Charl Schwartzel - How To Load Up Your Swing
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In this video, I'll show you how important weight shift and knee flex are in your golf swing for stability and power.
- Shift your weight to your trail heel or ankle.
- You should feel 80-85% of the weight into this foot.
- Maintain the knee flex as you complete the backswing.
This week we are going to be focusing in on the beautiful golf swing of Charl Schwartzel who just picked up a play off victory against Bill Haas this past weekend at the Valspar Championship.
We're going to be talking about one really critical move in the golf swing that can allow you to stabilize your hips. It can also load you up with more power in your golf swing. So if you've been struggling with getting yourself into a good back swing position, then pay close attention to today's review. Let's go ahead and get started.
Okay everyone, so this week we are going to be focusing in on how to build a more powerful backswing by focusing in on two really key moves here that a lot of amateur golfers tend to struggle with, and that is number one shifting your weight, and number two maintaining the flex in your trail leg. Those are really critical for stability of the hips and also being able to load your golf swing up. I'm going to show you a perfect example here, and Charl Schwartzel is known by a lot of the peers on the PGA Tour of having one of the best swings in golf. He does have a lot of really good moving parts, very pretty golf swing to watch from beginning to end.
We're going to be focusing in on two really critical areas that are going to help you. Number one, get into a better position at the top of the swing, and really get your focus on stabilizing your lower half. Let's go ahead and take a look here from a face on perspective first. What I want you to pay very close attention to, and this is a move that a lot of amateur golfers tend to not want to make off the golf ball because they feel like they're swaying off the ball.
It's best for us to use this little black thing back here in the background. This little chair is a reference point because the camera does shift around a little bit during this swing. I do want you to see as he's going to start to move the golf club back, okay you can see that he's shifting his weight to his right leg. Okay shifting about 75 to 80% of his weight into that right heel right ankle area which is extremely critical for us to be able to load our right leg up properly in the golf swing.
Remember your brain is going to respond to muscle tension, and if we know that we want to start our downswing with the lower half, then we've got to start to load those muscles up in that trail leg. It's really really critical that you start to allow yourself to shift into your right ankle and then start to rotate your body. Now when you get to a more advanced level, what you're going to be looking for is you can make those sort of moves happen simultaneously. That's perfectly fine, but you want to make sure that you're making a conscious effort to shift your weight first, and then stabilize by keeping your right knee flexed.
I'm going to show you what that looks like here with Charl. So go ahead and get him down to the address position. Very good posture from him. Just pay very close attention here to his right leg. So he's shifted his weight over there. You're going to see that he's going to maintain a lot of that knee flex that he had at address. Now, in a perfect world we do lose a little bit of that flex. That's perfectly okay. It's just when you notice that your right leg goes dead straight on you. You're going to notice that a lot of your weight starts to dip over to your left side, then you haven't dynamically loaded your trail side up.
Now, what can happen with that particular case is that. Let me go ahead and focus back over here from a face on perspective. If his weight were starting to fall over to his toes and his pelvis became really unstable, his golf swing could get longer and longer and longer because his hips will ultimately have more mobility in them. That way he can continue to rotate his spine, and then he can get his golf club to move further and further back. But you can see that this is the top of his swing. He's got really good load in that trail leg. He's being able to maintain his access tilt at the top as a by product of being able to load the right side up properly in the golf swing.
If you've been struggling with seeing that your golf swing's getting a little bit longer and out of control, then I really strongly suggest that you focus on shifting your weight first. Make sure you feel about 80 to 85% of your weight in your right heel, right ankle area. Then go ahead and feel like you're pushing that right heel into the ground. Keep your knee flexed, and then turn your body to the top of your swing and do several reps of this. Do 50 to 100 reps, and take a look at it on camera. If you're focusing on maintaining that knee flex, you're going to notice that your swing feels really short, really tight. It's also going to feel really loaded up.
Okay Rotary Swing golfers. Thanks again for tuning into this weeks tour analysis. I want to go ahead and let you guys know of a few videos that are going to relate to the stuff that I talked about in today's topic. I know it sounded real quick and real brief, but this is an area that we see so many amateur golfers struggle with. It's one of those areas that we can fix by allowing our body to feel like it can move into that trail side and help load things up properly.
We have the weight shift number two video that was just re-mastered and put out. That's the right hip line video. Fantastic video that's going to give you some check points about this whole process. All of these videos that I mentioned just now are going to be to the right hand side of the video player under the recommended videos tab. Just click that tab. You'll see all these videos populate.
The next video I want you to check out is the load the right leg for stability and safety in the golf swing. That's another critical video for you to understand how important it is for you to be able to dynamically load your right leg up. Also, check out load the right glut, shorten swing, start transition. That's another fantastic video that's going to teach you how to start getting things moving it back in the other direction once you become a little bit more proficient with loading this side up.
Then maintaining the knee flex, the anchor. So those of you that have been struggling with maintaining the flex in that right leg, there's a great device that can help you keep that flex in that right side. Then you'll be on your way to playing some really good consistent golf with a better back swing position.
Ron
Craig (Certified RST Instructor)
Stephen
Craig (Certified RST Instructor)