Pete Cowen explains how your body should move in sync like a choreographed dance move when you swing.
We call the golf swing the pyramid of learning so you learn from the bottom to the top, and the bottom is all about good posture, good arm position and good grip.
Five steps to the right posture:
- To start with, your feet should be shoulder-width apart. This is actually the stance you should have most of the time. Maybe a little bit shorter or narrower in short shots or a little bit wider for the longer shots.
- Try to stand up perfectly tall and balanced so you have got a straight body.
- Touch your hip bones with your thumbs and from there you should bend from the hip bone forward. You should be able to feel your hamstrings up to your hamstrings pulling up to your backside.
- Allow your arms to relax and lower yourself into your knees and ankles, don’t sit down, just lower yourself so you have got the ground. The better you have control of the ground, the more control you’ll have above the ground, so that’s the most important thing.
- Get your posture right, let your arms relax and then put your club in position. From there you are ready to go.
Movement matters:
Now lets talk about the right movement that you should make. It is really more like a dance routine, of getting your body to work properly, not just turn and turn back.
You should load the power as you are turning. This is what we call the spiral movement. The quickest to get from the ground floor to the first floor is straight up, the second is the spiral way, going around.
We want the weight to come up from the left foot and spiral all the way up to the right shoulder, like a rope tied to my left foot twisting and I can feel the muscles turning up. That is the first movement and then from there as we are tying that rope to the top, you can feel it wants to get pulled back down.
The spiral movement becomes left foot to right ankle, left ankle to right shin, left shin to right knee, left knee to right thigh, left thigh to right hip, left abs to right chest, left chest to right shoulder as we are going.
It is a little bit like taking a cork out of a bottle, we push it in and then we twist it up.
Put a club behind you and windup to feel your whole body twisting so the right hip has to go up and back on itself, not just turn – we lose the power if we do that.
Because you have uploaded this way what happens then on the downswing is the spring loading unloads; down, around and through.
So it is a spiral, around and up, and a spiral down and around and through, it is not just a turn back and forth.
The reason it is not just a turn is because if I turn I am trying to find the club position. If I work the body and over the club with me, the club moves through these positions very easily and in sync.
