Rickie Fowler - Using Your Legs
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Rickie Fowler uses his legs in the golf swing for a great amount of power and control. In this video, I'll show you how to start using your lower body like a tour pro.
- Understand what your impact position is supposed to look like.
- Allow the trail side to help get the weight over to the lead side.
- Control the body by focusing on the lead side hip being pulled away from the target with the obliques.
Hi, This is our ST instructor Chris Tyler.
And we are back again with this week's tour analysis on the 2015 Deutsche Bank champion Ricky Fowler.
So congratulations to Ricky.
He came back on Sunday and took down Henrik Stenson in the final round.
This week, we are going to be focusing in on how to use your legs in the golf swing to help get you a little bit more power and a little better consistency.
I'm also going to give you guys a really good checkpoint with your trail leg in the golf swing.
That's going to help you overcome a lot of the common swing faults that you may be struggling with from day to day.
Okay, everyone.
So as I said in the opener, We are going to be focusing on the legs this week.
And I'm going to show you guys a couple of good checkpoints that are going to help you get into a better impact position.
And also help you self-diagnose some of the common swing faults that we see.
So if you've been battling with either hip spinning, or if you've been battling with getting too much secondary axis tilt? Or if you've been battling with losing your tush line, This video is going to be really critical for you and give you a good understanding of what you need to work on and what you need to focus on.
So looking at the golf swing from a face -on perspective, if we look at the golf swing backwards, okay, so we're going to talk about impact first.
If we look at impact, so let's get Ricky right into an impact position here.
What are we trying to achieve in order to hit the golf ball really solid and have control of the bottom of the swing arm? Well, simply put, we're just looking to try to have our lead side very stacked up here.
So you have the lead ankle, the lead knee, the lead hip socket, and the lead shoulder all stacked right on top of each other.
We're also looking to make sure that we have a flat lead wrist and proper secondary axis tilt.
So you can see the spine is just outside the lead knee here.
Okay, now he's hitting a fairway wood here.
He had ball position back a little bit because he is in Scotland for this video.
So he's probably trying to fight the ball down a little bit.
But if you've noticed that you're having a very difficult time of getting your lead side stacked up, where you feel like your spine is leaning further back, or if you see that your lead leg is out past neutral, and you notice that you're either hitting some thin shots or some fat shots, well, I want you to pay close attention to what your right knee or your trail knee in your golf swing is doing down in the hitting area.
If it's jamming hard left, then that's you pushing your pelvis forward or pushing your hips through the hitting area.
That can cause your spine to lean away, which in turn can start to change the path of the golf club.
It can change the angle of attack.
It can cause the golf club to start making more of an ascending blow rather than a descending blow.
And I know there's a lot of times that we talk about push versus pull in the golf swing.
And with the lower half, because downswing sequence does happen so fast.
And I want you to think of this as kind of like a graduate level thing, where we do want the right side to help push a little bit.
But once we get the weight over there, we want to control it from the lead side of the body.
And I'm going to get further into that here in just a moment.
So the idea is that from a dress position, you're going to see Ricky sets up very wide here with his knees apart.
He's a little almost like a bow-legged appearance here.
But we don't want to have the gap between our legs really get closed up because that can cause too much secondary tilt, which in turn can make it very difficult to control the bottom of the swing arc.
It can cause, if you see that your gap is closed up quite a bit down in the hitting area, it can cause your hips to come forward, which is early extension of the spine.
So that's a good way to kind of encompass what you're going to be looking at from a self-diagnosis standpoint.
Now, from a down-the-line perspective, I want you guys to focus on, this is a line that you don't really typically see within golf instruction.
This is a line I use quite a bit with a lot of my students.
But it gives you a good idea of how much the right side is going to, you know, what we want it to do down in the hitting area and what we don't want it to do.
So if you have a good down-the-line video of your golf swing, load it into the self-analysis tool and use this line.
Put it down right in front of the knees.
Now, I've gone above the knees this time because this camera angle over here on the left-hand side, the video does move around a little bit.
The camera guy is actually moving it around.
But I'm using this mark on the side of the green here.
So this is over on the edge of the left-hand side of the green.
And that obviously is not moving.
But you'll get the point here in just a sec.
So I'm going to go ahead and get Ricky loaded up to the top.
Good load into that side.
Pretty good position at the top.
This is with his new golf swing here.
A little bit more elevation up there.
And in transition, what you're going to see is he gets his weight moving over to his lead side.
So he's shifting his weight.
I'll show you that from a face-on perspective.
So he's loaded into the right.
He's going to make a good shift over into the lead side.
So I'm going to get him right in about the same frame here.
So the lead arm is parallel to the ground here.
Now, it looks like he's evenly balanced.
But you can notice that the right foot's not really bracing a whole lot of weight.
Now, this is the mistake that a lot of amateur golfers make.
And this is the cause of a lot of problems at home.
Is that we still, because we have that little bit of weight over in that right side, we want to use to push off of it.
And that's what's going to bring the hips forward.
That's what's going to cause the hips to spin, or the body to really kind of rotate open through the hitting area.
What we want to focus on is we want to focus on driving this lead heel into the ground.
We want to feel like we're pushing it into the ground.
And we want to feel like we're using our left obliques to pull the left hip back away from the target.
Like you're trying to rotate your hip away from the target.
And if you can focus on the left side, then the right side of the body will react.
We don't want to use a lot of that coordinated side of our body to help push and cause those swing faults.
So let's look down here as Ricky gets down to the hitting area.
And you can see that he's actually moved further away from this line.
It's not a common kind of thing that we see with a lot of PGA Tour players.
But what you'll notice is that if your right leg or your right knee jammed through this line, you're going to notice that your hands are very close to your thighs.
And in turn, that's actually shrinking your radius up.
And that's going to hurt you in the speed department.
So now from a face-on perspective, You're going to see as he starts to pull that left hip away from the target and get into that really good sound impact position.
If I were to move this line here, You can see that he's maintained a good bit of that width between his knees down in the hitting area.
So that's a great way to use the lower body.
It's a great way to understand what may be causing a lot of your swing faults.
And chances are it can be your trail leg trying to do too much very late in the golf swing.
And what I mean by late is just really at the release point.
All right.
So if you've been struggling in this area, try it out.
Load up some swings in the self-analysis tool and start to better understand where you're at with your golf swing.
And I can also recommend some videos that are going to help you out with this.
Again, this is over into the recommended video side of the player.
So you've got to click that tab.
I want you guys to check out sitting into the left side.
I also want you guys to check out the straight left-legged impact video.
Also, the rotary connect hip stability video.
So those of you guys that have rotary connects at home, You can go ahead and put the rotary connect between your knees, and you can use it to help maintain the width while you're working on releasing the golf club, all that fun stuff.
And then also another video that talks a little bit more how to use your hips in the golf swing is called Exactly that.
It's called how to use your hips in the golf swing.
It's a great video that Chuck did.
We're going to show you that.
It's okay to have a little bit of trail side push there, as long as we're not overcooking it to where we're causing a lot of these common swing faults that you might be battling with at home.
All right, everyone.
So I appreciate you tuning in this week.
Now let's get out there, use our legs properly, and let's play some great golf.
Make it a great day.
Stephen
Craig (Certified RST Instructor)
Dustin
Craig (Certified RST Instructor)
Mark
Chris (Certified RST Instructor)
Kyle
Chris (Certified RST Instructor)
David
Chris (Certified RST Instructor)
David
Chris (Certified RST Instructor)