you know, making this big. And if you swing like this and you just feel this actually just hop up and do this while I'm telling you, make your hands travel on a really wide circle, feels a little goofy right now, let your hands drop and get close to your thighs and move them in a tighter circle.

Yeah, there you go. So you, you can hear the difference, right? So that's the idea of concentric circles. Now, when your hands shallow out, instead of start going, you instead of your hands, getting pulled out toward the ball, making your hands, travel on this bigger art, where they shallow out and they get zipped back up to your body and they travel on this narrow circle. That's why you feel like you're not swinging very fast, but the call goes fast. It's a physics principle, right? Versus you having this big wide arc of your hands, that takes a lot more physical force. So that's number one. Number two is this idea of parametric acceleration, where essentially as the club is going down, if you could somehow pull up on the handle at the time that you wanted the club and go down, you would cause this angle that's in your wrist to release faster.

Okay? So this versus just pulling the handle through, you know, on a straight line, this couple of the club to bottom out and release quicker, those two things together happen when you swim correctly. And that's why pros and guys like myself who hit the ball a long ways, but don't swing very hard doing it. You can't see it cause it's happening in this little space. It's very hard to really realize how powerful that is. But that's why I really feel like I wait and let my hands drop and I'm patient. And then I use that concentric circle to speed up the club. But I also, this is why you can't run out of pulling from the shoulder. If it's too soon, then you've already started to release the club and the club just getting flipped through. But what I'm trying to do is I'm waiting, getting my hands down here.

And then as my shoulder starts to go up, that's my left hand pulling against the butt of the club. This motion takes my hands from down here by my knee, up to my mid thigh that is traveling on an arc up as that opening. That's forcing the club to go down and do it faster last second. So that's not like, well, I'm doing this immediately. Okay. Yeah, exactly. So this is happening super late and not really something that you need to try and create, but you need to understand why this works, right? Why can you swing slower and hit the ball or, you know, your body and everything be like you're swinging slower. You have to club goes faster. It's more efficient. And that's the secret to this stuff is understanding some of these really simple, but hard to understand, hard to see physics principles.

Like, you know, if your hand path is just a little bit in versus being out here, like it's hard to see that on camera. It's hard to know. Does that really make that much of a difference, but you can feel it. You can S you can feel how the club moves through when you, you know, if you keep trying to push your hands and throw on a straight line, there's no power in this. I need this angle to be released, but I also don't want to try and time that and push against the shaft. How do I get that to release automatically on its own? Well, my wrists have to be soft and I have to go up right. As my leg goes up, my shoulder goes up, it pulls the butter of the club up, which pork versus the head down. Oh, okay. That makes a lot of sense.

Yeah. The video on the site, where you had like a whole full thing that you made, where you, you made a big circle and the little ball or something was going everywhere, but you made a real tight circle. It was getting flung around really fast. That makes sense. Well, that's the simplest way of, I mean, that's oversimplification of the golf suit, but that's what you want to try and emulate, right. Is how can you move as slow and efficient as possible and get this club head to move quickly. And that's really what we're trying to do. So do you think just moving forward, do you think the best way to practice is, is like on the range and just video it? Or what do you think? Yeah. Well, this is more of a, you know, your swing itself, mechanically is fine. What you need to do is develop the feel of the sequencing of zipping your jacket back up.

You need to practice feeling, waiting, being patient. I hate that word waiting, cause it's not really what's happening. It's just letting everything sync back up, getting your arms back, you know, more connected to the, the rotation and the movement. The body's trying to create getting the hands closer to your body versus having them way out here. You know, if you watch the app, next time you go to the range, just look down the range and watch like the worst hitters, right? There'll be no shortage of them. And what you'll find the guys who hit the worst and the shortest have this big arc to the club. They cast the club at the top and their hands also get as wide and far away from their body, as soon as you really possible, because they're extending this right arm because that's the only way that they know how to produce power, right?

So they make their hands, travel on this arm is why does they can, and then they have to scoop and chicken wing at the bottom, right? That will be the worst golfer out there. And he'll be sweet as hard as you can. And the ball would just go absolutely nowhere. Right? And then you'll watch somebody like me who looks really boring. And my hands are really narrow and close. Cause I get, I'm trying to use these concentric circles and you, and as I'm using parametric, acceleration is happening in, you know, hundreds of a second. You can't see it. That's that's the secret to this stuff is using those physics to accelerate the club without your body having to work so hard for it. Yeah. Total sense, man. Cause I think I told you before, but I had surgery on his shoulder from golf on the road every time if I go after it.

And then, you know, I start getting wider here. It starts hurting my shoulder and my crap, I might miss far and I go faster and then faster. It really starts wearing that shoulder. Both that little short zip at the bottom, but I don't like any, anything on the shoulder, which is really good. It's exactly right. But you, you, you hit the problem in golf on the head when we start hitting it. Not as well, we start getting more out of sequence because we start trying to swing and faster and harder earlier when I go, well, I need to swing harder. I need, I need more time. I need to do it harder, sooner. Right?

If the ball decently far, far from me, and if I had like my seven iron and I hit it bad, like a par three and it goes like one 60 or something, I'm like, oh shoot, I can't with like a weenie on here. Do you, I gotta step it up. We'll let you know. And then just like you're saying, it keeps getting worse and worse. It's the worst problem in the world that happened. The true answer to it is sequencing. It's, it's actually being swinging slower, being more patient. You know, you watch guys on the range who were really, really efficient ball, strikers written, you know, tour players who were really efficient ball strikers. And they look like they're swinging so slow from the top, right? There's no hurry. Or there is a great example of somebody who had the ball polit the far, but he moved quick, but he really leveraged, you know, his build and the way that he swung the club as much as possible.

And I have really great old footage of tiger or a Verde because one of my old teaching pros used to he's from South Africa as well. And he knew learning. I used to play with them and tremor around. So I have great old footage of these guys and the way that they swing and being up close to them in person and watching how smooth and elegant these guys were, half the distance they got is radically different than how you see everybody else on the planet swing. Right? And so when you start realizing like almost all the tour pros look like they're barely moving and almost all amateurs look like they're moving as fast as they can. The disparity in ball striking abilities, vastly different. You have to look underneath the covers a little bit and understand like some of these physics things and, and the sequencing and the mechanics of what's going on.

It's not about swinging harder. It's truly about swinging more efficient. And when you get that and you understand these simple little things you realize, gosh, I can swing. What to me feels really slow from the top and hit the ball the same distance or, or further than I am now. Yeah, you're totally right, man. I'm sorry to bother you. Just the last thing is is the tush line look okay. And everything I've really been working on that too. It looks great. Yeah. I guess the problem is that you're, you're just running out of rotation, right? Like, like people who are gonna use a little bit of right arm for us in the swing, again, that can't happen early is now you've got nothing left to hit with the people, the golfers who use a bit more right arm in their swing, their right arms tend to stay really close to their hip until very late, right.

Need that right arm to be able to hit with and extend and jam for us to club that line. But if you do that too soon, you run out a right arm. You're just running out of rotation. So that can make you lose your posture a little bit more because at some point, once you really rotate yourself, you have to come out of your posture. It's like reading a towel, you're just making everything shorter. So you're originally going to come out of it. And so you may see it, you losing your posture a little bit, but that's just because you were rotating way too hard too soon. Gotcha. Okay. And we'll thank you for taking the time and that really like, I couldn't put it into words, but that makes a ton of sense to me. So thank you. Yeah. You bet. Let me know how it works out. Yeah, man. I'll hopefully be back in a little while and I can update you on how it's going. So I to go out there and swing easy, but hit it hard. They're all strong, man. You have a good one. Okay. All right. Got it. You too. Thanks.