Hit Great Shots off the tee with better rotation

Mastering the right combination of Posture and Shoulder Turn can truly elevate your golf game.

When tour players turn through the shot, they typically have 45 degrees of torso rotation through impact. Thus, turning through the shot a substantial amount.

Not only that, they have 30 degrees on average of side bend. That’s a substantial amount of body action.

The average player has a lot less. They only have 20 degrees of torso rotation and 20 degrees of side bend.

What the longer hitters do is use their pivot power.

To generate power “from the ground up,” start with a stable athletic set up.

As you begin your swing, push your right foot firmly into the ground.

Torque around your right leg by turning your right hip behind you. At the top of the swing, you should feel fully loaded with explosive power.

Don’t try to create speed with the wrong end of the club. Most golfers try to get the clubhead speed going as fast as they can. What actually happens is the clubhead out races the grip and the club releases early and creates more of a scooping motion at impact causing you to actually lose distance.

The feeling you want to create is that the grip is traveling faster than the head, staying in front of the head as long as it possibly can until impact. This will give you the best compression onto the ball.

Be sure to avoid these common pivot mistakes. First, the shoulders flattening out too much on the backswing which pulls the body up off the ball, from there you have to make all sorts of compensations to hit the ball.

And second, as the golfer tries to keep their head too much over the ball, nearly always the right knee will straighten and the hip will come up. That’s a big power leak, these two mistakes are going to lead to a lot of faults on the golf course.

For the first mistake, if we can maintain the axis of the back and turn our shoulders on that axis what you should see if you’re practicing this pivot exercise is if looked in the mirror you should see your shoulders at right angles to the angle of your spine. So your shoulders are turning correctly when they turn on the axis of your spine. Simply just practicing that exercise and then getting the feel of that, try to transfer that into your golf swing.

Now when our mistake is that the right leg straightens, this is best cured by bringing your left foot back behind you and up on the tip of the toe which puts more weight over your right knee and really activates the muscles just above your right knee, so you have good awareness of it. Now from there start making backswings, and just swing back and you will feel the flex of that right knee and the right sensations that again you want to transfer into your golf swing.

So have a few practice swings, feeling how that right knee stays flexed and resists the pivot then bring your left foot back into position and then combine that shoulder turn on the axis of your spine with that flex right knee resisting and you got the right set-up angles and pivot angles and you’re in perfect position with your body at the top of the backswing. From there you can just go on and unwind and hit the ball right down in the middle of the fairway.

If you can develop more pivot power, your shots will become much more powerful and give you more distance off of the tee.