GolfPlus June 2018 Digital Edition (June 2018) | Page 36

Good balance:
Nice solid takeaway. Long trailing arm with the left shoulder
well below the right ensuring the Spine angle is retained.
Good balance comes from a nice athletic
posture in which your core is engaged. The
Glutes and your stomach muscles form a
major portion of your core and these muscles
need to be strong to ensure a good balance
when your club is moving at 100+ miles on
the down swing. The club swinging at that
speed creates a lot of centrifugal force and
it becomes very tough to keep it the body
in position. As an example If you tie an
object to a string and then swing the object
in a circle around you, it becomes harder to
hold onto the object. Centrifugal tendency
pushes the object in a straight direction or
outward, making it harder to hold on. As you
spin the object faster, the centrifugal tenancy
increases. In a similar way the centrifugal
force created by the driver is pulling you
away much more than a wedge since the
shaft is longer and thus making it tougher
to control the driver. The body needs to be
much stronger to hit a driver and also to keep
in balance while swinging one.
Consistent spine angle
Even the best address position can get
derailed by a common backswing mistake.
When you set up, you establish a certain
amount of forward bend from your hips,
which creates an angle between your spine
and lower body. If you want to hit the
ground in the right spot and get the right
amount of it-two keys to hitting solid shots-
you need to retain the posture you set at
address all the way through impact.
Instead of turning the shoulders around the
original spine angle, many amateur golfers
stand up out of their posture and turn their
shoulders on a À at plane That kind of level
turn tends to move the arms too far to the
inside and makes it dif¿ cult to get back
down to the ball.
The more you can rotate around a consistent
spine axis, turning your left shoulder under
your right (for right handed golfer) the more
consistent contact and ball speed you’ll be
able to produce.
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GolfPlus
JUNE
A perfect position on the top of the backswing. The player has retained the spine angle,
left shoulder well below the right and is in a great position to start the downswing.
2018