Pete’s Pointers – Modern Life is Bad for your Golf
Here’s Why and How to Fix it
In addition to a busy work and life schedule demoting your golf time, ‘normal’ life activities make it MUCH harder for people to develop a consistent and powerful golf swing. Here’s why, along with a simple way to help correct a multitude of golf swing ‘issues’.
Sitting Pretty?
We now have plenty of creature comforts, such as squishy sofas to sink into in front of Netflix, send messages or scroll through Instagram. We have comfy car seats to make those travelling miles a little easier, and we also have fancy office chairs to keep us at our desks managing everything online.
We are almost encouraged to be more inactive than ever before. Sitting down for hours a day both at work and home, deactivates the core muscles and encourages rounded shoulders, generally promoting bad posture including in the golf swing.
Stressed Out?
Added to our seated ways, the stressors in our lives often have the effect of tension in the muscles of our neck and shoulders. The extra tightening of the shoulder muscles means the shoulders get lifted out of their relaxed position, resulting in raised shoulders.
Set up Key
Along with grip, aim and stance, a good posture is one of the fundamentals of the set-up. All golfers can master, but many just rush through the set up, eager to give the ball a whack! Before you even start swinging the club, pay close attention to standing in the right place and holding the club right. Look at Scotty and his meticulous gripping of the club. If it’s good enough for him…
A good posture includes -amongst other keys- a straight spine tilted over from the hips. The benefits are:
- Allowing maximum body rotation to generate efficient power.
- Encouraging the head to remain in the same spot until impact, for maximum consistency of strike.
Set Up Drill
Stand tall imagining a thread pulling your head up from the crown of your head as tall as you can. You should feel the neck a little longer, perhaps the mid back muscles working harder and even an activation of your core.
Allow any tension in your neck and shoulders to release and let your shoulders sink into their sockets.
That feeling of your straight back and relaxed shoulders, should be taken into your golf posture.
Swing Key
Feel the shoulders relaxed into their sockets at the start and throughout the swing. This will keep the arms better connected to the body, and stop the undesirable flying elbow in the backswing, and also a chicken wing in the follow through.
Swing Drill – The classic towel
In this simple drill, a towel is clamped under the very top of upper arms in the set up. Make half swings, and hit some balls, keeping the towel in place. This really promotes the arm-body connection for consistent ball striking.
BONUS: It also has the HUGE benefit of minimising the dreaded shanks!
So, next time you’re on the range give your posture some TLC with the tips above, and let me know the results!
If you’re in need of more posture tune up, click here to book a lesson. You game will thank you for it!
Happy golfing!
Pete
Pete Langford PGA