Why You Need This: In this video, you'll discover how to clear your hips in the downswing.

First, you'll find out why it's so important to clear your hips.

It's common to see golfers bump the hips towards the target instead of opening up the hips.

Bumping the hips causes you to stand up in the downswing in order to make decent contact.

Notice I mentioned decent contact because if you're not opening up your hips in the downswing, it's going to be really tough for you to get enough forward shaft lean to compress the ball well.

And if you're bumping your hips out, you're risking injury since you're putting tremendous pressure on your lead hip and lower back.

In the video, you'll see what I call the compression line when you clear your hips properly.

I want you to shoot for this straight line that forms from your ankle, through the hip, and through the shoulder.

Watch this video now to stop bumping your hips out...

And clear your hips for more solid contact!

Golf Pros Featured:

Instructors Featured: Clay Ballard    

Video Duration: 4:36

Video Transcription:

Hey guys, and welcome back. Today we’re going to talk about how to clear the hips properly in the golf swing.

Those of you who may be struggling clearing the hips, let me see if this sounds familiar to you.

As we’re making our downswing, pretending I’m going to go this way, as I start down, I’m going to bump my hips to the left. You can see my hips get a shift to the left, they’re not really opening up, and then all of a sudden I start to stand up out of the shot.

Sometimes the toe of your club will start to dig down into the ground a little bit. If you look at your divots, you’ll kind of notice that the toe end of the divot is a little bit deeper.

If you’re looking from this way, then as I’m making this same swing, bumping to the left, my hips aren’t opening properly, then I end up standing up and getting tall coming through the shot.

It happens all the time, I see a lot of people really struggle with this. This video’s really going to help you with that. I’m going to show you how to clear the hips and the proper way to do that.

Now with the Top Speed Golf System, what we want to have happen is what’s called the compression line. Any time we’re talking about rotating the hips, it’s more about angles than it is actually trying to rotate.

For instance, if my hip slides in front of my left ankle, and my left shoulder is behind that – so if I draw a line from my ankle, to my hip socket, to my shoulder, and it’s kind of bowing out like this, I’m not going to be able to rotate my hips because my hips are kind of locked up.

I’ve got pressure going into the outside of my hip. I feel some tightness in the outside of my left hip, and now as I try to rotate, it’s just really not going to work very well.

What I need to do is get the proper alignment. This is something that we teach in the Top Speed Golf System called the Compression Line. Where as I come down to contact, my hip, my ankle, and my shoulder – if you take a look at those – are going to be in a straight line.

You can see how ankle, hip, shoulder, straight line, and now I’m in a position to where I can rotate my hips very, very freely. So my hips can rotate on through if I have this proper alignment.

If I bump them out here like this, I try to rotate, there’s pain in my lower back, there’s pain in the outside of my left hip, it’s really just not going to happen. To key in on this, and if you guys are used to sliding too far forward, here’s what I want you to do for your drill.

As you’re starting the downswing, as you shift to the left, you’re starting to put some pressure into the left leg and the left side of your body, I want you to feel like the upper leg or the bone in your upper leg, your femur here, is angled back.

If you start to slide too far forward, and we’re more like this, well now we’ll see how the lead leg, the femur, is actually angled toward the target a little bit as I’m coming through there.

So I want to make sure as I start down, this is angled back slightly in my upper bone. The reason this works well to clear the hips, is as I’m pushing into the ground, because this is angled back when I push into the ground that automatically gets my left hip working back away from the target.

You can see the right side of my body is going to come on through also. If we’re looking at the right foot, when I’m talking about the hip rotation, my right toe should be able to…or my right heel should come off the ground and my right toe should have a little bit of pressure on it as we’re coming through there.

Now if we do this in slow motion, all I want you to do is to work on number one, as you start down making sure that that upper leg is angled back.

Number two, as you get to contact just like we talk about in our system, we want the hips about 45° open and those shoulders nice and square and we’re in that good compression line.

When you’re looking at this from down the line, it’s going to look like this where now I’ve stayed in my posture. I’m coming down and through and I’m not raising up like this, and that’s because my hips have been able to clear out of the way and I’m going to feel pretty comfortable as I’m coming through that shot.

So 100 repetitions doing the same drill. Upper leg back, contact, nice straight line on the left side of the body. Hips 45° open, shoulders nice and square.

Number one, position number two. I’m going to pause in those and really feel those positions, check those on camera until you get about 100 reps.

After 100 reps, we’re going to make a full practice swing just going all the way through it, feeling that good repetition. Then once we’ve done about 100 practice swings, we’re going to jump out on the course, we’re going to hit some nice, good shots, and we’re going to stay down in our posture.

There we go, hit that one right down the middle. Nice and solid divot, or nice and solid shot, good divot. Everything felt really good. Do those drills, it’s going to make you a better golfer, and you’re definitely going to feel a lot better coming through contact.

I’ll see you guys soon.