Why You Need This:

In this video, “Can You Physically Do the Straight-Line Release?”…

You’ll get a close look at the muscles that can help you boost your swing speed and finish with a powerful release.

You don’t need to memorize every single detail…

But what you’ll see in the video will help you learn how the body works and ultimately should help you perform better.

First, I’ll show you a quick wall drill to test your shoulder rotation independent of your hips.

Being able to rotate your shoulders in addition to your hips will help you generate more speed in your swing.

Second, you’ll test the internal rotation of your leg.

If you have trouble with this rotation, you can simply open up your left foot at address.

These drills may seem a little weird, but your rotation is key for swing speed.

Once you’re more aware of the details of the rotation you need in the swing, then you can focus on exercising those rotations.

For example, you can grab a medicine ball to practice your shoulder rotation and build up your obliques.

Finally, you’ll learn the 9 o’clock drill, which is making a short backswing and rotating as fast as you can through the ball.

This will force you to engage the torso for a faster swing.

What you really need to remember is that the faster rotation you can swing with, the more speed you’ll get.

Watch this video now to get an answer to the question: Can you physically do the straight-line release?

What's Covered: See if you're capable of doing the straight line release.

Golf Pros Featured:

Instructors Featured: Clay Ballard    

Video Duration: 8:54

Video Transcription:

Hi guys, so in most of my videos I’m talking about drills that you can take out to the golf course, drills that you can do to improve your golf swing.

Now some of you may be struggling to do those correctly, and in this video, it’s going to be a lot different.

It’s going to be a longer video, we’re going to talk about ideas, and we’re going to talk about just how the body moves in general.

I’m going to break it down by the joints. Doesn’t mean you have to be thinking about this stuff when you go out and play, doesn’t mean you have to be working on all these drills.

But just learning how the body moves, it’s going to help to speed up that progress for those of you who are struggling with one specific thing.

Let’s go through this, try these motions out. Don’t get obsessed with them, it’s just kind of helping you to learn how the body moves, and I think it’s going to speed up your progress.

Let’s go ahead and get started.

Hey guys, welcome back. In this video we’re going to talk about the straight-line release. Can we physically do what’s necessary in the straight-line release?

I’m going to go through all these moves, make sure we can do what we need to do to get the speed, to get all that power.

When we’re making our downswing, we’re going to have a lot of lag, halfway down, kind of a maximum lag position, I often call this.

We’re going to have our hips almost facing the ball at this position, and our shoulders are going to be well back.

Now from there, what’s going to happen is my hips are going to rotate through to about 45° in front of this ball. The big key here is that I’m going to catch up very aggressively with my shoulders.

So in order to get a lot of distance, in order to get a lot of swing speed, it’s not about how much stretch I can get between my hips and my shoulders.

That’s good, that’s what’s called the X Factor, a lot of people call it X Factor stretch in the downswing.

It’s great to have a lot of X Factor stretch, but that has nothing to do – well, it has something to do with power – that has nothing to do with how much power you get at the end.

What gets the power is, how quickly can I catch up my shoulders to my hips? Now my hips and my shoulders are going the same direction.

Halfway down, shoulders are way back, hips are way forward. From here, I’ve got to catch those shoulders up.

So let’s see how good of control we have with our hips and shoulders, and how well those shoulders can accelerate or catch back up.

What we’re going to do here, is I’m going to go ahead, let’s pretend we have a wall. Do this in your living room. I want you to put your hips against the wall.

I want both butt cheeks to be against the wall here, and then I’m going to put my club across my shoulders.

Now from there, I’m going to keep my hips perfectly still against the wall. My right back pocket and my left back pocket are both touching the wall, they’re not going to move at all.

Then from there, I’m going to rotate in my backswing, and then into my downswing.

Now if I feel my hips move at all, I’m going to slow down a little bit, and I’m going to go a little faster and a little faster, to see how well I can control my torso independent of my hips.

So here I’m moving my torso. You’re going to really feel it in your obliques, all throughout your core, your midsection.

If I’m doing this, I’m moving around, then I don’t have very good control. Keep on doing these drills.

So I’d like to do it fairly quickly without having my hips move much at all. Once I can do that, and I can feel that, now I’m going to get rid of the wall that added stability.

I’m going to do the same thing without the wall. So I want to do those drills. What I’m learning to do there, is I’m learning to stabilize my hips and use my torso independently.

You’ll be surprised. If you videotape yourself, a lot of you guys out there will find that instead of looking like this and your shoulders moving independent of your hips, it’s going to look a lot more like this, and my shoulders and my hips are moving together.

If I can learn to disassociate those, I can learn from my shoulders to catch back up, then I can do that move a lot quicker and I can physically be able to do that.

There’s a difference between physically being able to do something, and just being able to practice it, so it’s being able to do what we’re trying to do, or just learning to do a new motion.

So work on those drills. Start against the wall, test it out there. See if you can go at a moderate pace without your hips moving.

As you do that, go ahead and move off the wall. Videotape yourself. Just take a quick camera shot, set it up on your table or whatever, and then go ahead and see how much your hips are moving.

Very slight movements, hips should be able to move back and through pretty easily while we’re doing that.

If I can do that, now I’m going to be able to rotate in the straight-line release, and my shoulders are going to be able to catch up, and I’m going to be able to get a lot of speed in there.

Now a second drill, the second test we talked about, I’m going to do this very quickly. We talked about this in another video, but it’s internal rotation of the hip.

So if I put my foot forward, my hip is toward the camera. My pelvis is, and I’m going to internally rotate my right foot, so I’m taking this upper bone, my femur, and I’m rotating it inward.

I should be able to get about 60° from my hip socket. It’s a great little test to do this, and I’ll go over really quickly to recap this, to make sure that you guys saw this.

If 12:00 is the camera, 9:00 and 6:00 are here, that would be a 90° angle. So I’m going to set this at a 45° at first. I’m setting that kind of 45°.

Then I’m going to go ahead and turn it a little bit more to get it to 60°. If my foot is straight ahead, let me get this lined up with the camera. This is at a 60° angle.

Now what I should be able to do is take my right toe, lift my right heel off the ground, grab my hips, and I should be able to rotate keeping my knees straight, my left foot flat on the ground, until I get to that 60° angle.

When I’m looking at this from this direction, my right heel’s off the ground, I’m not doing this and letting my left toe come off the ground. See how my toe’s way up off the ground now?

That’s cheating, I’m going to be able to get extra. I’m also not letting my right foot kind of do this, slide all the way around. I’m keeping my right toe right in the middle of my left foot and then just rotating that way.

So if I can’t get very much internal rotation, I’m going to have a tough time as I come on through.

A quick fix for this, and a quick way that you can work on this and get better right away is to just go ahead and externally rotate or turn your left foot out.

If I can’t do this very well, that means I’m not going to rotate my hips, I’m not going to get to that straight-line release very good.

I’m going to go ahead and turn my left foot out, and now it’s much easier to rotate on through the shot. It’s completely fine. Players used to do this for hundreds of years until it became very popular because it looks better on camera to keep your feet straight ahead.

But there’s been, I couldn’t even name how many good players turn their left foot out at address. Completely fine when you’re doing that.

If you find that you struggle with this rotation and stabilization, then go ahead and really just work on those very, very slow at first.

The first step is to be able to separate and stabilize between the hips and shoulders. I need to be able to move my shoulders without my hips moving.

Once I’ve done that, then you can go ahead and work on some exercises. Maybe you grab a medicine ball and do some Russian twists.

You can find all kinds of exercises there to work on your midsection and being able to rotate your chest more quickly, but the faster I can rotate my chest, the more speed I’m going to be able to get.

Now finally I’m going to leave you with one great drill that I love to really work on this torso catching up, and that’s the Nine O’Clock Swing, or the Half Backswing.

What I’m going to do with this swing, is I’m only going to take my hands back to about waist high. Very, very short swing. Then I’m going to quickly accelerate to try to hit this ball as far as I can.

We’ll see here, I’m going to put it to the test. I don’t know if I have a tee. I’m going to grab my hybrid.

So this water right here is probably a good 200 yards, 210 yards to carry the water. I’m going to try to make a little mini half backswing, and carry this ball over the water with my hybrid.

I have to get a lot of speed with a little short backswing. So I’m not going to take my full backswing back here, I’m going to make a little mini backswing, and then really accelerate through.

My torso has to catch up really fast if I’m doing that. So if you feel like you stop your hands here, what’s really going to happen is they’re going to get back to there.

So I’m really going to try to stop my hands as low as I can, and then accelerate through and we’re going to find out right away just how much speed I can create – oops, my ball fell off the tee again.

Because you’re going to see it splash if I can’t create enough torso rotation. Let’s give it a whirl.

Oh, it’s going to be close, it’s going a little right. Oh, just cleared the water. So I got about 20 yards over the water.

It’s a tough drill. If you block them a little to the right like that, I’m talking on camera, I’m doing this quickly, that’s normal.

You’re going to be able to hit a few. It’s not an accuracy test, it’s a speed test. We’re seeing how far we can hit this not how straight we can hit it.

If you hit it straight, that’s great also. Long and straight is always good.

Try that out, do these tests, work on your game. I think you guys are going to have a lot of fun. Hit a little farther.