All About Pushes, Part 2

Good morning, magnificence. Welcome to our second consultation about pushing the ball.

A quick note, just to make sure we're all on the same page: Rather than try to use left and right all the time when I have both left-handers and right-handers reading this, I simply use the terms lead and trailing. If you're left-handed, your left side is your trailing side; if you're right-handed, your right side is your trailing side -- and obviously your other side is your lead side. Got that? Good. Let's move on.

We ended the day gone by's class about the primary of ordinary reasons of pushed pictures with this:

The club swings in-to-out -- that is, pushes the ball -- because your trailing shoulder is lower on the downswing than it was on the backswing. And to lower your trailing shoulder, you have to lean away from the target. So the more you lean away from the target, the more in-to-out your swing will be... which means you'll get a bigger push.

Almost every instructor agrees that your spine has to angle back away from the target a little bit. That's because your trailing hand is lower on the club than your leading hand, so your trailing shoulder has to be a bit lower. The big question becomes how much tilt away from the ball is enough?

This is where such a lot of people get tripped up. We need to approach this from a couple of various guidelines to understand what is going on.

First, let me refer you back to a post I wrote in October 2009, only a couple of months after I started this blog. The post was called Meet Gary Coilman and it involved a little prop made from popsicle sticks and cardboard. (Isn't he cute?)

The whole point of that post was that you don't have to move your shoulders up and down during your swing to get the appearance that they're moving up and down as you turn. (Remember, you're trying to hit down on the ball at impact, so most people think that means you have to bend forward and dip your trailing shoulder. Wrong!) You can read the original post to get the gist of it -- Gary explains it better in a few pictures than I can here in words -- but I'll just say that you don't have to lean backward at all to get some downward motion of your trailing shoulder.

The 2nd factor we need to recognize is that a number of the backward tilt we see in a golf swing is an illusion. It's due to the manner our skeletons are constructed... And the incorrect photo most people keep in our minds. Here, take a look at this diagram. (Yes, that is a right-handed version. The left-exceeded model is a little farther down, after the subsequent paragraph, to be able to visually separate them.) In it we're searching down from above -- the huge oval is your hips, the smaller oval is your head, and the dark circle is your backbone:

Most of us imagine our skeletons look like the top three drawings -- that our spines are in the center of our heads and hips. They're actually constructed like the bottom three drawings -- our spines are near the back of our heads and hips. This means that our heads and hips appear to be offset slightly as we swing back and through, not centered.

I've added dotted lines to the images to show how what we actually see differs from what we expect to see. In the backswing position I've drawn dotted lines at the outside of the trailing hip and lead ear. Notice that in the actual position it appears that both have moved backward, away from the ball, when the spine position in the drawings hasn't changed at all. (The head has also rotated slightly away from the ball. This tends to happen automatically for most players.)

Likewise, in the downswing position -- I left the head slightly rotated away from the ball because most of the pros whose swings we study in the videos tend to do that -- it looks as if the hips have moved much more toward the target in the bottom picture. That's totally because of the spine not being centered in the head and hips; in these diagrams I haven't moved the spine at all. That's important. I merely rotated the head and hips around the spine in all the pictures, as if the spine was completely vertical... but it looks as if the spine should be tilted, doesn't it?

Now let's bounce returned a few days to the submit that included a video of Na Yeon Choi's swing. I've taken stills from the video displaying the identical three positions inside the previous diagrams, however I've delivered a directly line representing her backbone role. The line runs from the position of her backbone at the bottom of her skull all of the manner down via its position in her hips. Notice how, even though her body appears to have moved a huge quantity, her backbone absolutely changes its tilt little or no both way from its address position:

NYC's spine receives a piece greater vertical at the top of the backswing (center %) and tilts a chunk more at effect (rightmost percent) than it become at address. But it's not a great deal in any respect, is it? Because her hips are rotating and her head is still became barely faraway from the target, it looks as if her hips have slid plenty farther forward all through the downswing than they truely have.

Again, this is a lot to digest so this is probably a very good location to forestall for the day... But I want to give you a manner to begin getting to know what a correct flip appears like. To achieve this, I'm going to present you a drill from an older publish, however with a twist. (Actually, it's extra of a tilt.) And you might not even want a club to do it, so you can do it everywhere, each time, for free of charge! What a deal, eh?

I want you to go to a post called More Indoor Practice . It links you to a drill at the Golf Tips Magazine site that teaches you how to make a correct turn back and through without a club. (It says it teaches you to make a body-driven swing rather than an arm-driven one, but a good swing uses both in a balanced way. This drill is good for learning the body part, and my post explains why.) The idea is that you learn how the proper coiling action and footwork feels, then you can learn to do the move with a club.

But I'm going to make a slight change to the drill because I want you to learn the Gary Coilman position. Instead of crossing your arms and placing both hands on both shoulders -- which will make your shoulders level when you stand up straight -- I want you to place your lead hand on your trailing shoulder but put your trailing hand on your lead elbow. Let me give you those instructions specifically for lefties and righties:

• Righties: Left hand on right shoulder, right hand on left elbow.
• Lefties: Right hand on left shoulder, left hand on right elbow.

This change will cause your trailing shoulder to be slightly lower than your lead shoulder during the drill, just as in the Gary Coilman post.

What will this body turning drill do? It will educate you to make a complete balanced turn with an automatic downward strike and true footwork multi functional! The new arm role will possibly reason your lead shoulder to push your chin away from the goal -- much like NYC's head inside the video. (In reality, on the top of backswing position, your shoulders could be almost parallel to the floor despite the fact that your backbone is tilted toward the ball. You can see that in the drawings on the Coilman post.) And while you turn inside the downswing, it'll sense as in case you're hitting down -- believe me in this one.

If you do the drill efficiently, you'll be able to make a balanced "swing," both going returned and coming down, and your head will live just inside your trailing knee. If you do it wrong, your lead shoulder goes to pressure your head and backbone too a ways far from the target, and your head will grow to be leaning over your trailing foot.

A quick note: The higher lead shoulder position you'll use in this drill is different from some swing methods, such as Stack and Tilt. I'm not saying that SnT (or other methods where your lead shoulder swings more under your chin) are wrong. But SnT was created to fix a problem that I'm trying to prevent from ever happening in the first place. If you already use a SnT swing, just use the drill exactly as the Golf Tips Magazine article suggests.

Practice this drill a few today -- depart me a remark when you have any issues or questions -- and we will preserve our consultation tomorrow. Class dismissed!