Why You Need This:

Today’s instruction is on the glutes,  your butt, the large muscles in between your back and your legs. They help to move your legs and pelvis correctly when coming through the shot. They work to straighten the body out and eliminate the angles in the upper and lower body, which allows for gliding motion into the ball as well as making the end of the club come back up. The flat spot is dependent on this.

What's Covered: How to use the glutes throughout the golf swing.

Golf Pros Featured:

Instructors Featured: Clay Ballard    

Video Duration: 4:14

Video Transcription:

Hey guys, and welcome back to instructor training. In this video we’re going to go over the glutes, those are the big muscles, basically your rear end, largest muscles in your body.

Those are going to help you to move your legs and your pelvis correctly coming through the shot, and that sounds al good and well, but what does that really matter? Why do we need to use these properly? Well there’s two very important things that these are going to help you to do.

Number one, if you have a player that’s coming over the top, what’s happening is they’re creating an angle between their upper leg, their femur, and their pelvis, or if you just basically look at my upper torso, you can see that there’s an angle here.

Now if I keep that angle all the way through contact, I’m going to come over the top. You can see even as I’m swinging through this over the top swing, I still have that angle, and that’s going to get me going right to left across the ball.

So we need to actually lose that angle through the swing, and I’ll get to that here in a second. Now that’s one reason over the top swings, not using the hips properly, not using the glutes properly.

Then another problem is, what if we have a player that doesn’t have a lot of speed. We can imagine that I want this club, I want to have a good amount of lag, and then I want to release that lag and get the butt end of this club to turn back up.

Well there has to be something that actually turns the butt end of this club up to get it to whip on through there, it doesn’t just happen on its own.

The glutes in your legs are really, really responsible for making this happen. So let’s go ahead and go over how this works.

So your glutes, the biggest muscle in the back of your legs here, what they do is you can imagine you’re squatting with a barbell across your shoulders, just like you’re doing a normal squat.

I’ve created an angle here as I go down between my upper legs and my torso, or my pelvis. As I contract my glutes that’s going to decrease that angle and straighten that out, it’s basically going to make my hips, and my upper legs, and my pelvis in a straight line now.

So when I contract my glutes it does this, and I’ll be pushing into the ground while I’m doing that.

Well, in the golf swing ideally what we want to have happen, is as we’re coming into the downswing we’re letting our glutes are fairly relaxed as we start down, and now I’ve created that angle.

Now as I’m delivering the club through contact, I’m going to fire my glutes and they’re going to raise up, and now I’ve lost that angle here.

So if I’m looking at an over the top move, I’m going to have this angle, and if I come on through and fire my glutes, that club is going to release and I’ve let the club come on through very, very nicely.

If you’re looking at it from this way, let’s go ahead and imagine that I’m coming down, I have a bend in my leg and my torso, and then as I release that club, as I get to the straight line release, that’s when I’ve lost this angle as you can see between my leg and my torso there.

So that up and down, that firing of the hips is what allows this club to come up towards your body and to get the club head to whip through there. So the butt end of the club is going from facing down to facing up, and the glutes fire to help it do that and to get a lot of speed.

So if you don’t use the glutes properly, you’re not going to be able to get really high amounts of club head speed.

If you have a student that’s struggling with this, what you want them to do, to focus on, if we’re looking from down the line, relaxing the glutes as they start down, the hips feel like they’re moving back, I’ve got this good angle, and then as I release, I’m going to release out to the straight line release point, that’s when the club is turning up and I’ve lost this angle.

So my feet are feeling like they’re driving into the ground, almost like I’m turning toward the target, hopping and twisting at the same time.

The one thing I want to make sure of though, is that as I come on through I don’t want to lose my posture as far as doing this. So even though my hips are extending, I’m not coming up out of my posture, I’m releasing the club.

My left hip is moving back, and my shoulders are staying down in their posture even though you can see if I turn this way, you can see that I’ve lost that line. I’m still in my posture as I release the club.

So that’s how the glutes work, very, very key. If you can break this down to your students and show them exactly what to do and how to do it, that’s going to put you way above a lot of the other instructors out there that don’t know how to move the body properly.

So good luck to you guys, I’ll see you all soon.