Why You Need This: Today, you'll discover "Pros Vs Ams | How To Get The Hips To Open At Impact"

In today's lesson...

Discover three very common issues in the golf swing...

...that make it nearly impossible to open your hips at impact.

Then get one setup "cheat" and a very easy "feel" that will allow you to overcome these issues...

...so that opening your hips becomes super simple!

If you struggle to open your hips, you HAVE to see if you're doing one (or all) of these.

 

 

 

 

Golf Pros Featured:

Instructors Featured: Clay Ballard    

Video Duration: 7:36

Video Transcription:

And I feel like most players, you struggle to get your hips open. I actually saw this drill from a fellow golf pro, and I wanna do my variation of this to really get you the feeling of how the hips should be opening in the golf swing. So what we do is we take a pool noodle and we're gonna put it about one foot in front of our lead foot and one foot behind our lead foot.

Um, doesn't really matter. Too much of it's exact, just in this general area is gonna be fine. Then I'm gonna take an alignment stick and put it through my belt loops. So that as I open my hips, I can hit this pull noodle. Now the goal is to make sure that when I open my hips, I tap that pull noodle before I get to contact.

So I don't want to have me hitting the ball and then hitting the noodle later. I wanna hit the noodle first in the downswing and then go through there. Now that's gonna get you the feeling in general, just if you're close or not, but there's three things that I found that really make it almost impossible to get those hips open and hit that noodle.

Before contact. If you're doing these wrong, it's gonna be very, very tough. So piece number one will be your weight going to your toes. So if I tend to let my weight come up on my toes, my hips go toward the golf ball. When my hips go toward the golf ball, obviously I'm getting farther away from this pool noodle and it's very difficult to have my my hips open.

That's the same thing as if you're getting a little steep and you tend to stand up or back out of the shot with your chest. That's the same thing as that weight going in the toes. And if I do that, I'm nowhere near this pole noodle now. So the trick with this is once you start your downswing feel like your weight actually goes towards your heels, like this is gonna back up and get closer to that pole noodle.

That also makes it very easy to open. And I can see when I do this, my front toe almost wants to come off the ground slightly, so I'm pushing for my front toe and then it goes back to the heel after that. And I feel like I'm really rotating everything. I'm smacking that noodle when my club is way back here somewhere.

That's the first piece. So if you're going toward your toes, man, it's gonna be tough to get those hips open. Piece number two, a lot of times players will set up with their toe very square. So not only are they going toward the toes in the down swing, standing up outta their posture, but then it's very difficult to open up your hips when this is happening.

I have a great little test for this. Set with your feet perpendicular to the target, so my toes straight ahead, my left toe be pointing to my golf ball here. And I want you to lock your knee, your left knee, and I wanna see how much I can keep this foot flat on the ground and rotate without either bending that knee.

Or letting my foot roll up off the turf. So you'll notice here if I cheat, my foot has to kinda roll off the turf and I can get more rotation. I want to keep it dead square and my knee locked. My right knee can go ahead and bend, but I'm gonna rotate as much as I can there. You'll feel that getting really tight in your left hip, and most players can get about 45 degrees.

To get more than that, you either have to let your knee bend or to roll that foot off, off the turf. Now what that's doing there is, that's a trick to see how much rotation you have in your hip socket. So if my knee stays or my toe stays forward, my knee stays locked. That's testing how much my upper part of my femur can rotate in the hip socket.

Just with my normal range of motion. Now some players doing this will only be able to turn 15, 20 degrees. If that's the case, I've got a perfect drill for you or a perfect tweak for you to do. Other players may be like, Gumby, I can't do this, but they may be able to turn the, the hip like that, get this all the way back there.

Well, I had to roll, roll my toe and bend my knee To do that, I had to cheat a little bit. So test your own range of motion. And if that's you, if you're the person that can only turn for 10 or 15 degrees, all you need to do is go ahead and flare that front foot out about 45 degrees. You see players do this all the time.

I see pros set up like this all the time. Now that turns out my upper part of my femur where it goes into my hip and I've preset my hip socket, essentially open or rotated outward. Now I can keep this foot flat on the ground and I can rotate well past 45 degrees and easily knock this little stick over.

That's the second piece. So wait on your heels, flare the foot open. That way it really helps you to rotate. The last piece is my chest again, if I stand up outta my posture, if my shirt buttons get farther away from the golf ball, if I start backing outta this shot, it's gonna be very difficult to open my hips.

I'm gonna tend to come down steep cast the club in the downswing. Back out of it. No hip rotation at all. So as you do these, I'm coming back to my heel heels. My left foot is preset open and I'm keeping my shirt buttons feeling like. They're down to the ground. The only reason I wouldn't chunk if I'm doing this or hit down in the ground is cuz my hands are leaning forward.

They're in front of the golf club, and I could get way close to the ground and still not hit the turf because my hands are leaning in front. That's the same thing that the pros are doing to create lag, to release that golf club out in front when they're swinging. So it ties in perfectly with what you wanna be doing.

Now, once I've done this, say 15, 20 times, I start to get the feel. Of when I'm doing it right, when I'm doing it wrong. When I can easily hit this pull noodle, then I can simply just take this outta my belt and remove the pull noodle and try to recreate that same feeling. And you'll see here my hips get plenty open as I make this swing.

Let's go ahead and give it a whirl.

I hit that one pretty solid. I think my T flying around the warehouse here, it may gone farther than the golf ball we can see there. Now that I got open, I was easily able to clear outta the way through that shot. 3 0 2 total distance, nice and solid shot. Now I will say there is one small issue with this lot of players, like we talked about earlier, used to having themselves come outta posture, stand up and get that club steep.

Well, if you take that same kind of club position, that steep more over the top, and now I start to clear out of the way I'm gonna start to come across the golf ball, it's very common when you try to get your hips more open, like the pros are doing that you start to hit a little bit too much of a fade.

You start to cut across the ball a little bit too much. Well, what you need to do is get that club shallowed out way from the inside, way more from the inside than most people ever realize they need to do. And when I get that club shallow out in here and I start closing the face on this, Then I can turn left as hard as I want.

And that club still goes from the inside and swings inside out for a nice tight draw, even when you get your hips really, really open. Now that's exactly what I teach you to do in the move section. So once you're done with this video, I challenge you to today, right now, head on over to the move section and just do one video.

Watch that one video and pair that up with what we talked about here today. If you start opening your hips more, you're probably gonna slice it. Nobody likes slicing it cuz it goes pretty dang on short and it feels like the harder you swing, the ball just kinda limps out there. You don't have any power on it.

What I want you to do is pair up what we talked about here with the hips, with the move where we know everything's gonna be drawing. I want you to have that power draw from the inside. I want you to feel like you can open up as much as you want to and that ball's still gonna turn over from right to left and feel like it's hit pretty dag on hard and goes a long way.

So going over the move section, do one video from there today, and then when you go out to the range of the golf course next. Work on pairing these two things up that we talked about. You're gonna be well on your way. So click the instruction tab, go to the top speed golf six system, click on the move and do one video.

There's only a handful in there. You'll be amazed at how much better you play when you put these two things together. I'll see in the move next.