Fixing Your Weight Transfer in the Golf Swing
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In this video, I will show you 2 of the most common faults in downswing transition by not properly transferring your weight. I will also, show you a simple drill to help you start using your legs properly in the downswing, leading to more consistency and a better impact position.
- Throw a ball like a baseball pitcher and learn the movements of the lead leg.
- Use your leg muscles to pull yourself over to the lead side to start the downswing.
Hey Rotary Swing Golfers, welcome back.
I'm your instructor, Chris Tyler.
And today we're going to be discussing one of the most important parts of downswing transition, and that is weight transfer.
I'm going to be showing you what some of the common faults that you may be struggling with in your own golf swing.
And more importantly, I'm going to be giving you a detailed list of checkpoints that you're going to start to look for when starting to refine your downswing and your weight transfer.
So if you've been battling with weight transfer, pay close attention to today's video.
Let's go ahead and get started.
Okay, so, in part one of this video.
I think it's extremely important for all of us to have a clear understanding of where we're trying to go in our downswing.
First, so that we have a good visualization of what we're going to be trying to achieve.
And that's what I'm going to go ahead and demonstrate an impact position.
So, and give you a few checkpoints of what you're going to be looking for when you start to work through these drills.
At the end of the video.
Let me go ahead and impact this bag here.
I'm going to hit it lightly.
So here are my checkpoints for you.
Okay forget about the hands and the arms at this point.
Forget about the lead wrist.
We're just going to be looking at the body lines for now.
What I want you to focus on is making sure that number one.
You have eighty percent of your weight in your lead leg, underneath your lead ankle, lead heel area.
So eighty percent of my weight is going to be right in underneath my lead heel lead ankle.
Twenty percent of my weight is going to be over on my trail foot.
Okay so twenty percent of my weight is going to be into this right side with the foot rolled in.
No heel up off the ground.
Okay so we want to have twenty percent of our weight heel down.
You can see that my my heel is rolled in here.
So your first checkpoint eighty percent twenty percent.
Second checkpoint is your hips should be open about thirty five to forty five degrees.
Okay so from down the line hips should be open about thirty five to forty five degrees.
Your shoulder line should be square.
So when I shift over I got eighty percent twenty percent.
Hips open about thirty five to forty five degrees.
My shoulders are square.
So down the line what that looks like.
Our head should still be in behind the golf ball.
So when I hit this impact bag you could probably see that my head stayed back there.
Now, the final, most critical checkpoint of it all that's going to really dictate.
A lot of the faults that you probably have in your golf swing is the position of the lead side of the body.
So when we're at impact here we want to have our lead shoulder, our lead hip socket, our lead knee, and our lead ankle all stacked right on top of each other.
Okay this is what we would call a neutral joint alignment.
This is a perfect impact position.
This is going to allow you to control the bottom of the swing arc and get the club to bottom out in the same spot every single time.
Which is really critical for consistent ball striking.
Okay so now in part two of this video I want to go ahead and discuss some of the common faults.
And one of the biggest faults that we see is when people start to work on shifting their weight.
Okay that's the operative word is we're going to shift our weight over to our lead side.
We're going to use our legs.
What we typically see, okay so I'm going to get the club out of here for this so I can demonstrate it properly.
Because when you load into your right side we see people just shifting their pelvis and keeping their upper body back.
Now we would all agree that when we load into our right side we shift and we turn our body so we've moved off the golf ball in essence here.
Maybe an inch, inch and a half or so.
We need to allow the body, the upper body, to move dynamically back over to your lead side.
So if I were loaded into my right side here I wouldn't just want to shift my hips.
What that's going to do is it's going to create a lot of secondary axis tilt which can in turn shallower your swing plane.
So if I were at the top of my swing and I lean my spine away you can see that the shaft plane lays very flat.
Also the problem with just shifting your hips laterally is you're still bracing a ton of weight into your right side.
Okay you haven't moved or you haven't transferred that weight over to your lead side.
So you need to allow the upper body to feel like it's moving.
Now golfers or amateur golfers tend to feel like this is a big slide.
This is not a slide by any means.
You can allow your body to move if you've loaded your right side properly.
Okay so if I load here and I'm moving back over to left side we can allow things to move back over and we're still wanting the body to move.
So if you've been battling, or you've been seeing on camera that you're getting a lot of secondary axis tilt in transition, then these drills later in the video are going to really help you out.
Okay, so, the second most common mistake that we see is a fault.
When working on downswing, transition, or transferring your weight properly over to your lead side is what we call a closed hip slide.
Okay, so if you've noticed yourself on camera.
Or maybe you've been working with an instructor through the swing review process and they've talked to you about this closed hip slide.
I want to go ahead and define what that means for those of you that don't know.
So from a down the line perspective, when I'm loaded into my right side here, okay for me to move my weight over to my left side.
What a closed hip slide would look like is just kind of falling over to your left foot without your hips unwinding at all.
So from a face-on perspective you're loaded into this right side let me do this properly here and then you would just fall over into that left side.
That is a very, very difficult move to recover from.
Because now, as your weight shifts or falls over into that left foot, you have to remember your hands and arms are starting down very, very quickly.
Now for you to be able to transfer the weight from the toes or the ball of your foot all the way back to your heel and your ankle joint here.
And then open your hips up before your hands and arms get down in the hitting area is very, very difficult to do.
Also you run the risk of when you're doing this closed hip slide of getting your body out in front of the golf shot.
So again, the two common faults are is here.
A is just shifting our pelvis and not allowing our torso to move back along with the lower half, or B that closed hip slide.
And I've got a great drill that's going to help you overcome both of these swing faults, and it's going to help you get into that perfect impact position.
Just like we had in part one of the video.
Okay, so now let's get to work on a proper weight transfer in your golf swing so that you get a clear understanding of how you're going to be moving properly from the top of the golf swing down into impact.
And what I want you to think about is a baseball pitcher.
How would a baseball pitcher start his move? Well you would see him transfer his weight okay you would see him lift his lead leg up and then you would see him make an external rotation of his lead leg this is actually called internal hip rotation here okay so you would see this move where he rotated his leg outward okay so again you see this move then he would pivot his hips and then he would fire his arm okay so you can see how there's a chain of events that's being driven by the lower half down here now that same move is actually happening in the golf swing believe it or not watch some of the longer hitters out there you're going to see their first move from the top of their golf swing down as you'll see their leg start to make that same sort of external rotation or again internal hip rotation here so my point here is what I want you to do in order to be able to encompass this is just try throwing a ball first okay pick your leg up plant okay do this several reps over you're going to feel what it's like to use your legs in that same sense once you get more proficient at it you're going to feel like you're keeping your foot completely on the ground you're going to feel like you're still making that same move now there's also another drill that you can encompass with this and this is a drill that I put out in the hip pain video the preventing hip pain video so for those of you that have very little awareness of the leg muscles that we want to use to help pull yourself back over to your left side now that's a really big word around rotary swing is push versus pull we want to be able to pull ourselves back over to that lead side so for those of you that have very little awareness of those muscles what I want you to do is I want you to take your lead leg okay your lead foot and I want you to drag it on the ground okay I want you to do this maybe six or seven times here okay drag it on the ground or your carpet at home okay and you're going to start to feel some muscles contract in your leg here once you start to feel those muscles now what I want you to do is I want you to keep your weight on your right side and I want you to wind your hips up okay you're going to keep your foot kind of rolled in on your lead foot here okay it's going to look a little goofy because I'm not in golf posture okay but you're going to see now I'm going to keep this foot planted and I'm going to pull myself over to my left side okay so I've done the baseball motion a few times okay I'm starting to feel what that's like I've dragged my foot on the ground now I'm going to get myself set up okay I'm going to wind into my right leg here okay and now I'm going to use those muscles in that throwing motion with my left leg to pull myself over and because I'm focused on my lower body doing all the work watch what my upper half does see how my upper half is now moving dynamically back over to the lead side if you use your leg muscles from the lead side of your body and you're pulling your upper body will want to move with it if you're pushing from the right side or not using those muscles at all that's when you're going to run into those faults so I want you to try this drill out let's go ahead and do it perfect now load up I'm going to make sure that my leg feels like it's externally rotating okay and I'm going to use those leg muscles and then we're going right into neutral joint alignment where our knee our hip our ankle and our shoulder are stacked right on top of each other once you become more proficient at this start adding the golf club back to the mix okay use an impact bag but flip the club over you're going to work to the top of your swing you're going to use those leg muscles and you're going to start to feel yourself getting pulled into your lead side so you're ready to post up and really ready to release and you're going to be in a great impact position with proper weight distribution and proper impact line
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