Clearing The Hips In The Golf Swing: Pros Vs Ams

In this episode of

pros

vs. AEM, we'll show you how to do a pro-like lower body pivot and in the process get rid of that nasty initial extension. Lower body pivot is a big issue for many

golf

ers and within that it is primarily a hip depth issue that we see quite often and we are looking at a gear image here with the bones feature on and this line Faint white at the bottom is a vertical glass panel that then gears are placed just behind the

golf

ers. back and runs parallel to the target line, so that's what you're seeing now, it just gives us a really nice visual representation of how the golfer is moving relative to the target line.

Does he do it? Do you move your

hips

closer to the target line? early extension or move them away which is what we would like to see and the difficulty with this move when we see the golfer float towards the target line as seen here is that it really creates a big space problem so the golf

swing

becomes can come down to a time and space problem that we have once the club moves we basically have a second to do everything and then where do we place the ball and the direction or where is the ball on the ground and the direction that creates our space , we have obtained that amount of room to operate and we see golfers very frequently and this affects not only high handicap golfers but also low handicap golfers and even professionals, the

hips

lose their depth in both the back

swing

and the the downswing most often, which is established by the backswing, but you lose the depth and the hips in the downswing and you really get tight on the golf ball and what that causes is that you have lost that space, so what causes it is that you have to do it. lift the handle when the handle lifts which we see a lot of toe impacts because of that or if you don't time it correctly you're obviously getting close to the golf ball and that heel goes in so you get those heels unpleasant. shots or even those side hand grips so it really creates and those are just a couple of the problems it really creates a lot of nasty problems for the golfer when they lose their hip depth in the backswing so let's get this guy rolling forward and we are.

Let's take a look, let's get rid of his body here and let's take a look at the bones very clearly. What we're going to do is trace the left hip and the right hip. and then we'll trace the center of his spine and we'll just put a crosshair here to reference where it starts and then we'll trace to where it ends at impact, so if we can get him moving, see our yellow line here represents his left hip, it's tracing left hip joint, the green line is tracing the right hip joint and that pink line is tracing the center of his spine there so we can see when he gets to the top of his swing.

We can see a lot more travel from that left hip than from the right hip, so the right hip basically came back now circling towards a golf ball, the left hip opened up a lot in and out of the target and then we can see Obviously the center of the hips fell somewhere in between, so now when we bring it down to the left arm parallel, we can see how it's trying to recover from that big hook, we would say from the left hip going in, now he's trying to come back out and we can see how closed his right hip is he pretty much went back to where it was one direction so again the right hip has done very little so far the left hip has been overactive now I'll say this will roll him over In that moment, this golfer was trying to get more hip turn because he wasn't hitting it as far as he thought he should, in an effort to get more hip turn, which is something we see all the time with golfers, they get that hip left super. active, you know the old saying, put your knee behind the ball, put your shoulder over your right foot, all those things, what that does most often is cause the left hip to travel a lot in the backswing.

Now golf is a backswing sport, it is an impact sport. So the implications of that are that it creates a difficult time for downswing and impact. Now, when we roll him into impact, with the left arm parallel to impact again, we can see how much more travel the left hip took to basically end up a little further away. forward than when I started at address and the right hip didn't do much other than move back and then really sail toward the golf ball and what causes the problem is when that left hip goes so far forward that you're left.

Again, it's a timing issue on the downswing, you're looking at less than a quarter of a second right here, on the left arm parallel, that left hip is still very much in front, blocking the right hip again, we've got room there. we're dealing with, so now we have less than a tenth of a second at impact, there's just not enough time to reorganize all of that and get the left hip out of the way so the right hip has a place to go, this creates the stall, the right hip is going to stop because again we have to get the club there somehow and the left hip is blocking the entire parade.

I have nowhere to go with the forehand, so just stall and you get what you get at impact, very little rotation, we can see that our sight has now actually moved towards the golf ball and slightly forward and you will get a pattern of very inconsistent impact because of this so now let's look at our pro and we're going to see something quite different so we'll play it up to here and you can see how it moves relative to that glass panel with such drastically different movements and then if it face, I'll just show you the back view or you can see it pressing against that glass panel in your cheeks as you twist and pivot during the golf swing, so here we go, we'll get rid of the body and just look at the bones and Let's trace from the same way we did with our amateur golfer.

We can already see how much more active the right hip is compared to what we saw in the morning, so the right hips move back a little bit and actually move towards the target left hip goes more forward but it's actually quite balanced between left and right and swings around that center location much more than we can see like all the great ball strikers do, there's that drift, there's that drop set up toward the target as the backswing is completed. Right there, that's the top of the backswing, we can see how everything is already in motion moving to the left side, over that left foot, and as we move it forward again, we basically have, you know, just looking at it, amounts quite similar in yellow. line versus green line again, that's a well-balanced pivot and everything's kind of shifted forward and then the left arm parallel, of course, and then if we knock it down at impact, we can see how I'll actually show you this. how these right leg bones, this right, excuse me, left leg bones, this left hip joint is now pretty centered over the top of the ankle, which is a really strong and powerful impact place to be and we can see how different, how equal these lines are. are compared to what we saw in the amateur golfer and that's how you turn your hips, that's how you maintain your hip depth and we can see it in contrast to the amateur golfer where his sights here are actually going quite a bit towards the target and it moves away from the target line, away from the ball when it comes into impact and then we'll just move them, so let's take a look here and we'll see, obviously, the targets on the left are

pros

in the Okay, here you see a much clearer difference when these golfers are together they are on top so it's pretty drastic how differently the left hip operates in these two golfers again the pros are excellent at impact most of us normal golfers we're really hyper with those hips in the first part of the swing in the backswing the rotation the final part we do very well but the pros do the initial part very well and you can see how much more space this amateur golfer has made beyond the cover.

It's a lot harder for the pros to make it easy on himself and then they're on impact, it's just miles of difference in how the hips have maintained or added depth on the right and lost depth here on the left, so what? what does all of this mean for you if you If you're more like the golfer on the left and you want to be more like the golfer on the right, then we need to retrain how these hips work in our pivot, we need to practice some focus and really retrain the movement sequence because if we just look at the overall movement pattern, there is a more complicated and demanding movement pattern for the amateur than for the professional, so this is not a question of the professional being more talented and be able to do things, it's more of It's about the pros doing less work by creating less work for him at the beginning so he can have all those advantages in the downstream phase, while the AM gets into more trouble at the beginning by doing more things and then you don't have time to undo all those things so it's not really a question of talent at all, it's more about how we organize these movements and our pivot and the best way to train this is to remove the golf club, like this than leave it on the ground or just put it on your shoulders with your arms crossed over your shoulders there and you really have to be very focused and think what is my right hip doing?

It needs to move more like the right hip here on the right side of the screen and it does it with the right hip on the left side and then you have to think right, so my right hip moves away from the target a little bit and starts to rotate back , while before my left hip may have been doing that, it may have actually moved away from the target now. I really want to focus on my right side, make sure my right hip moves back and around me. Golfers are very good at focusing on what's in front of their eyes, so we need to be a little more aware of what the left side of the body looks like. the right side is moving on this pivot now as you get very good at it without a golf club because golf clubs like magic it's like Harry Potter's wand it will undo all this good stuff if you don't it moves correctly, so you're going to do the right pivot without the club and then you're going to add the club.

We're not going to hit the balls, but you'll just add the club and swing, focusing on these same movements now if adding the golf clubs messes up the movements. above and we know there is a problem with the club and we will link to a video here that talks more about the problem with the club, but we have to have both the club and the body working together because the club can absolutely undo the body and the body . You can undo the movements of the stick so they have to be synchronized and then once you put that piece together, you don't have the stick, now you have the stick.

Now we start hitting the balls and we do it slowly at first and build up to You're not going to see much improvement and we have guys coming in all the time. I've been working on this for 20 years and I haven't been able to change it because you're always trying to change it or they're always trying to change it at full speed and you know, thinking about doing it at full speed, which won't happen because golf spins too fast, so that if you want to be more like the golfer on the right and less like the flower girl on the left, the way to do it is to break it down, go into hyperfocus mode and really put these things together with a little movement, without the club, with the club and then hit the balls, that's if you do it well enough for 5-10 minutes a day, you don't do it, you know, all day long. 5 to 10 minutes a day over the course of weeks or months, you will start to move more like the golfer on the right and then you will really start to see some benefit. in your ball strike, so give it a try if you need more hip depth at the right times in the golf swing, do that practice regimen and you will see improvements.