Russell Knox - Setup and Rotate
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Russell Knox golf swing analysis. Learn how to rotate properly in your golf swing and protect your body by setting up properly.
- At address, make sure the back of your knee is over the center of your ankle.
- Rotate your shoulders perpendicular to the axis.
- Right heel down on the ground into impact.
Hey everyone, This is RST instructor Chris Tyler.
And welcome back to the weekly tour analysis, where we have Russell Knox, who just picked up his first victory on the PGA Tour at the HSBC this past weekend.
So congratulations to Russell.
This week, we are going to be focusing in on a consistent move in Russell's golf swing.
And we're also going to be focusing in on a good way to protect your lead knee and your lead hip.
So if you've been struggling with some pain in your lead hip or your lead knee, you want to pay close attention to today's review.
Let's go ahead and get started.
Okay guys, so here we are with Russell Knox this week.
We are going to be talking a little bit about a consistent move that I want you to start to work into your own golf swings.
We're going to talk a little bit about setup and then we're going to talk a little bit about impact as well.
So there's three really key areas of the golf swing that we're going to focus on here.
One thing that I want to address here is from the address position here when he's got an iron in his hand, you can see that he's got very little spacing between his hands and his thighs.
Typically, what that's a byproduct of is usually having too much flex in the knees at the address position, where we would normally want the back of the knee to be right over the center of the ankle.
So you can see that the back of his knee, it's a little tough to tell, and I drew that line a little bit on the bigger side.
But from an anatomic standpoint, a biomechanics standpoint, what that's going to allow us to do, That's going to allow us to keep our weight into true balance and not get so sunk down into the quads.
But true balance is really, It's one of those big myths in the golf swing, where we've always been taught to set up over the balls of our feet.
And we've got some videos on the website that kind of go into the sciences about this.
Um, but when we set up in true balance, Think of this green section as kind of like your money section here, where you want to have your weight at your address position, not forward to this, not behind this.
Okay.
If you can get your weight into that, into that section, Then you're going to be able to stay in balance throughout most of your golf swing if you're focusing on that.
And it's also going to be a little bit easier for you to be able to load up your glute muscles.
But aside from that, what happens is when you get too sunk down into your knees, what we typically would see is some roundness right here from the thoracic spine up.
And you can see that the shoulders have a little bit more of a rolled or protracted appearance here, which in turn gets the hands a little bit closer to the body.
So if you've looked on camera and you've noticed that, man, I've got some roundness here from my thoracic spine up, then check the amount of knee flex that you have.
Make sure that you're not getting too sunk down into your knees.
You can still, he's obviously over here with the driver.
He's got his hands a little bit further away from him because of the length of the driver.
But you can still see just a little bit of curvature there.
Not an overwhelming amount, but just, again, just a little bit too much knee flex.
And you'll see that he actually sinks down a little bit.
See that little move there?
So again, the point of that is just to make sure that you're getting yourself into a good neutral posture, getting yourself into good neutral balance at the starting point, because that's going to help us down in the hitting area.
Because a lot of people think that, you know, I'm supposed to be athletic.
I'm supposed to stay in the balls of my feet.
And in turn, that's actually a very dangerous position down in the hitting area.
So let's look at the rotation of the body here now.
I'm going to go ahead and mark a line down the angle of his spine here.
I'm going to try to be as close to perfect as I can here.
So what we're looking to do in the golf swing is we're wanting to rotate our shoulders around our axis and keep that perpendicular.
We want to keep our shoulders perpendicular to our spine.
So what we're going to be looking for at the top of Russell's swing, okay, is that his shoulders have made a T, a perfect looking perpendicular T here to his spine.
So let me draw these.
So that's what we would look for, What the shoulders would look like at the top of the swing if he were rotating around his axis and not changing his spine angle.
And he does an absolutely fantastic job of that.
So you can see here into the takeaway, gets nice and wide, typical tour player takeaway.
Then at the top of the swing, you're going to see that his shoulders are pretty well matching this line right here.
Okay, so you see that he's maintained his spine angle.
And the same thing here.
So now see the shoulder line is perpendicular here to this line that I drew originally.
That means he's maintaining his spine.
So if you're seeing any sort of different look out of your shoulder line, then we need to take the club out of your hand.
We need to work on rotating your body properly around your axis.
Rotation is really one of those big things that allow amateurs to struggle so much in their golf swing because you're changing the angle of your spine.
And when you change the angle of your spine, guess what?
You're going to have to get it back to its original starting point to get the bat on the ball.
So we always want to feel like we're rotating around our axis, keeping our shoulder line perpendicular to our spine.
All right.
So now down in the hitting area, this is the one move I want to talk about if you've been struggling with some hip and knee problems.
This is where it can help you in a sense.
We always talk a lot about the right foot, the position of the right foot, keeping it down on the ground, making sure that you're not driving up off onto the toes here, driving your knee towards your lead knee.
And you're going to see that he actually does get rolled out to the outside part of his lead foot.
But what I do want you to pay close attention to, okay, Is, you can see that the weight is predominantly centered on the lead foot, underneath his ankle joint.
It would be over in that green section on the other side that I pointed out.
You can see it over here on the downline perspective.
And I would have a good face on view for us so we could look at this as well, but there's not really a lot of good videos on his golf swing out there.
But notice that his weight before he starts to release the club is in that right back, in that green zone, on that left foot.
And in turn, that's going to allow him to stay more in true balance.
It's going to allow his central pivoting balancing joint to remain in his hip.
If the weight were to stay forward into the ball of the foot, then you're moving the central balancing pivoting joint down to the knee.
And that is very dangerous, very, very dangerous.
So ideally what we would like to do is we'd like to have that left foot nice and flat to the ground.
We'd like to have the weight centered right underneath that ankle joint.
But again, there's a lot of momentum that can carry you to the outside part of the foot.
Just make sure that you're using your glute muscles to help stabilize the lower half.
And you'll start to avoid some of that common hip pain, some of that common knee pain.
And we have some videos to help you out with that this week.
So if you've been struggling with any of that stuff, first thing I want you to do is I want you to watch the Finding True Balance video.
That's going to give you some further clarification on what it means to set up with a weight in that green section like I was talking about.
Weight on the balls of your feet.
That's a video that we're going to discuss some of the myths of the golf swing and give you some really good, solid information.
And then fixing your setup.
It's another video that a lot of our members get good, Good results with as far as giving you a detailed checklist to get yourself into a good, neutral posture, good balancing part, good stable lower half to start from.
And then in turn, you're not having to work on getting a lot of band-aids in your swing.
And then if you've been struggling with rotation, five minutes to master rotation.
That's a good video that's going to give you kind of a chunky checkpoint list of things to work through.
Start to rotate around your axis, just like Russell does here, and you'll be on your way to playing some really good, solid, consistent golf.
Okay guys, So, any of those videos can be found to the Recommended Videos tab to the right-hand side of our video player on the website here.
And if you have any questions, feel free to post those up and I hope you guys have a fantastic day.
Let's get out there and play some great golf.
William
Craig (Certified RST Instructor)
terry
Craig (Certified RST Instructor)
Mark
Craig (Certified RST Instructor)
Robert
Chris (Certified RST Instructor)
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Chris (Certified RST Instructor)
Tom
Chris (Certified RST Instructor)