Should You Restrict Your Hip Turn in the Backswing?

For years, you've been taught to restrict the hips in the backswing. Is that what's best for your swing and your body? Find out how the pros actually move their hips in this Live Lesson.

so what's going on tell me a little about your game how can i help you well hi jack really nice to meet you and um thanks for the time today yeah and uh yeah i joined rotary swing learning a lot so that's been awesome and um so yeah i've played the game for a long time and i played a little bit in college and um don't play as much now with kids and stuff but um i just suffering from some pouring consistency and would love to kind of shore up some fundamentals so um sure that's why i sought you out all right cool well tell me a little about your ball striking what's going on when you're inconsistent yeah um you know sometimes i hit it okay but just i've noticed the shot dispersions getting wider and wider and um i'm getting fat and um a lot of pull hooks some heel shots and then i can hit push slices as well so when i get over the ball i it's a it could be a hundred yard you know dispersion it just sort of depends that's pretty tough to play with all right let's um you got a place you can make some swings back there and we can record them and see what's going on or yeah yeah okay perfect well why don't we start there i'll uh i'll record a and can you do one face on just a practice swing you don't have to hit a ball if you don't want okay you got a great golf swing that's got to be really frustrating to have uh have a swing that looks that good and hits those kind of gets those kind of results well it's a very beguiling sport yeah it is deceiving well the good thing is it's it's rarely as hard as we we tend to make it out to be we just got to figure out what's going on but uh so let's take a look here setup looks pretty good lower body is not doing its job so the great thing is your arms and shoulders and all of that stuff positions and mechanics and plane and all that stuff is great what what's missing here is being able to use your lower body enough right here you get a little bit steep and so the club's getting out in front of you a little bit and this is where you're going to start to see the ball you have a wonderful release but the ball is going to start to be able to kind of go both directions a little bit so but this is pretty simple actually this is really just your lower body not leading enough in the downswing which means it's not loaded up enough in the backswing okay one more look so this is going to be you're going to be really really easy to get going in the right direction here because right now your arms yeah just get a little deep there again a wonderful release but your your lower body is just kind of taking a little bit of a nap and a good way to check this when you're practicing is kind of use this area back here your tush line will help you understand when you start to kind of get off a little bit with the arms it's a really good gauge so if you start to come off of it pretty early in the downswing this is indicative of somebody firing their arms from the top and you're starting to move away and you're losing it about halfway okay it's not bad at all you actually got a really really good swing but what we need to do let me just take one quick look face on stance width is just a hair wide for an iron okay here here's the issue okay watch your left leg it just kind of slides it doesn't really do much it's left knee is a little soft you're pushing quite a bit off the right which is okay because you're not losing the tush line too badly but the left leg is not getting posted up and out of the way which means it's not working enough in the downswing that's why you're not shallowing out you have a little tiny bit too much from the right so let me show you how we're going to fix all this stuff because you actually you're going to be really easy all right so when you come down there's basically there's three different ways that your legs work in the downswing right you can move laterally by pushing off the right which you do and that's why you're you see your foot coming up off the ground a little bit early and you're and you're losing the tush line just a tiny bit yeah the second way is that you rotate right so we move we turn our hips and the third way is that we move up and down right and so you're kind of lacking the second two you have great lateral movement you're shifting really well but when you're shifting and not turning from this left side and not pushing up into the ground off the left side the left hip won't move back enough and so what you're going to do you're losing a lot of power there what you'll notice in every single powerful ball striker on the planet they will all tend to decelerate by pushing this left foot into the ground and create a tremendous amount of force off the ground on this left side if we looked at yours you kind of have the this it's very subtle the old school kind of softer knee it's not really posting up which would be pushing the hip back and that that pushing the hip back does two things it rotates the hips with some speed right if you do this quickly with your left leg you're going to get some speed so then you can take some of the speed out from your arms your arms don't have to work as hard when this left hip is is replacing that speed so that helps a lot there because then your arms don't have to get you know as i was saying you're getting just a little bit steep a little bit tiny bit over the top of the plane coming down and then that's where you're seeing the ball going to want to go both ways that's just because again you're trying to use your arms for power a little bit too much too soon in the swing we replace that by getting that left hip to work that left hip is posting up going this way moving your hip back but also where you're going to start getting more power is pushing up and getting that vertical force out of your legs and so what we got to do to get that stuff to work is get that trained in your brain that right off the ball i want you to think of it this way by the time your left arm is parallel to the ground in the backswing you should have maximum amount of weight and pressure shift on your right leg done and be getting ready to go back to the left already this is the important one by the time your left arm is parallel to the ground in the downswing you should have maximum pressure in the left leg and right now yours is still kind of just going and it's not really it's not turning and it's not pushing okay they're not pushing up off the left so it's just you wouldn't see like if you're measuring yourself on a force plate you wouldn't see a big spike in this left side pressure by the time your left arm is parallel to the ground it's just kind of slowly going over gradually we want that pressure spike so that you're getting ready to jump and push into that ground hard so what you want to think about by the time your left arm is parallel to the ground but i want you to try and double your body weight and how much you're pushing into this left foot when you do that you're going to feel a lot more activation in your legs so that your legs wake up in the swing because right now the right side's working but the left side's not and so we're going to start to really feel a big exaggeration in the left leg where it's not only pushing up but pushing the left hip back does that make sense it does completely yeah i've heard you talk about in videos where you really want to stomp down the left leg to wake it up and i could see how that could be something i need to do yeah so as we start getting this to work then we can start taking your arms a little bit more out of it at the top of the swing because that's going to still get you a little bit steep your right arm gets a little bit away from at the top you can totally play from there but it's a tendency when the right arm gets away that you want to then fire it because you're loading up this arm to be able to push coming down so all we want to do we'll worry about that kind of stuff later that's just more of a fine-tuning thing but i do want you to start to feel immediately off the ball that you're starting to learn to turn and use your feet and feel your feet pushing into the ground especially like even off the backswing to start to get loaded up early enough you can use a little push off the left to start helping you load up your legs and wake up this left side so that when you start down as during that transition that this side's already got some activation in it and it's ready to really pounce into the ground coming down so what we're going to do it first is i want you just to get loaded up more with your legs going back like immediately off the ball you're trying to turn and shift and load your hips going back so that you're ready to really stomp that left foot by the time this left arm is parallel in the downswing it's really loaded up and then we're going to work on getting it posted up going back so we're going to go back and work on getting this transition move to feel like you've increased like double the pressure on your left leg during the transition let's take a look see what we can feel like that okay i'm going to have you practice that all right so show me during the backswing i want you to show me your your hips and your legs way more loaded up immediately off the ball and then i want to show i want you to show me transition where you're you can you can stop during the transition but i want you to show me like how hard you could push that left foot into the ground okay uh would you like me to do it without a club to start let's do it without a club at first just so we can focus on our lower body okay narrow up your stance just a little bit this will make this a lot easier okay good okay so you're turning your shoulders there in the downswing relax your shoulders and focus just on your hip movement for right now okay you turned your chest quite a bit oh i see i see okay good let your hips turn a little bit more and then your shoulder yep there you go perfect now let's really try and sit into that left leg and create a lot of pressure on it there you go and then push it out of the way turn it but not your shoulder see how your chest is open there okay better good let's take a quick look at that on the next one i'll have you tilt the camera down a little bit so what did that feel like compared to normal uh less shoulders and it felt um yeah a lot more squatting down into the left and um less yeah shoulder rotation and pushing up okay so turn there looks good now one thing you're going to notice is that you're doing what we call a little bit too much of a closed hip slide so your your hips need to begin to turn a little bit earlier so we start creating some of that rotation soon the rotation needs to happen early in the swing in the downswing and then it needs to start decelerating what you're doing is sitting into the left side really well but you don't start turning your hips until late and so that's why your left knee looks like it's not really moving right there you're just kind of sitting into the left glute which is great but the left knee has to move over as well and i'll show you i'll demonstrate this stuff in a second and then as you post up right there is great so that post up move is really powerful we just need a little bit more so now your hips are a lot more open at impact because you've used your legs to open your hips whereas before you were just kind of relying on your right leg to try and open the hips and when you do that you almost always lose the tush line you did a better job than most for sure but you'll still have a tendency to lose that tush line so let's talk about the the sequence a little bit more during that initial part so here's what you did going back you loaded up pretty well and then watch my left knee and hip okay see i'm sitting to the left but my left knee is not moving this is just showing i'm not turning yeah that that initial peak hip rotation happens super early right so as you're starting to shift you're turning your hips pretty quickly and then they're starting to decelerate so what you're really trying to do is turn the hips early while you're shifting over and then your hips start to decelerate and that's where that left leg the way it's going to stop that hip rotation is by pushing up into the ground and pushing the hip back well what you're doing is staying a little bit shut getting a lot of load over here but then turning and instead it's turn and shift and then post up does that make sense totally totally yeah go ahead no i just had the i've heard you talk about this i just had the wrong concept um like i'm trying to stay closed longer and that's but i need to accelerate the hips i track along yeah so you're you stay closed with the shoulder so think about it in terms of the in the sequence the hit you know i'm sure you've heard about the kinematic sequence and all of that stuff the hip rotation is it spikes early and then it slows down really quickly and then the shoulders spike and then the arms and then the club right so you've seen that kind of curve what most people do is they don't get that early hip rotation and so instead they'll either drive hard laterally off the right and so there's not much rotation at all they'll do a closed hip slide and sit in here which is great for loading up this hip but then we won't have time to get the hip out of the way so really what's happening is that that initial hip rotation it starts to decelerate by the time that your left arm is about parallel to the ground and most people think that they keep turning their hips as long as they can as fast as they can but really it's a quick spike it's a quick rotation and now that this is loaded i'm kind of squatted back to square you've heard me talk about where that left arm is parallel to the ground my hips are square i'm no longer trying to like turn my hips like that i'm trying to get ready to jump i'm trying to get ready to post up and even though yes my hip is turning it's getting turned by my left leg pushing into the ground and pushing my hip back rather than me trying to turn my hips does that make sense i track along totally so so that's what i want you to get to feel is that initial hip rotation's quick but then we're decelerating really quick and we're getting ready to post up so let's try that and then this time if you could tilt the camera down a little bit more so i could see your feet okay yeah that's perfect okay so now you turn but now we got to shift as well so get more over to the left more to the left so you're just now we've taken out that lateral move and we've just added rotation we need both even more now so you're turning a little bit too far so think about shifting to the left okay i'll show you here let me let me just quickly run this through you and i'll show you so now we did the opposite we don't have enough lateral okay i'll just show you real quick so you can see and then it'll make a ton of sense and again narrowing your stance while you're practicing this will help quite a bit okay so you see here you're turning and now you're just and you're turning open right so but there's no shift we've got to shift all the way back over here so let me so let me show you what that looks like so you're going back and as that left arm's parallel to the ground that's when you've shifted as much pressure to the right as you're going to shift and you're starting to shift back to the left during that initial phase we're starting to kind of fall downhill into this left side right and loading that and but the hips are also beginning to turn what you did is you took out that initial shift to the left and just turn and so you don't look like you get all the way over there right so we need to fall into that left side because we're still trying to load that glute so that you can jump right so that you can really push into the ground so it's not just this it's sitting in here and turning to get back to square once you get back to square you don't really have to think about that hip rotation speed anymore it's more about loading up that leg and pushing off of it so let's work on the transition to get more weight over to the left side this time during that transition like you were doing before but we just add a little bit of hip rotation okay so go to the transition and stop so show me okay so right there we need more weight onto the left leg so your hip has to shift further to the left but your knee you're just turning your hips too far you're only going to turn back to about square okay better it's closer there now do you feel like you could jump off that left leg at that point yeah there you go good there you go good good do that from down the line for me for real quick and push that left hip back more in the downswing not you don't need to get quite so open there with your hips i want you to think about pushing your left hip back behind you a little bit more you're turning a little too much good so this is the piece that you need now in a second i want you to do this with the club and we're going to start to see how the club is going to shallow out for you but this is the key is that you once you at first you got to just kind of focus on this without a club get your lower body to really wake up because you really need to dramatically increase the force that you're putting into that left leg to recruit enough muscle fiber to make it do anything so i want you to kind of keep focusing on that as you're going through your just initial early hip rotation you have a tendency to kind of get your knee too far out like this yeah be mindful of that the knee just moves back in line with the foot just again the simplest way to think about this is other things that you've done if you were going to jump you wouldn't move your knee out like this right it wouldn't make any sense you're going to get your knee in line with your ankle and your hip so in the downswing we're just trying to do the same thing it doesn't need to go that far we're just trying to move over so that now these are in a line when you're looking at it at the angle that my foot's at they're going to be in line so that i can that's the most powerful position for me to be in and then from there we're just going to start to post up but as you start to do this we'll grab a club and we'll go left arm only and we'll see how that club will start to shallow out for us now when you just focus on your hips so go ahead and grab a club left hand only okay and let's do the same thing and just focus on your lower body but i want i want you to turn down the line for me down the line yeah okay so that's a lot of pulling with your arm relax that arm big time you got to let you got to give your hips time to do their thing so even there you're picking the club up with your left arm i want you to think about turning your hips to start to move that club your left arm is working way too hard okay so turn your hips better relax the arm now just focus on your lower body let me show you that you'll see your arm is pretty aggressive here probably don't realize it and that's what's going to get us deep all right so the first one that you did you can see this is all left arm movement your left arm is moving away from you it's rotating and picking the club up and your hips have barely moved by this point this left knee should already be out over the toe your hips should be turned more so that the legs are waking up because remember the legs are the first thing to move in the downswing right so if we don't get them loaded up immediately off the ball then the arm will take over and so what happens is your arm your left arm is pretty loaded up here your left shoulder is already getting tight and the hips are pretty relaxed still there they should already be really loaded up and ready to go and instead we got this was the first one and so then as you come down the arms the left arm really fires and so it's getting everything out in front of us a little bit too much and so we're getting the arm out so we haven't shifted enough laterally there because our legs just weren't awake enough let's move toward the toward the end and then here you got the arm kind of doing the same thing so this is when i told you to focus on loading up your hips first okay it's a little better but you're still kind of on you're not really loaded up on that right leg but by this point we should already be shifting back to the left by the time your left arm's there you should be your pressure should be decreasing on the right and increasing on the left pretty significantly got it okay so chuck should i be moving a little bit more laterally just start the backswing and turning more and then i gotta think about going left a lot sooner bingo you nailed it uh i just wanted to see the club here the club did shallow out here better but this is still not as good as i want it to be because you're still opening up there but you just nailed it on the head so the initial move off the ball is a little lateral shift to start to feel this right glute but it's immediate right if you don't do it until your arm's already up here by the time this gets loaded up you've got so much stuff here that can't move nearly as fast as your arms so if you're up here already and this left shoulder is tight and your grip's tight and the forearm's tight and you're still loading pressure over here it's way too late right so you said exactly right immediately off the ball you can use this you know increase the pressure on the left to help you shift to the right a little and so that's immediately starting to load up this right hip so now by the time you're here you've already maxed out pressure and you're starting to think about getting back to the left and then posting up so yeah if you if you feel immediately off the ball shifting and then by the time your left arm's here and getting the left arm is getting pulled down by your hip turn now you've maxed out pressure by the time the left foot or the left arm's parallel on the downswing so yes it's a little bit sooner exactly okay sounds good try it again so a little shift to the right first there you go a lot more dynamic let your hips turn a little bit more going back you're restricting them a little too much okay pretty good one more so that arm is still working too hard but the lower body is getting better but you're still not letting yourself load into your hips enough and i'm going to show you what i mean by that because this is where when you start loading up more in the backswing then it's everything starts becoming more automatic cool so you can see here watch what's happening in your lower body versus the club the clubs move five feet and your hips haven't moved at all they haven't turned your hips at all right i can't even i can barely see your left leg and literally by the time this left hand is here that left knee should be moved forward out over your toe that's showing hip turn and i'll show you through this in a second but but you can see it you had a tendency you probably moved more laterally that time but you didn't allow yourself to rotate enough okay but now the club is definitely shallowing out better it's a lot shallower coming down but we need to get that hip turn going back so when you're looking at your swing from down the line what you did was this so yes the hip was the right hip was loaded but you can see my left knee didn't really move but i feel load on this side what i need is to turn and so watch my left knee see how it's out over my toe yeah right that's happening almost immediately so that by the time my arm's here this left hip is starting to load so now when you look at it from face on it makes sense that i can fall into this left side to transition earlier if i don't do that i don't let my knee move and i just shift laterally my arm's really loaded and my right hip's really loaded but this isn't this is taking a nap so i'm actually letting my hips turn because your pelvis has to tilt down but yours was kind of flat because you didn't really turn your pelvis goes down a little bit and that makes it easier to shift more weight into the left side because you're already kind of rolling downhill right so immediately off the ball this left knee has to come forward that allows your hips to turn which makes it a lot less restrictive with your upper body you know whereas before if you don't turn let your hips turn at all and you swing your arm back that far this thing's going to be so tight and so loaded up it's going to rip coming down right so instead little shift to the right let the hips turn the left knee come out and now i don't feel quite so tight in my shoulders and rib cage until the transition that's when i want this stuff to peak where if i go up here i can still be relatively relaxed here but then as i start to transition that's where i get that dynamic stretch so you've heard the whole x factor stuff what really matters in that separation in your upper and lower halves is not really so much the x factor that you create going back it's the x factor you create during the transition that stretch right and if you're tight you can't stretch anymore there's nowhere else for it to go because you didn't let your hips turn so as you allow yourself to shift your pelvis to the right and rotate this will stay a little bit more relaxed which will then buy you stretch my hips don't have to move or excuse me my shoulders don't have to move but i'm opening up my hips i'm stretching this more dynamically when it matters in the swing does that make sense it totally does and uh you're just helping me understand some bad concepts because i thought you were supposed to keep the hips pretty quiet immediately off the ball so um and and that's probably my fault because i've talked about that a lot and the reason being is that most amateur golfers do what we call the lazy man's turn right and this is this is what it is if i just turn my pelvis and i don't really load any my legs this is what older golfers do and and you know the majority of our work is with golfers in their 50s and 60s and on up who you know don't really do anything they don't use their legs properly so they just kind of do this and then they wonder why they don't have any power so for them they're overactive with their lower body and so we have to tell them you've got to learn to separate the two because they don't feel that right but now for somebody like you that information is not not going to be applicable because you you have a great ability to to separate your upper and lower halves too much right so what really needs to happen is we need to separate the upper and lower half during the transition primarily obviously it's going to turn more during the backswing but but you're overcooking that a little bit and so that's where you're losing some of that dynamic stretch during the downswing and some of these things like you can't stop ripping your left arm through when you feel this right your left arm and shoulder are going to chill out a lot they're going to be able to relax during the backswing so that we keep them in reserve until later in the downswing totally understand and my other the other thing i was saying conceptually i thought you were supposed to squeeze the towel on the way back not not and you kind of kept that in the transition versus you really get that squeeze in the transition that's where you do it okay good exactly and again most a lot of the stuff that i've posted on there is about applying to golfers who who do it this way right so they don't feel any separation at all so we start to get them to feel that right away and for them that's a really foreign feeling for somebody like you you you can't be i would tell you the opposite right i'm telling you you need to turn immediately so that you then this stays a little bit more open but now if i took an older golfer and said turn your hips right away they'd look like this in the backswing right so it's a little bit difficult i'm trying to kind of speak to a wide audience and it's not always applicable to everybody but for sure i need to do a better job explaining that to to golfers like you because you you go down the wrong path oh no not at all i this is great so um so i guess for me i just need to you know load the hips and turn a little bit more off the ball this is what's fun for you though because you you're going to start to be able to use your legs again whereas before you had kind of like restricted them so much that you had no choice you had no place else to move from but your upper and low upper half and your arms and shoulders shoulders so now you get to do the fun stuff you know you get to load up on this left leg let this knee come forward feel more load in your glutes and feel a lot of leg work coming down and that's fun stuff you know that's not restrictive stuff that's that's freeing yourself up to have a lot more power so that's exactly where i would tell you to go is start paying attention as you're looking down the line that this left knee you know again you don't want to you don't want to do this stuff and start like you know reverse pivoting and stuff like you're not going to do that but but the left knee has to be allowed to come forward as you as you turn and you load and you just need to do it sooner and once you have once this is loaded up it becomes kind of automatic especially for somebody as good as you to start to use your hips coming down but if you don't load them up going back and you load this arm instead then you won't be able to get out of those habits of just ripping the arms down so so this would be a big big change for you in terms of sequencing right because you now get to you need to it's not so much freeing up your hips it's loading up your hips and then once you start to feel that then all of a sudden you're gonna be like dude i i feel like i have so much more power and i have more control over the club because you're no longer throwing it from the top and chasing it right because you already have so many awesome fundamentals in your swing we just have to shallow out the swing plane slightly but we'll never do that if your arms are firing as the first thing right the only way to get your arms to stop firing first is to take the tension out of them and put the tension somewhere else does that make sense sure does sure does any other any questions for me or no i know we need to conclude can you just see if i get off the ball correctly with the hips and then yeah for sure we'll just do call it okay yeah let me see what's going let me see do that i'm going to record one so do that for me again yeah exactly so the right knee is going to straighten a little you don't want it to get too straightened because you want to maintain that load in there right there you go now feel how that would help you in the transition since that left knee is forward how you can sit into the left side easier it's there you go dude do that again for me all right so let's just take a quick look at that one i know that you know it was it was static the first one it wasn't dynamic per se but what i wanted you to see from that is how the club starts to get back down on plane for you without you having to do anything so yeah so first now this is where you let the right leg you know straighten up maybe a little bit too much at first because you're trying to really feel that but yes yeah the left knee is now forward out over the toe so now that you've got your pelvis you see your belt line is tilted right so now we can start to fall into that left side in the transition so weight shift becomes automatic right you're not having to think oh i have to push really hard off my right leg whereas before you had to drive kind of harder off the right to make yourself shift now we're just letting gravity do the weight shift for us so once you're there then what i wanted you to see is how the club shallowed out i think it was this one yeah so that's an exaggeration there but now you can see how your hips are back to square but you're let's see how your legs look loaded right instead of before your right leg was starting to straighten up a little bit already and move into the ball a little bit but now you're you're still able to create force into the ground with both feet and that's what that squat is for that's what it's supposed to look like and now the club this is a little bit exaggerated but the club is shallowed out now so now you can start to start coming back from the inside a little bit more without having to try and manipulate it and trying to you know make it happen with your hands so now from here we don't want that where your arms are a little bit stuck but that is something you i seriously doubt you would do that in your real swing but your arms are a little jammed up there because you're you kept it back a little bit too far but but you didn't do that in your real swing at all i seriously doubt that's going to happen but what i'm really interested in is you know are you starting to use your legs that looks way better and then there you just kind of drove and turned too much instead of getting posted up that's what let me i'll just walk you through that real quick so i can show you what happened there in your in your regular swing you you know you had a great release your arms in a great position but now as you start to turn your hips if you don't keep or if you don't stop trying to turn by pushing from the right side your arms never get a chance to get back out in front of your body so you get a little jammed up here instead now that we're here we shift and we're back to square but remember we don't want to keep turning this way because then our arms get stuck it's not so much driving off this right hip to turn the turning is kind of done it's now pushing up to push the hip back and now you can see my arms have this whip here but if i keep pushing from the right side my right elbow gets trapped up against that hip does that make sense sure does so early rotation of the hips during that transition and then think no more turning no more trying to turn your belt buckle to the target yes your belt buckle is going to get turned to the target but that's happening not from you trying to turn your hips it's happening from you pushing into the ground and pushing your hip back and so we're creating vertical force at that point does that make sense sure it does all right so yeah so hopefully that kind of puts all the pieces together now you know how to let your hips turn a little bit and be a little less restrictive there and then start to really feel your legs post up there instead of trying to keep turning right there's there's a balance between this rotational force lateral movement and vertical force right and right now as you did it there you've got two before you didn't have you had a lot of lateral not quite as much now you've got a lot of rotational we don't need that much we need to put that more vertical in there got it chuck well thanks for your help i really appreciate it it gives me some great stuff to work on you bet you got a great swing once you get your legs working again you're going to be back off to the races i promise thanks bro really appreciate the help today all right you bet take care thanks have a nice one you too