Squeeze the Cheeks for Consistency
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The glute muscles (your butt cheeks) are some of the most important muscles in the golf swing. Without understanding how to use your glutes properly, you will struggle with consistency your entire golfing life.
- The job of the lower body is to provide stability at impact
- Glutes should be engaged at impact - soft, relaxed muscles allow the body to spin & lose power
- Drill: Get into impact position, stacked over the left leg
- Squeeze the cheeks (engage the glutes) and hit little half-shots, keeping the right heel on the ground as long as possible
Learning how to get into the proper impact position is only part of the key.
One of the most important things that the RST is all about is teaching you what muscles to engage, how to align the joints, and what to really feel in the golf swing to make everything correct and make it easy to repeat, safe on the body, powerful and efficient.
One of the biggest keys at impact is learning how to engage your glutes, and so I use a drill called squeeze the cheeks.
It's long story short.
It's not rocket science to figure out what this is.
What you're trying to do at impact is rather be in this soft and sloppy position where your hips are really soft, your legs are really soft and you can just kind of spin really easy in this relaxed position.
At impact, you want to have your lower body doing its job in the swing, which is to provide stability.
And if it's providing stability, certain muscles need to be engaged.
So that they can support what's going on up top, so that we can control and have stability at impact.
In order to do that at impact your legs, your glutes should be contracted.
I'm going to exaggerate this drill a little bit.
But what I want you to imagine is that you had a penny between your cheeks and you were trying to squeeze it together as hard as you could at impact.
So that when you're here, your muscles are activated and now your lower body is really quiet.
And that allows you the ability to release the club with some speed and aggression when you need to hit the ball far, or just to have control when you're trying to hit a certain shot.
The opposite of that is for your legs to be relaxed, your glutes to be relaxed, and you'll see that everything just kind of wants to spin through together.
And I look kind of flowy and loose and soft because my muscles aren't engaged, which are going to keep me from spinning my hips.
I want to do the opposite at impact.
I want to use muscles that do the opposite of rotation.
I want them to just stop, obviously, as I'm moving my body up in the downswing by pushing that left leg in the ground.
My glutes are starting to get engaged and I want to squeeze them at that point.
So I can release the club with a great deal of speed and control.
Rather than allowing my hips to spin and try and time all of that, releasing at the same point over and over again.
So a simple drill go and hit a lot of half shots preset yourself into your impact position.
So you're going to be stacked over the left leg, squeeze your cheeks together as hard as you can.
And then, as you come down, just start releasing the club.
And keep that heel on the ground, your right heel on the ground as long as you can.
And as you do this, then do a couple where you let your legs relax and you'll feel how you spin your ball.
Flight will typically go up because you'll create a lot of secondary axis tilt.
And you won't be able to hit the ball as solid and compress it and feel like you're on top of the ball.
As much as when you squeeze your cheeks and feel like your hips stop at impact so you can release the club properly.
So you want to slowly start integrating this into your swing so that as you come down and impact squeeze the cheeks release the club and you'll notice that your right foot will stay on the ground if you're a hip spinner this will feel completely different you'll have a really hard time spinning your hips so just stand up with me while I'm doing these drills keep your legs really soft let the club release around you'll feel it's kind of soft and flowy and then squeeze your cheeks and release the club with your arms and hands and you'll see your lower body is much more quiet into the follow -through so work on this drill and you'll be able to lower your ball flight and compress the ball better than you ever have before
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