How improving sequencing can change your swing

Watch the video for a before and after swing analysis from one of my students.  The swings are about 9 months apart, and the focus of the lessons have been on improving his swing sequence in both the backswing and downswing.  This helped improve the faults of: [button style=”small blue rounded” link=”https://swingstation.com/backswing-sway/” ]Backswing Sway[/button] [button style=”small blue rounded” link=”https://swingstation.com/reverse-spine-angle/” ]Revere Spine Angle[/button] [button style=”small blue rounded” link=”https://swingstation.com/hanging-back/” ]Hanging Back[/button] and probably most importantly for this player, helping to start his downswing from the ground up, rather than with his arms.

Transcript

Hi, Robin Symes here. Hopefully, you’ve been watching some of my lesson videos over the last few months, been improving your understanding about the golf swing and developing your concepts. But I’ve just been thinking that perhaps, to help you transfer these into your own game, you need to see them applied in a more real life situation. So what I’m gonna try to do in a more regular basis is show you some of my students, my lessons and how I’ve been applying these concepts and the improvements I’ve been getting as a result. Here’s a good player to start with, this is about nine and a half months ago, we were in a camp just outside Dubai, during the winter. The weaknesses in his game would be off the tee, where he’d lose most of his shots just due to inconsistency with his driver. I think you’ll see quite clearly that the club and that his arms get out of position. His arms get behind his body, the club shaft gets too steep in the down swing. So high speed, he’s got a lot of compensations to make here, to head a good tee shot and that makes it difficult to repeat over one round or over a four-round tournament. Now, when I asked this player what he thinks he needs to work on, he would have said, “I need to get my arms more in front of my body. I need to improve my swing plan.” Perhaps some of you are saying the same and it would be right. These things need to improve for him to become a more consistent driver of the ball. But sometimes, it’s very — those are the obvious things you see, but very often, they’re not the root cause of the problem. So I asked this player not to worry too much about the position of his arms and the swing plan right now, which, obviously, he was surprised at. But I needed him to focus more on developing his concept about the body movement, understanding how to move his body correctly and in what sequence. Because, briefly explained, his hips had to much lateral movement in the back swing, where they would slide to the right, to finish the back swing, causing his upper body to tilt, which would affect the position of his arms and the club head. And then, because his weight was shifting so much into his right foot as he completed the swing, this would then not encourage the correct down swings sequence. So he would pull his arms first, quite severely, rather than leading the down swing with the correct lower body movement. I also asked this player not to try to go about fixing his swing, working on each individual aspect. He simply needed to learn the correct body movement and the correct sequence to the body movement. Except for a few lessons based on fundamentals, 90% of our lessons have been working on body movements and sequence and I’ll explain that with this drill I asked him to do. What he’s learning to do is start his body movement with shoulder rotation, separating his shoulders from the hips and that is quite a key point. There must be early separation, shoulders to hip, at the start of the swing. When this happens, it helps to keep the body in a more forward bent position, reducing that tilt he had. And also, that early separation encourages early separation of the down swing in the reverse manner, where now his hips will lead the down swing with some rotation, a shift to his left foot, a little bit of force into his left foot. That’s the sequence, shoulders start, the back swing, the hips will then follow and the hips, in the reverse order, the hips will lead and the shoulders will follow. Moving his body in this fashion, with this sequence, will greatly affect the position of his arms and the swing plan and turn. So when we skip now, we skip forward a few months and I’ll show you, just working on these concepts, the progress this player’s been making. look at the top of the back swing, his arms were getting behind him, the club was crossing over due to that slide to the right of his hips and the tilt of the upper body. Here, he’s rotating his chest first, encouraging his upper body not to tilt, improving the position of his club and arms at the top of the swing. And now, most importantly, rather than the hips almost doing nothing and the arms pulling in the down swing, causing his arms to get behind his body and the club shaft to get steep, now he’s leading the arm swing more with his lower body, causing his arms to come, automatically, more out in front of him and the club just staying more on plan. So I think, most people, most people will be able to see he’s got a loss less compensations on the right, to head a good shot, head a good driver shot, leading to more consistency, rather than more compensations of high speed, making it difficult to repeat. For me, this is just proof, that most players should be learning to move their body correctly first, in the correct sequence, before trying to fix any problems you might have with the position of your arms or the swing plan. Because if your body’s out of position, it’s very difficult to get your arms in the correct position. So quite clearly, you can see now the slide of the hips, the tilt of the upper body and the pulling of the arms. Here, chest rotating first helps to keep the body in a more forward bend position, with a little less tilt and then it encourages a better down swing where the hips will be leading more rather than the arms pulling. It’s a work in progress, you can improve this further over, over the next few months, but a greatly improved golf swing just by understanding how the body works and the sequence of the movement. Leave a comment if you want more detail about any of these aspects, but also, if you type in into my YouTube page, and type in golf swing sequence, you can get a little more detailed explanation about the correct sequence of the swing. Also, you can type in body movement, body pivot and you get a little more detailed explanation about how the body works correctly in the swing. So those are just — those concepts applied in a more real life situation and I say hopefully, if there is one thing you’ve learned from this, you should really be working on your body movement first and the swing sequence, before you try to tackle any other problems in your swing.