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DEAD Drill Step 1 - The Backswing
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Here's the first step in building your perfect golf swing using the DEAD Drill. It's critical that you master the backswing movement and each checkpoint contained in this video before moving on to step 2.
All right. Are you ready to learn just how simple the entire backswing is when you use the dead drill from face-on?
All you need to do is this
That's a perfect backswing. Now I'm going to walk you through each key checkpoint face on and down the line so that you can get the perfect backswing as good as any ball striker in the world and master a perfect swing, super, super fast, and really, really easy. So let me walk you through the checkpoints as you're going through this. So the first thing is that most golfers tend to make a mistake by pushing from the left shoulder, instead of pulling from the right, and that causes their head to move off the ball and the shoulders to turn really flat. You can see that my left shoulder almost looks higher than my right here. That won't work because you're adding a lot of extra movement to the swing. And any time you start changing the spine angle and your axis, that's going to affect what's happening to the swing, plane, and path.
So in order to make your swing really, really simple, all you need to focus on at first is pulling that right shoulder behind your head. You can see that even me, I have a fuse neck after our neck injury and my head still stays centered. When you start pushing from the left side, that's when your head starts moving off the ball. So focus on the wall, drill in the reference videos so that you can start getting the feeling of your head, staying nice and centered. While you pull your right shoulder back behind your head. Once you have that move, the next checkpoint is your right hip line. The best way to think about this is if you were up against a chair or a countertop at this height, this right hip should never move away from that or move into it from face on. It's going to look like it stays exactly where it started out a dress.
So imagine my hand is a coffee table or a chair. And as I start rotating, pulling that shoulder back behind my head from face on it looks like my right hip never moves this way or this way, what golfers tend to do, especially when they stop making a full shoulder turn. When they pick their arms up, is that their hips start sliding this way. Obviously, if there was a countertop or a chair here, I'd be bumping into it. So that won't work. So as long as I imagine I have an immovable object here and I'm just rotating around it. So that face on it looks like it stays in position. I'm going to have a perfect turn. The other common mistake is to shift this way. When you're rotating back, you need to feel that you increase the pressure on your trail foot. So at address you're about 50 50, give or take a little bit, but at the top of your backswing, or before you start your transition, you want to imagine you have about 80% pushing that right foot into the ground.
So as you go back, you want to imagine you can kind of push it in a little bit more, increase the pressure in it, and that your lead foot is going to feel pretty light. If you do that, that will help you maintain that right hip line and help you reward, avoid your hips, sliding and swaying all over the place. If you do, then the last thing that you need to check is your access tilt. I like to use the neck tie drill as a really simple reference for this, because it makes it really clear when you start to lose your access, as you go back, which is really common. So what the neck tie does is as I go back, I want to imagine if I had a neck tie on, it would hang down freely just to the inside of my right knee.
If I slide my hips this way, you'd see the neck ties going to start to drape across my belly. It should hang freely from the top. If I've maintained my access tilt, your course, you don't want to have it hanging this way. That's a reverse hip shift. So again, use the right hip line, pull the right shoulder behind the head. And if you set up correctly, you'll have the neck tie drill down perfectly. Now let's talk about the checkpoints from down the line. The first thing that I want you to focus on when you're talking about looking at your swing from down the line is your shoulder plane. If you imagine that this was my spine angle and this shaft represented the by future shoulder plane, that is perpendicular to my spine or 90 degrees to my spine angle. As I rotate back, my shoulders should just rotate on that same plane by put a club across here.
This makes it really easy to start seeing it or mirror whether or not I'm turning flat. This is obviously flat. If the club shaft parallel to the ground, I clearly didn't rotate perpendicular to my spine. And now that means I've pushed from the left side. And most likely my head has moved off the ball as a result. So instead, I'm going to pull that right shoulder behind my head, push that right foot into the ground. My maintain the right hip line. And as my right shoulder goes back, my left shoulder goes down as a result. As long as I'm not doing anything with my left shoulder, it'll rotate perfectly back on plane to the perfect position. The last checkpoint for the backswing is maintaining flex in that trail leg. What a lot of golfers tend to do is straighten that leg up right away, and you lose all the healthy torque intention that you've built in your obliques and your core muscles by just making what I call the lazy man's turn.
This makes it really easy to turn, but you've built up no activation, no load in your muscles. And so what you want to do is maintain that flex. As you go back, it's okay to lose some. You can see as I go back my right legs and to lose a little bit of knee flex, but I still feel that I have enough that I feel athletic and I can continue to push and drive that foot into the ground to activate my glute and my hamstring. If you feel load and intention here in your muscles, then you've maintained flex. As soon as you straighten that leg, you'll feel all of that load in the right glute completely go away. So if you can master those simple checkpoints, adding the arms and the club is going to be a piece of cake, but make sure if you're not certain that you're doing these moves correctly, get a review of your swing so that we can help you master these moves and check out the reference videos below because they will walk you through each cheat key checkpoint in great detail
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