Pros vs. Ams | Golf Swing Hip Rotation

In today's episode of

pros

versus aEM we want to try something a little different. Typically, what we will do is show you a typical movement pattern of an amateur

golf

er and then we will compare and contrast it with what a typical professional

golf

er does. Now there are a lot of benefits to that because it helps shape your concept for these given movement patterns, but today we're going to change that and do it a little bit differently. We will guide you through the actual lesson we have. with this morning we will show you the

swing

he started with, we will show you the problems that arose from that

swing

and then most importantly we will show you the progress throughout the lesson, you will learn what he was feeling and you will see what he was dealing with to do to make the changes.

We will then share with you the professional swings we used in this lesson to really help this golfer achieve the swings you will see. At the end of the video we see so many golfers struggling with the same problem that we thought it would be useful for you to see the actual progression of the changes we made in this lesson, so it will be beneficial for you when you are out. there working on his own swing just to give you a little backstory. Before we jump into the swings, what we typically do is when a golfer comes to a lesson, especially for the first time, we have him warm up and hit the balls and as we do that we will ask him questions to try to find out the real reason. why he came and what his goals are for the session and, in the future, in the morning and we'll just call him John so we don't have to keep referring to it.

For him, as in the morning he was 50 years old and a good tall athlete in a single-digit golfer, he now described his game as a short scratch player with a double-digit long game as he hit his last hottest balls. He looked and saw that we were watching some of his previous shots and said, I know what you're looking at and I know what you're going to try to do. They'll try to get me like everyone else. stop pushing my hips towards the golf ball on the downswing and he laughed and COE, good luck with that, my answer was okay, if you're loose, let's get you dressed, start capturing your swings and show you exactly what what are you doing. doing and that's where we'll continue this video, we'll show you the first swing that we captured and walk you through the progress of the lesson and the changes that he made.

He's watching the first swing we captured. John, your comments during the warm up, poor tele and you were right, it seems like he shows his hips towards the ball on the downswing, but that really wasn't his problem while hitting, he tells me that he has never seen a swing of his where he didn't see his hips pushed into the golf ball and that's all anyone is really trying to fix with him and he also felt like he was a good enough athlete to get away with it most of the time, which worried him the most. However, it was about how agile and time dependent he felt at impact, you know, when hitting the ball, he felt that if he could open up more he would have a more stable release and with that better misses, so he told us every time that I had tried to get it.

The more open things got worse and that's the real reason he came in. Now let's take a look at what is happening in John's swing, what is causing two things that he didn't like to feel or see what the ball was actually in. John had a flawed way of thinking. about his

rotation

, specifically the

rotation

of his pelvis, the pelvis has so much importance in what happens with it that when it is off and not moving well, the rest of the swing becomes a series of compensations and saves. John's first problem here was in his setup, his hips were too far behind his ankles, this is such a common problem that we see at least once a day and it almost guarantees that you will push your hips forward during the descent towards the ball of golf you are looking at now, compared to some of the best balls.

The forwards of the world notice where the center line of his hip falls in relation to his ankle. John is used to setting up with little to no flexion in the ankles, which forces the hips back. Notice Ben's ankle and the resulting forward shin angles of the

pros

, that's what he allows them. to place his hips over his ankles here he braced himself and this is John before and after going from the setup here on the left to the setup on the right. This is important because at one point or another you're going to find this balance it's best if you do it here it's set up so it doesn't change the space that you created and set it up during the golf swing so that's the first thing to prepare your hips for. move correctly, is to configure them correctly.

You shouldn't tax any of your reserves of talent to do this well, so there's no excuse for having bad alignment of peles, etc. Below we analyze his conclusion. When there is a problem with your hips, it is usually easy to spot early on, so here you are. Looking at John and one of our Tour Pros, this is from the back angle and with gears we can put this vertical plane behind the golfers or the sheet of glass as we like to call it and this is the same plane that you saw from below. In the line view in the last segment, most golfers have their hips slightly open and you can see the evidence of that with their left cheeks pressed slightly against the glass.

As these guys start moving, you'll see two distinctly different movement patterns here. On the glass, the professional has taken fingerprints from the glass by turning his left cheek towards his right cheek just as he would do if a contrast fingerprint was taken. John has completely lost contact with the glass, but remember that John started with much deeper hips, so he practically forced himself to lose contact with the glass when he started moving and then when we let these swings take place, he shouldn't surprised to see that the rest of the hip continues to do opposite things, so every time we see a golfer.

In fights like this and this Windex test, 99 times out of a hundred the golfer is putting a bad concept into practice. We showed John a swing from this aerial view and asked him to describe how his pivot feels or how he tries to pivot at all times. his swing said I'm trying to rotate around my right hip on the backswing and then rotate around my left hip on the downswing, that's pretty much what I was doing or at least as well as it could be done, I was also paying a penalty for We call that a key pivot because one of our golfers a while ago said he felt like he twisted around his right hip and then quickly tried to pivot around his left hip.

The two big problems with the key pivot is what it does to the center of your pelvis and the time it takes to do it, we'll use John's swing here to explain what we mean by that, so this line you're seeing on the screen here will now plot the movement at the center of your hips. the trace that draws the center of the hip throughout the golf swing notice how the idea of ​​rotating around your right hip forces the center of your hip to make a straight line towards the golf ball that the center of the hip already he has moved two inches forward when his club reaches the end of his serve and that is when the club is parallel to the ground, which is why we saw him lose contact with the glass here at the end of his serve and this is the so-called early extension, here is when it starts, this is what causes golfers to drive their hips towards the golf ball on the downswing and you can see here how early that failure occurs.

It occurs at the beginning of the backswing, but because golfers pivot around their right hip, the right hip often stays in that butt line until the downswing begins and the right hip begins to rotate toward the golf ball and that's when When most golfers think they extend early, they think it's a down swing fault, but as you can see here, it happens very early in the backswing and then as you get closer to the top of your swing, you can see how There is no way you can recover from this move. It took him three quarters of his second.

That's all we have in the golf swing from address. The impact lasted a second. He took three quarters. one second to get to the top and that's pretty standard among all golfers; It's just not something you can really successfully recover from in a quarter-second fall; In fact, I don't remember any golfers who asked for early extensions and didn't do it. Do this move early in the backswing and I really don't remember anyone successfully recovering from it. You can also see the damage this does to his ability to rotate, which as we found out a moment ago was the real reason he came in.

His hips are open 18 degrees here at impact, his chest is open 14 degrees and his shoulders are closed 15 degrees and that's why impact feels so bad and volatile to him. John was a classic example of this problem we see all the time. Here's a look. to several other golfers who have the same problem and what that looks like in his swing after understanding what the bad concept looks like. John said, show me what I should do. Instead, we show him these three following professionals and you'll see that he can get a really clear picture of the right concept and the right moves.

These three guys represent over a hundred million dollars earned on tour, over 30 wins and six majors. This is the best you can get to see how the pelvis should move during the swing and how to visualize the rotational pivot point of the hips both forward and backward. Notice the commonalities here: They have a small lateral shift to the right at the beginning of the backswing, then they rotate around the center of the pelvis and travel back. target as the pelvis is still rotating close, that is a big problem for most golfers notice how they are not rotating towards the top of the backswing and then moving forward on the downswing, they are moving forward while that rotation Closing and backswing are still happening.

They continue to rotate around the center of the pelvis in the downswing, so the main difference between what you're seeing here and what we saw in John's swing is that the center of the pelvis moves almost laterally without that big lateral movement. Golf ball. . Quan calls this the shift, rotation, shift, pelvic rotation pattern and it's something we see in top players time and time again. Now John's light bulb was really on and he said, "You're telling me that all I have to do is feel like I'm spinning." about halfway up my hips, that seems a lot easier than what I was trying to do, with just that simple thought in mind of rotating around his hips from his new setup and without a golf club, we had John do some slow turns back and forth.

His only thought was to try to feel the movement of the middle of his hips in space. Closing his eyes was a great help for him. Once he felt that he had mastered those movements, we put the stick back in his hands and asked him to make some moves. but continuing to go slow once he felt good moving with the club now allowed him to increase speed. Has he started hitting the balls? We also started capturing his swing again so we could start anchoring his fields to the reels. Here are his pelvic stroke progressions, which is all we worked on as he worked on the process of changing this movement pattern, this was the first swing instead of a straight vertical movement towards the golf ball, now he has a little bit of a forward component to that movement, it's still not moving away and there's still too much movement towards the ball, but you can see it's improving.

Here it was on the second swing he did 20 miles per hour club head speed just so he could feel a more exaggerated movement with the center of his pelvis again and here is his third swing now we are closer to normal speed only Now you're using that ball breakaway motion at the beginning of your swing this is swing number four call it the full speed bear hug swing now with the exaggerated feel of the previous two swings you've now completely reversed the motion you had when entered for the first time. This was the first time I was hugged during a lesson.

He said that he had never seen himself swinging at full speed without any props. or chairs or alignment aids or training without seeing your hips pushed towards the golf ball this swing was the first time you saw this is swing five this was the fastest swing of the day so far by three miles per hour it's starting to get the now sorry without the hype and the swings from 6 to 37 almost all looked like this. He forgot about trying to get wider or less agile during the hit. He had completely forgotten, but we didn't. This is swing 38.

The speed of it had gradually increased from 83 milesper hour on the first wing we captured that day at 92 miles. in one hour these were all 7 irons because of the way his pelvis had completely changed, what was his only focus his hips went from being 18 degrees open at impact to now 33 degrees open his chest went from being 14 degrees open to now 23 degrees open and his shoulders went from being 15 pieces wide to now being square on impact, that's the biggest one and that was the real reason the impact felt so terrible to him. Having square shoulders stabilized his release and gave him a much better club path for the shots he wanted to hit. on the course, so that's it, in 38 swings, John gave himself 9 miles per hour more clubhead speed.

He completely changed his concept of how to pivot and that allowed him to change his movement pattern greatly. He got rid of something that he had given up on, he had given up all hope of not pushing toward the ball on the downswing and he got something that he had been trying so hard to get. He is now more open and rotated than ever. He has been before he did it all without an exercise or without a training goal. His process was to adopt the right concept and then, little by little, create awareness of how those movements differed from what was normal.

He also gave himself permission to experiment and exaggerate, but most importantly he kept The singular focus on the cause of John's original hip movements is one of the most common golf swing problems we see every day. Hopefully this will help you better understand and visualize how to make these changes to his own swing. John is a great example of taking some of what the best in the game do and applying it to his own swing. You can do the same. Don't settle for how it looks on the TV screen. Try to really understand and find. evidence of what they're actually doing, you can turn that into real, tangible results just like you saw John do here Hi guys, we hope you enjoyed today's video, if you enjoyed it go ahead and give it a like too if you have any.

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