Clamshell Drill - How to Cure Early Extension
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The Clamshell Drill is the key to the golf swing, no seriously! If you want to see how the pros differ from the joes in just one simple drill, then this is it. If you struggle with losing your posture, swinging over the top, a sore back and inconsistent, weak shots, then you MUST learn this simple yet effective drill now! Here's a link to where Tiger was talking about some of these moves in his swing: Tiger Woods Talks About Hip Movement
All right guys, I am super excited to share what I'm going to do. Share with you today on one of the most, if not the most important moves in the entire golf swing. If you get this right, you're going to see how everything falls into place. And I've talked about it for many, many years, but I'm going to get into super detailed stuff today. That's going to help you understand how to make this move really simple by simply understanding exactly how to do a couple key pieces. Now, as you can tell, it's not exactly a golf weather here. So June 9th, we got three inches of snow overnight in the San Juan mountains, but it doesn't mean you could be out. You don't have to be outside practicing. You can do this inside. I'm going to use, as you guys know, I have a serious disdain for training aids.
So I just have a simple chair here. It's all you need a kitchen countertop. Anything that you can put about hip line is all you need to learn how to master what is the most important and powerful move in the golf swing. If you swing over the top, if you struggle with casting the club, if you struggle with your shoulders, getting to open an impact, if you struggle with losing your posture, especially these are all things that the tour pros don't do, but most amateurs do the exact opposite. I'm going to show you and explain exactly why today. You're losing your posture, losing your spine angle, not hitting the ball the way that you want and learn how to feel and get incredible power out of your lower body. By just doing one simple drill. And again, you don't need complicated gizmos and training aids.
I'm going to use a chair. That's all. You need to learn the secret of how the pros use the lower body. So here's what we're going to do. What I want you to do. First of all, I've been paying a lot of attention on the Facebook group to the videos you guys are posting on there and watching a lot of the same common mistakes over and over again. And people don't understand some of the most basic stuff or they, they kind of ignore. And we all kind of fall into these traps, especially as we get tired with posture at setup, I'm guilty of it too. And so one thing I just want to emphasize again, in this video is as you're setting up to this, I want you to set up properly, which means first lock out your knees. Like my, my quads are tight here.
I'm literally locked out, hindering from the hip socket, with my spine, nice and neutral, and then just barely relaxed them as you start doing this and just adding knee flex and getting Squatty, which we see all the time and online lessons into the Facebook group. It changes every single aspect of your swing. And it makes it very, basically impossible to do what you're going to learn, how to do today, which is, well, I call it kind of the clam shell, which you're going to understand. And just a moment, this clamshell drill, if you will, if you're setting up like this and squatter, you're always going to almost always have a little extra curvature in your lower back. Your upper back is going to be rounded like this, to get to the ball. I call it. You've heard me talk about the pumpy doll, puppy, dog, humping the fire hydrant.
This is kind of what it looks like. And this is maybe a little exaggerated for some of you and for others. You may look even worse. We've seen everything in between. So keep your legs nice and straight hindrance suck in this. Barely relaxed your knees. And you'll find if you're the type of person who struggles with the stance with being too wide. This is really common. When you squat down a lot, you take a lot of add a lot of knee flex. You're going to feel really stable. As soon as you straighten your legs, it's going to feel really awkward. And so you'll find that it's much easier to have a narrow stance. When you minimize that knee flex, you're going to have such better posture to dress and better angles to get to the ball. So anyway, now what I want you to do is get set up weight from the center of the ankle, to the middle of the foot or the back of the ball of the foot in the middle of the foot is kind of where we're aiming for here.
And this you're going to understand why in just a moment, because I see a lot of times, people will way back on their heels. You seen that a lot in the live lessons. And what I want you to do is be able to put your hand once you're in your proper setup, behind between your butt and the chair or countertop or whatever it else that you're using here. So a little bit of space here. Now, here's the key as you're going back, as you've heard me talk about so many times, it's so important to get loaded up properly in the back. Single. What does that mean? Exactly. And I've explained it in lots of different videos, which I'll kind of reference here as we go through this. But what I want you to think about as your hip going back and touching that chair. So you're erasing that space where your hand was in there and now you're lightly touching it.
This is your hip, going back, your knee, going back and your weight going back from the middle of your foot to your ankle. This is why it's important. You can't be way back on your heels. You have nowhere to go during the back swing. The golf swing is about movement. You have to be allowed to move. And so if you're already way back on your heels, where else can you go? You're going to already be off balance and you just don't have anywhere to move to. So it's really important that you all have your weight forward enough that you can move your hip back. Now, the first thing you're probably going to notice to say, well, Hey, I'm supposed to maintain knee flex in my back knee, right? Yes, absolutely. The opposite of that would be this. We don't want your leg hyperextending, but as you move your knee back, losing a little bit of knee flex is okay.
We just see this kind of stuff all the time. And also keep in mind the swing is happening in 3d. So as I move back, if you look at it here, it still looks like I have more Knee-Flex than when you're looking at it straight down the line, because my hips are turning as well. So anyway, back to this nice and tall through the lower body, my hands got the space. Now, as I go back, I move my hip back so that my glute touches the chair. This is important, super important, because so many times guys move out onto the balls of their feet, their hips slide, they don't move their hip back. You don't move into that hip. You need to move into this hip socket. And another video I did many, many years ago was talking about this crease that you can see in your pant, as you go back properly, you can see that my pant leg, you know, my pant, the front of my plants are nice and flat.
And I was like, go back and move into my hip. That's what creates that look of that crease in my pants. So that's what you're looking for. If you're looking at yourself face on you're moving back into this, loading back, getting weight loaded into that glute. Now that's the easy part to get, right? But so many people don't do it. So really using this, just knowing that you have a little bit of space and moving your hip back into it. So make a huge difference in what's going to happen next, which is the most important part of the entire golf swing. And that is the transition nine times out of 10. If you struggle with a proper transition, it's probably because you didn't load your lower body correctly and you overloaded your arms and shoulders. So when you're doing this, your focus is going to be here.
Your arms can. Now, first of all, they have room to swing back the lower bodies, helping move them back, and now they can stay a lot more relaxed. And now as you start down, your whole focus is switching sides. And what I mean by that is the left hip is now going to go back and go back further than what the left did or excuse me, what the right did. So now I'm just lightly touching it because my hips are also turning here. But now as the left goes back, my focus is sitting into that left side, pushing that left hip back, and even trying to bump the chair up a little bit, just a little bit here, just so that I get that hip back. Now you can see why I talk about this as like the clamshell. Cause as I'm standing here to dress nice and tall, my hip goes back.
That makes my spine angle increased slightly. And then as I get a little bit more aggressive with it, now you can see that my spine angle has gone forward even more. And my legs, this is what the squat to square is. My hips are going, my left hip is going back. My right hip goes back in the back swing left. Hip goes back in the downswing. And I look like I'm folding over like a lawn chair. That's the feeling or the look when you're looking at it on video, when you do it right now, the opposite of that, let me show you what's happened so often. So I'm going to stand up. I'm going to have a little bit of space here so you guys can see the gap and I'm going to over flex my knees a little bit. Now, as I go, go back, my hip doesn't touch this.
And in fact it may even move away from it. And then I fire with my right side, and this is my fault there. Now I'm nowhere near that. This is why people lose the tush line. They change their swing plane. They change their spine angle. Some of it has to do with starting with too much knee flex at address. And then once you do that, you can't move into this hip. And then you push hard from the right side and you move away from that. You want to do it correctly by moving the right hip back just a small amount. Then as you transition to the left, the left hip goes back. And now as you see it with the club, you're going to understand how these golfers on the tour, who do this really, really well look really powerful and have a ton of room for their arms to outstretch.
If I'm turning like this and losing my posture, my arms get stuck across my body. And I look really jammed up. It's costing me a ton of speed. It's hurting my back, but this is helping my spine stay in neutral versus kinking it and spinning it. My hip going back is creating room. And then I have all this room to release the club with a ton of speed and no effort, your lower body and the transition of the golf swing is everything. If you get this move right, this is how you do the squat to square. A lot of times when I'm seeing the squat to square, people are kind of going back and then just doing this. That's not what we're doing. The knee flex increasing is happening. As a result, as I'm sitting in the left side, this leg gets lighter and then there's, this leg goes back.
That's what moves this in forward from face-on. I'll do it just quickly so you can see the difference. Here's me too. Squatty all upper body. Now, as I stand nice and tall, right? Hip goes back, left hip. Now working to push that left hip back against the chair. Tons of room power is now at your disposal by feeling your glutes work in a golf swing. So all you need to learn a really powerful transition in the golf. Swing, a chair, a coffee counter, anything you have, you can put it in your hip up against, and you can learn how to swing, just like the best players in the world.
All right. So now let's take this drill and look at what a wide variety of tour pros to us. I've argued for years, the RST system, the method that you're learning, the techniques that you use, the fundamentals are what all of the tour pros use. The vast majority of tour pros all use RST fundamentals. Now of course, we talking about fundamentals versus variables. You're going to see things that may make the swing look different, but that's typically due to do with the arms and the hands and the club and the swing plane. Those are variables of the swing. Those are not fundamentals. I've explained why that is. And in another video, because simply those are dependent on how your body moves, how your other parts of your your arms move and so on. That's what creates a swing plane, et cetera. So let's look at, in this case, let's take Patrick Reed, Patrick Reed.
You may look at him and say, is he a rotary swing? Or is he using the RST fundamentals? Well, the stuff that you just learned in this video, absolutely. Let's take a look. So here you can imagine I've got that. The red line represents the, the chair drill that we just looked at. And so now watch, as he goes back, he obviously moves into it. Now watching the transition. This is where it really happens, where the load really happens and he really pushes back. Now you can see his hip is actually on the other side of that line, staying back against, and I watched the left hip boom on the other side, just like what you just learned, how to do in the drill. Notice the space that he has and the release with his arms. This is the RST movement. This is that clam shell drill.
This is the squat to square, all powerful golfers, all great ball strikers have the same characteristic. And it's all done by learning how to move from the core. Like you just learned in that clamshell drill. All right. What about DJ Dustin Johnson? You guys look at his swing. He's like, oh, that can't be an RST swing. He can't be using the rotary swing fundamentals because if you look at that crazy shot club face and super-strong grip and all that other stuff, well, again, those are variables of the swing. The fundamentals are, what matter? That's what moves the club is your body. So watch as Dustin demonstrates exactly what we just talked about, how his hip is already moved back. He's broken that chair. He's actually moved quite a bit. He makes a big hit turn. So he's well past that hip line. Now, as he goes back, look where that left tip is.
Again, all of the tour pros, the stuff that matters, the fundamentals of the swing, the stuff that we talk about in rotary swing the arm, plane, swing, plane, stuff like that. Those are variables. The body movement is what you have to focus on. And that's what the Dedra is all about. Teaching you how to do. And the tour pros all do it the same way. All right, now let's take another one. Brooks KEPCO, as he goes back, you can see on that hip line with the right hip during the peak of the back swing and the left hip goes back, stays there again, their hips move further back than where they started address. You can see clearly there's a space there. Now this camera move a little bit. So it makes it, he actually moves further back than it looks like, but you can still see the exact same things, all the tour pros do.
And when you compare this to the average amateur, nearly every single amateur in the, on the planet is moving their hips into the ball on the down swing. All right, let's take one. Last one. We all know who this is. Of course, Mr. Woods, same thing. In fact, tiger actually talked about this relatively recently, an interview talking about how he's trying to get deeper into his right hip. And then when his, when he was talking years ago, about how his glutes, when fires really talking about getting this left side to work in the downswing. But again, you see the same thing. He moves into that right hip into that chair that we just discussed in the drill even exceeds it. So now if you drew another line, you can see it's actually all the way out there. And then of course the left hip goes out there as well. And that is again, the main difference between amateur golf and pro golf is how the hips work and now you know exactly how to do it by doing my clam shell drill.
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