Learn to Create Ground Force and Weight Transfer with a Gym Ball

Hi, Robin here. I’ve got a good drill for any players who feel like they’re struggling transferring their weight during the downswing, shifting their weight to the left foot. If you feel like you’re hanging back on your right foot, your weight’s staying too much on your right foot; you’re spinning your hips open too early. Also, players who feel like they can’t use the ground to create any energy in the downswing.  There’s ground forces which we’re hearing a lot about these days.

First of all, I’d like to say that I don’t take any credit for this drill. I saw this from an instructor Andrew Rice. Clearly, a great instructor, and hopefully this is just helping spread the word.

So what we need is we need a wall, a gym ball, and we’re going to trap it between the wall and our hip. And it’s as simple as this. If you have just a little bit of pressure at address, the gym ball is actually pushing you away from the target. And the goal is to make your backswing, and then actually try to squeeze the ball against the wall. Now, in doing that, you’re going to start to feel like you’re pushing off your right foot. You’re creating some forces under your right foot.  It’s going to be helping move your left hip over your left foot, transferring your weight to your left foot.

The resistance makes it quite difficult, but we find if you add some resistance, if you make it a little bit more difficult, when you take away the ball, you go back to the driving range, what you’ll find is, naturally, you’ll be making this movement a lot more easily.

So there’s really no limit to how much you can repeat this. It depends how severe your fault is. But really, once you start to get a good feeling for this, take the ball away.  Go to the range.  Hit some balls with the same pressures, with the same forces you’re feeling in the swing, and I’m sure you’re going to find that you’re starting to move to your left foot better.  Your lower body is leading the downswing.  You’ll be getting more solid contacts with a lower, more penetrating ball flight, hopefully creating a little more distance.