The obliques are largely responsible for separating the hips and shoulders to allow your body to rotate in the backswing. If you can teach your students to use the obliques properly, you will allow them to get more distance and club head speed.
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What's Covered: How to use the obliques in the golf swing.
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Instructors Featured: Clay Ballard
Video Duration: 2:08
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Hi guys, and welcome back, hope the teaching’s going well. In this video we’re going to talk about the obliques helping to rotate the body. There’s several things that are happening in the backswing to rotate the hips and to rotate the shoulders.
The obliques are really going to help you to separate the hips and the shoulders. So you can see here my hips aren’t moving, my shoulders are rotating, and my obliques are tightening and kind of forcing my body to twist, and you should feel pretty tight in your mid-section if you’re using the proper backswing.
One thing in the backswing that helps is we’re going to push into the ground, we’re going to use our legs. Our right foot is going to push out, my left foot is going to push back, and that’s going to help me to rotate my hips themselves.
Now here I haven’t gotten any separation between my hips and shoulders, you can see those are moving back together. I’m not using my obliques at all.
As I go to the top of the swing, I really want to feel like I use my obliques to turn my shoulders well past however far my hips are moving, and now I feel a good stretch through the side, I feel a good stretch in my left side, and I’m really wound up.
PGA Tour players are getting around 128° of shoulder rotation, that’s from shoulder socket to shoulder socket, not the actual spine itself, but 128° on shoulder rotation going back. They’re getting about 48° of hip rotation, so there’s a lot of separation between the hips and the shoulders, and that can’t happen if we’re not engaging our obliques.
So you should feel tight at the top of the backswing, that’s completely fine. If you have student that’s having trouble separating, number one, if they’re more overweight, if they’re a bigger player, sometimes they’re going to have trouble with that separation, that’s just kind of the fact of the matter.
Number two, make sure they’re engaging their obliques and really feeling that twisting in their mid-section. As they’re doing that you want to make sure also that they’re nice and tall throughout their spine.
So I don’t want to be slouched over and crunched like this. Even if I move my obliques, my shoulders really aren’t going to rotate and separate from my hips. I want to be nice and tall, that way I can rotate and my vertebrae are going to be lined up to where they can get their full maximum rotation.
So use those obliques, and get your bigger turn, get you more power, and your students will be a lot happier. I’ll see you guys soon.