Why You Need This:

Today’s training is on the quads. The quadriceps cover the front side of the thigh and femur. The purpose of the quads is to straighten out the lower to upper leg. If your legs have angles at the knees, then the quads help to eliminate that angle when fired (extension). This is obviously a huge part of the posture at address, and for moving the body mass up and out for contact and follow through movements. These movements allow for hip clearing and rotation.

What's Covered: How to use the quadriceps in the golf swing.

Golf Pros Featured:

Instructors Featured: Clay Ballard    

Video Duration: 3:22

Video Transcription:

Hi guys, and welcome back. Hope your instruction is going well, hope you guys are really busy out there.

In this video we’re going to talk about the quads. So the quadriceps are the muscles that are on the front of your leg here, and they’re going to help to straighten out from the lower to upper leg.

So if I flex my quadriceps, I’m basically taking the angle between my lower leg and my upper leg, and straightening that out as I’m pushing into the ground.

So it’s actually a group of four muscles. You won’t need to know the individual names, just know your quads or your quadriceps are on the front of the leg, and they straighten the leg out.

In the golf swing, this is pretty important, especially for the left side and clearing my hips back out of the way.

So we know as I come into the downswing, I want to go ahead and start to move my hips, to clear my hips open, and as I’m coming into contact, my hips should be open roughly about 45° if I’m coming in properly into contact.

Then as I release all the way on through, my hips are going to come all the way on around. Well the quadriceps is going to help to push that lead leg into the ground and rotate your hip back.

So let’s go ahead and watch from this angle, let’s imagine I’m hitting right back toward the camera. As I make my downswing, as I shit my weight to the left my hips are starting to open up.

You can see I have a bend between my lower leg and my upper leg. Now at this left foot I want to feel like I pushed that down and out, and as I push down and out into the ground, and my quadriceps start to flex, that’s going to push my hip back out of the way and help to clear it out of the way.

So sometimes people are coming up out of their posture and they’re standing up like this, their hips are moving toward the ball, they’re kind of pushing back the other way and their hips are moving forward.

We’ve got to push out and flex those quadriceps, and as I fully flex my quadriceps, or fully engage that in the straight line release, my left leg is going to be pretty much straight and you can feel, if you feel the top of your leg, that should be fairly tight there.

I don’t want to feel like I’m just going as hard as I can and snapping the leg, or anything like that, but it is naturally going to straighten up as I come into the straight line release.

Make sure here when we’re talking about straightening this out, I’m not talking about coming up out of my posture like that.

I want to make sure that this hip goes back. So you can see that even though that’s straightened out, my hip is going back away from the ball, or what used to be the ball, it would be well in the air at this point, and my shoulders are staying in their posture as I’m down and through the shot.

So that’s the quadriceps, really, really good for those of you who may have players that just kind of get to the bottom of the swing, and it looks something like this, where they’re not using the legs at all, and they’re kind of hitting.

I know we’ve all seen those players, especially in older players, sometimes they just don’t use the legs as they go to the top, and then back, they’re not really using those legs, not using the quads.

If we can train them to squat into the ground, to load the legs up properly, and then to get that butt end of the club releasing as they’re coming through and keeping their posture and really using the ground, it’s going to help them to get more distance, it’s going to help them to be a lot more athletic.

So, good luck to you guys, learn those quadriceps, really helps you. A lot of students have those wrong, and if you can explain which muscles are working, how that helps you in your swing, that’s going to put you way above the other instructors out there that maybe aren’t familiar with anatomy and the biomechanics of the body.

Good luck to you guys, good luck in your lessons. I’ll see you all soon.