Instruction
Your pelvis is the key to more distance
The golf product industry was built selling products that help you gain distance, and being fit for the right equipment can help you gain distance. Despite this, I routinely see golfers who have been fit for clubs still lacking one thing that can help them with distance: pelvic control.
The pelvis is the key to more distance. It is also the key to improved lower back health and better posture, too, along with the distance and power that all golfers crave. One thing I’ve never heard from a golfer is, “I want to hit the ball 20 yards less; I just hit it too far.” From tour players to long drive competitors to amateur golfers, distance is king, and more can be unlocked by ensuring the pelvis is working properly.
Our pelvis is the connection between our upper and lower body; it’s the vehicle for weight and power transfer throughout the golf swing. There are many muscles that affect movement and positioning of the pelvis, but the most important place to start is with neutral positioning.
Most people spend the majority their day sitting. Let’s paint a quick picture: wake up, shower, sit during breakfast, commute to work sitting 20-30 minutes, sit at your desk for 7-8 hours, commute home sitting, eat dinner sitting, watch television sitting and go back to sleep. For those of you who train at a gym, think of how many exercises do you perform where you are sitting — probably most of them. Just to prove a point, you are mostly likely sitting while reading this article. We do a lot of sitting as a society.
Sitting promotes prolonged pelvic positioning that places our pelvis in a backward-tilted position. This promotes tight hamstrings, back and upper thigh muscles, as well as weak buttock and abdominal muscles. Prolonged sitting is robbing you of distance on the golf course. So I guess the answer is more standing, right? I wish it were that simple. Standing incorrectly can cause similar problems.
Before we go further, let’s discuss some basic anatomy of the pelvis and talk about what it does. The pelvis does three basic things.
- Tilt
- Side Bend
- Rotate
Each motion affects the other. If there is too much or too little tilt, you have difficulty rotating. If you have too much side bend you have difficulty with tilting, etc. The goal is to find a neutral position.
Your neutral pelvic position is defined simply as the middle between forward tilt and backward tilt. Here’s you how to find neutral.
Sit in your chair with your feet on the ground. First, we should have some awareness of where you currently are. Is your pelvis tilted forward or backward? Imagine you’re wearing a large belt buckle; is it tilted closer to your belly or more toward the floor? Awareness of where we are is an important first step. Now let’s find the middle of our motion, or our neutral position.
Our cadence and order for movement to find neutral is
- Arch your back.
- Flatten your back.
- Arch your back.
- Flatten half way.
I will now take you through finding neutral in sitting.
Arch your back or belt buckle so it tilts toward the floor. Now flatten or round your back. This is the same motion we do when we relax sitting into a couch. Then arch your back again and flatten your back half way. The position you are in is your neutral position (keep in mind that it’s different for everybody).
This neutral position is the key to balance, power and most importantly distance in the golf swing. It sets you up to be able to load into your backswing and transfer power and weight into your lead leg.
Finding Pelvic Neutral (Seated)
Most golfers are not in a neutral pelvic position when they address the golf ball. There are two common pelvis faults that you’ve probably heard of that plague most golfers: S-posture and C-posture.
S-posture is a setup position that can lead to lower back pain, balance issues and inconsistencies in our swing. C-posture can lead to similar issues, but most important to us as golfers is both postures are robbing us of distance.
Finding Pelvic Neutral (Standing)
Our brain is in protection mode at all times. If you are set up in either S- or C-posture and are risking a possible injury, your brain will decrease your muscle force output. This means you are working at a decreased capacity when you swing the club. Proper setup with your pelvis when you address the ball is vital for setting the foundation to a fast and stable swing. Trying to hit a golf ball from an improper pelvic position at address is like trying to fire a cannon from a canoe. You will have to get it “just right” to get any distance.
Finding and maintaining this neutral pelvis position can be achieved by spending more time in neutral and exercising there as well. The first step starts with finding neutral, as explained earlier, and supporting it while you are sitting at work and home. To train neutral you will first start by lying on your back with your knees bent up.
Place your hands on your buttock muscles and squeeze your buttock muscles as hard as you can. We are using your hands to measure how hard you are squeezing and if your right and left buttock are squeezing equally. You should feel a strong contraction when you tighten your buttock muscles. If your buttock muscles are not working properly, you may experience tightness in your hamstrings or abdominals. This means your buttock muscles are probably not working to full capacity or are inhibited. If you get a good buttock squeeze on both sides, try to squeeze one buttock at a time. You should be able to tight one buttock muscle with the opposite side relaxed. If these are easy, then your next move is to lift your hips in the air and perform a bridge.
While your hips are in the air, straighten one leg out. With your leg straight, can you keep your pelvis level? If you experience any hamstring cramping, lower back tightening or cannot maintain a level pelvis, your buttock muscles are not working properly.
Your buttock muscles tilt your pelvis backward. This is important because when standing in golf posture your pelvis is already tilted forward so your buttock muscles need to be working to stop the pelvis from tilting too far forward. As you rotate your pelvis into your backswing your tilt decreases, which is controlled by your buttock muscles. If your buttock muscles are not stabilizing properly, you will not be able to control your pelvis and will be unable to transfer weight properly from your lower body to your upper body. Being unable to control the stability of your pelvis will result in a loss in distance and inconsistencies with your swing.
If your buttock is contracting properly, we need to challenge you in different positions. Standing up, can you tilt your pelvis forward or backward? Now get into a golf posture as if you have a longer iron, cross your arms and rest them on your chest and try to tilt your pelvis forward and backward. We will use the same cadence as before, arch your back, flatten your back, arch your back and flatten half way. This is your neutral position in golf posture.
Beginning your swing in a neutral pelvic position is the key to more distance. As you flatten your back or rotate your pelvis backward you may experience vibrations in your pelvis. This can be alarming to some people, as it seems to happen involuntarily without your control. These vibrations have been commonly called “shake and bake.” If this shake and bake happens it is because your brain is having trouble coordinating the muscle contractions that cause your pelvis to tilt. This lack of coordination performing your pelvic tilt will affect your ability to smoothly use your pelvis during your golf swing.
Your neutral position is individual to you and is your key to distance. Practice makes permanent, so we now need to train this position in standing. Our goal is to maintain a neutral pelvis while we squat, push, pull, throw and carry things. And if you can do that, there’s a good chance it will translate into more power on the golf course.
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Instruction
Clement: Laid-off or perfect fade? Across-the-line or perfect draw?
Some call the image on the left laid off, but if you are hitting a fade, this could be a perfect backswing for it! Same for across the line for a draw! Stop racking your brain with perceived mistakes and simply match backswing to shot shape!
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Instruction
The Wedge Guy: The easiest-to-learn golf basic
My golf learning began with this simple fact – if you don’t have a fundamentally sound hold on the golf club, it is practically impossible for your body to execute a fundamentally sound golf swing. I’m still a big believer that the golf swing is much easier to execute if you begin with the proper hold on the club.
As you might imagine, I come into contact with hundreds of golfers of all skill levels. And it is very rare to see a good player with a bad hold on the golf club. There are some exceptions, for sure, but they are very few and very far between, and they typically have beat so many balls with their poor grip that they’ve found a way to work around it.
The reality of biophysics is that the body moves only in certain ways – and the particulars of the way you hold the golf club can totally prevent a sound swing motion that allows the club to release properly through the impact zone. The wonderful thing is that anyone can learn how to put a fundamentally sound hold on the golf club, and you can practice it anywhere your hands are not otherwise engaged, like watching TV or just sitting and relaxing.
Whether you prefer an overlap, interlock or full-finger (not baseball!) grip on the club, the same fundamentals apply. Here are the major grip faults I see most often, in the order of the frequency:
Mis-aligned hands
By this I mean that the palms of the two hands are not parallel to each other. Too many golfers have a weak left hand and strong right, or vice versa. The easiest way to learn how to hold the club with your palms aligned properly is to grip a plain wooden ruler or yardstick. It forces the hands to align properly and shows you how that feels. If you grip and re-grip a yardstick several times, then grip a club, you’ll see that the learning curve is almost immediate.
The position of the grip in the upper/left hand
I also observe many golfers who have the butt of the grip too far into the heel pad of the upper hand (the left hand for right-handed players). It’s amazing how much easier it is to release the club through the ball if even 1/4-1/2″ of the butt is beyond the left heel pad. Try this yourself to see what I mean. Swing the club freely with just your left hand and notice the difference in its release from when you hold it at the end of the grip, versus gripping down even a half inch.
To help you really understand how this works, go to the range and hit shots with your five-iron gripped down a full inch to make the club the same length as your seven-iron. You will probably see an amazing shot shape difference, and likely not see as much distance loss as you would expect.
Too much lower (right) hand on the club
It seems like almost all golfers of 8-10 handicap or higher have the club too far into the palm of the lower hand, because that feels “good” if you are trying to control the path of the clubhead to the ball. But the golf swing is not an effort to hit at the ball – it is a swing of the club. The proper hold on the club has the grip underneath the pad at the base of the fingers. This will likely feel “weak” to you — like you cannot control the club like that. EXACTLY. You should not be trying to control the club with your lower/master hand.
Gripping too tightly
Nearly all golfers hold the club too tightly, which tenses up the forearms and prevents a proper release of the club through impact. In order for the club to move back and through properly, you must feel that the club is controlled by the last three fingers of the upper hand, and the middle two fingers of the lower hand. If you engage your thumbs and forefingers in “holding” the club, the result will almost always be a grip that is too tight. Try this for yourself. Hold the club in your upper hand only, and squeeze firmly with just the last three fingers, with the forefinger and thumb off the club entirely. You have good control, but your forearms are not tense. Then begin to squeeze down with your thumb and forefinger and observe the tensing of the entire forearm. This is the way we are made, so the key to preventing tenseness in the arms is to hold the club very lightly with the “pinchers” — the thumbs and forefingers.
So, those are what I believe are the four fundamentals of a good grip. Anyone can learn them in their home or office very quickly. There is no easier way to improve your ball striking consistency and add distance than giving more attention to the way you hold the golf club.
More from the Wedge Guy
- The Wedge Guy: Golf mastery begins with your wedge game
- The Wedge Guy: Why golf is 20 times harder than brain surgery
- The Wedge Guy: Musings on the golf ball rollback
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Instruction
Clement: Stop ripping off your swing with this drill!
Not the dreaded headcover under the armpit drill! As if your body is defective and can’t function by itself! Have you seen how incredible the human machine is with all the incredible feats of agility all kinds of athletes are accomplishing? You think your body is so defective (the good Lord is laughing his head off at you) that it needs a headcover tucked under the armpit so you can swing like T-Rex?
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Bb1
Apr 6, 2017 at 5:36 am
Thanks Jim. Appreciate it.
User
Mar 30, 2017 at 11:24 pm
Need to build a stronger pelvis so I can be better at Golf… and in bed
Dill Pickelson
Mar 30, 2017 at 11:18 pm
hugely important topic. thank you.
Bb1
Mar 30, 2017 at 7:33 pm
What commonly causes players to lose their posture and ‘stand up’ in their backswing or downswing from a physiological point of view?
Also could you explain why they may do the opposite and lose height?
Many thanks
Jim Alberry
Apr 1, 2017 at 12:40 pm
Bb1, There are a few reasons one may “stand up” in their backswing. Every problem can fall under two basic categories, physical or technical. I can only speak to the possible physical causes. Not every golf fault is the result of a physical limitation. Sometimes our physical limitations are actually the thing that sets up apart as golfers. If you do not have enough rotation in your hips or spine that can cause you to “stand up.” If your shoulders do not rotate enough that could also cause a “stand up” by lifting your arms. Believe it our not if you cannot touch your toes that could be the reason. Sometime we cannot touch our toes because we do not move our pelvis backwards as we bend. Most of the time we are unaware that we cannot do this which affects our golf swing because as we begin our back swing and rotate our pelvis we should be “loading” our trail side/ trail heel which is the same as our pelvis moving backwards. Pelvic rotation is an ellipse motion so for a right handed golfer rotating into their backswing the right hip is moving backwards. If we are unable to rotate in our hips, stay connected torso to lower body and torso to arms we will probably “gain height” into our backswing. Most of these could lead to the golfer losing height as well. If this golfer is you the best thing you could do is get a physical screen to make sure there are not any physical limitations affecting your swing and get that tied into golf lessons to make the body-swing connection.
larrybud
Mar 30, 2017 at 1:54 pm
While having a limber back and pelvis is all around good, it’s not the key to speed. Monte proves it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUx4Rtu58z4
Jim Alberry
Mar 30, 2017 at 5:26 pm
LarryBud-you are correct. Speed definitely can come from the arms, hands and wrists. Having a neutral pelvis and a solid base will allow you to transfer power to your arms and hands more efficiently so you can use that speed. This is the “firing a cannon from a canoe” example that is in the article. When your pelvis is stable you can “fire” those hands as fast as you can control.