How To Use Ground Force For Speed
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In this video, Rotary Swing Instructor Chris Tyler shows you how to use ground force for a big boost in clubhead speed. You'll see the difference in speed when not using your legs vs. using your legs like a tour pro.
- 3/4 swing
- As the hands and arms reach the top of the swing, step out into stance width.
- Push the lead foot into the ground and release the club with speed.
Today we're going to be talking about leverage coming from ground force. This is a great way to start to speed your golf club up pretty drastically. I've got FlightScope out here today that's going to show us the differences between using our legs and not using our legs, how much speed you could potentially be costing yourself. I'm also going to be showing you a great drill towards the end of this video that's going to allow you to start transferring your weight and start leveraging the ground for more club head speed than you've ever had before. Let's go ahead and get started.
Okay, so I know a lot of us watch golf on TV on the weekends and we see some of these longer players get completely airborne up off the ground when they're using their drivers. I wanted to discuss how important this move is to club head speed. I want to think of this as more of a graduate level move but it's a good way to start to understand how important your legs are in the golf swing. When you see a player doing this sort of move, they're gaining club head speed through leverage. This is through ground force. What they're trying to do here is that when they start to move into their lead side, is that they're using their legs to push into the ground. When they're pushing into the ground, their body's going up and the club head is going down. Now, that effectively is speeding the club up pretty drastically, so that's exactly what ground force really means in the golf swing. That's a good source of leverage for those of you players that are still trying to pick up more and more yards on the golf course.
Now, in this video I'm going to show you the differences between using your legs and not using your legs. I'm going to actually do a drill where I keep my feet together and I'm just going to swing as hard as I can. I'm going to track the data, and then I'm going to show you how important it is to transfer your weight and start to use the ground as a good source for power in your golf swing. Okay, so in these first few shots that I'm going to hit, I'm going to eliminate or I'm going to isolate the lower body completely. I'm going to stand with my legs together and I'm going to make swings as hard as I can with just using my upper body, no legs at all. Let's go ahead and hit a few shots here. We're going to measure what kind of swing speed I can create here just by getting my upper body to do all the work here.
Hit that pretty good. Very odd feeling, swinging with your feet together like that. Let's do it one more time here. Feet together. I didn't hit that one as well. It's hard to do. Let's go ahead and take a look at those numbers now, we'll see how we did. Okay, so now that you've seen me hit some golf balls with not using my legs here, I'm going to go ahead and get myself into my normal stance width here. I'm going to go ahead and start to really push my lead heel into the ground to see if I can get some ground force here. Let's see how much that ramps up my speed today. Okay, let's go ahead and get our golf setup on. Okay. All right, that went really good there. Let's try one more and let's look at the speed differences. Okay, make sure I'm transferring my weight and then using the ground. Hit that one good too. Quite a bit different how much the ball flies here. Let's go ahead and take a look at the difference in the numbers now.
Okay guys, so now that you can see how important it is for us to use our legs in the golf swing, you can see how much speed I was sacrificing by not using my lower body at all. I want to show you a really simple drill that I use with a lot of our students that helps them get the idea of how to transfer their weight, number one. Number two, what it's like to actually feel ground force or how it feels to actually leverage the ground for power. It's a drill I call The Step and Push Drill. Our goal here is that we're just going to make some 3/4 golf swings going back. My hands are going to go up to about shoulder height here. From a down the line perspective, my hands and arms go up to about shoulder height. As my hands and arms are starting to near the shoulder height position, what I'm going to do is I'm going to step out with my lead leg, and I'm going to push it into the ground. Okay?
You're going to see me, as my hands and arms start to near this part of the golf swing, I'm going to step out. Don't step out too wide, try to land in your proper stance width. You can put some markers on the ground if you need to. We're going to step out, and we're going to push into the ground to the point where my hips actually start to open up and my lead leg starts to almost go to a fully straight position here. It'd be more of like a passively straight position. For those of you that don't know what that means, if you were to have a conversation with me, just standing here, your legs would be fairly straight but they're not locked straight. That's what I mean by passively straight. Our goal is when we start to step out, as we push into the ground, and you're going to see that my hip starts to open up and the leg moves to a passively straight position. At that point, you want to go ahead and let the club fall and release. That should just feel like relaxed rotation of your wrists and your forearms.
If I were to swing back and forth with no body, or no legs, I'm sorry, just nice and evenly paced. Now I add that weight shift and then I leverage. You can start to hear the club to get some massive speed to it pretty quickly. The way that I want you to do this, step, push, release. Step. Now you can really hear me getting the speed up here. Okay. You'll start to feel your glute muscles on that lead side starting to really contract if you really focus on pushing that heel into the ground. Use this golf swing drill. Do about five or six reps of this and then go ahead and hit a golf shot. You'll start to feel what it's like to transfer your weight properly in your golf swing and you'll start to feel the ground pushing back and starting to add some speed.
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