Why You Need This: I'm going to show you "How to Clear Your Hips in the Golf Swing."

We all want it.... SPEED!!

If you are like most, you try to swing hard, but your body stalls out, your hands and arms take over, casting the club out away from your body, and your swing speed plummets.

You have been told to keep those hips moving to get your body involved, but no matter what you try, it just isn't working.

What if I told you, it is nearly impossible to open your hips, if your knee isn't pointed in the correct direction to start the downswing.

I know, it sounds crazy, but you'll see why after you watch this video.

Let's get started.....

Golf Pros Featured:

Instructors Featured: Clay Ballard    

Video Duration: 8:53

Video Transcription:

Using the hips in the golf swing is something that we all want to do to create a lot of club head speed, be able to hit those really booming drives, be able to outdrive our friends.

But I find a lot of players struggle to use the hips properly, and it actually has to do with how your legs, or your upper leg and knees specifically are angled.

If they’re not angled in the correct position of the swing, then we’re going to have a really tough time opening those hips.

Let me go over the right way and the wrong way to do this. Get you to open up those hips, and then we’re going to track that using my FlightScope to boost the speed.

Let’s go ahead and get started.

All right, so this is a series of videos I’m doing kind of showing what I use my FlightScope with.

For those of you that aren’t familiar with this, this is called a FlightScope X3, this is their newest model of radar. Pretty expensive machines, these will run you about $18,000.

This basically sends out a radio wave, or an electromagnetic waves that bounce off of my golf club, the ball, everything that’s happening right here through contact.

So as I swing through this golf ball, it’s tracking how my club head is moving, whether my face is open or closed, whether it’s moving to the right or to the left, up or down. It’s really tracking within a degree of what’s happening.

So really, really precise. It’s also tracking what we’ll be talking about in this video is how fast this club head is moving.

What it does is it finds the center of this club head, what’s called the geometric center, right in the middle of this club head if you can imagine that. Then it tracks how that moves through space to get my club head speed.

That’s what we’re going to really be focusing on and showing how using the hips properly can make this happen a little bit easier.

It also tracks the ball as it flies through the air and gives me some really cool numbers on ball spin, launch angles, all that kind of stuff, and how fast the ball leaves the face.

We’ll be looking at some of that when we’re talking about this drill, the correct and incorrect way of doing this.

Without further ado, let’s go ahead and hit some swings here. Let’s go ahead and cast from the top, show how to improperly use these hips, and let’s see what my numbers are on my FlightScope.

So in this swing, what I’m going to do here is I’m going to just turn off my body. What happens with players that tend to cast, they’re not rotating the hips and the body enough.

Then they’re having to use all hands and arms and we’re starting to throw this club to try to gain some speed with this club head right from the top of the swing.

Our body being good athletes, we understand that if we don’t use our body, we’re going to have to use our hands and arms to try to get some speed. Typically people will do that by getting a cast.

So in this one, I’m not going to have my body working very much, my legs and hips moving very much, and let’s have a look at what numbers this spits out for me.

Aha, tough to swing at all. I almost just completely topped that one. I have the toughest time making contact when I cast, because I just can’t feel where the club head is. I know you guys probably have the same experience when you’re casting or coming over the top.

That’s one good side note here. I think everybody’s a lot better athletes than they realize they are. A lot of times somebody with a cast just being able to get the ball in the fairway, being able to hit it in the fairway at all with any amount of speed is really tough to do.

When I try to cast in my videos, when I purposefully try to get the cast, I can’t hit the golf ball a decent shot two times in a row.

We saw that one, I almost hit it maybe a hundred yards or something along those lines. I barely made contact on the face whatsoever.

My club head speed went all the way down to 90 miles an hour, that’s a little bit less than the average male club head speed. Maybe you’re swinging 90 right now, and you have the ability to swing over 100, 110, 115. You don’t really know until we get the proper technique and find out.

We saw there 90 miles an hour club head speed, that’s going to be the main number I’m looking at here with my FlightScope and what it’s telling me I’m doing.

We’re going to see if we can get that a little bit better. My distance, my carry distance, was only 126, obviously that was not a good shot. My ball speed, see if I can find that on here, was 118 miles an hour.

That means whenever I hit this ball, it left the face at 118 miles an hour. Not really that great. What was I doing wrong in that swing that caused me to hit that, to do the cast, and how can I fix that if I want to do this properly?

What I find is, when players keep their knees facing forward, so if I make this incorrect swing, as I start my downswing, I keep my knee – you can imagine a line kind of coming out of this – my knee stays in front of me and it’s almost angled back in as I rotate through.

That turns off my lower body and I have to use all this arm speed, and hand and wrist speed to try to accelerate the club head, it doesn’t work very well.

What I want to be doing, is as soon as I start down, I want to feel like I keep my hips a little bit back. If I slide my hips forward, I’m not going to be able to rotate.

I want to keep my hips a little bit back, and my first thing I want to do is get my knees going forward. So my right knee’s going to be angled forward, if you can imagine a laser kind of shooting out of that, it’s going forward.

My left knee is going to be angled forward. If you look at my upper femur, this angle on my leg, it’s pointed out here. The reason that makes a big difference is, I have to use my feet and pressure in the ground to rotate my hips.

When I get my left leg angled forward, that puts my legs in a position to where when I push out, that rotates me open. That’s my body getting in a good position to be able to rotate really well and use my hips.

My right foot does the same thing. As that knee goes forward, my right foot kind of gets angled out and now I can push into the ground to get my right hip rotating forward. That helps with your club head speed.

What I want you to do is a few practice swings here. Go to the top of the swing, and the first thing I want you to do is feel like your hips stay back a little bit. You open up your legs, your upper legs and you get your knees forward from there, and keep the club back and from the inside.

I don’t want to do this and start coming over the top and over the top casting type motion, I want to have that club from the inside and then from there, I’m going to rotate everything through with my hips, and really come to that good full finish as I rotate through to the full finish there.

That’s going to help me to get a little bit more lag, it’s also going to help me to keep my hips moving. So watching this video, you’ll see my hips rotate much better in this one, and I’m able to get a lot higher club head speed, or hopefully get a lot higher club head speed.

My last club head speed was 90, 126 carry, I think I’ll be able to beat that one. Let’s see what I can do here.

There we go, killed that one right down the middle of the fairway. Not going to be able to do a ton better than that one. We’ll take a look at the slow-motion video here in a second.

My club head speed went up to 115, hit that one dead solid. My carry distance was 311, pretty good. I can’t do much better than that.

My total distance was 325, so I added about 25 miles an hour club head speed. I carried the ball you know whatever it was, 200 yards farther, something like that.

My ball speed before was I believe 118, and now my ball speed went up to 167.5. So almost 170 ball speed, that’s pretty solid.

The key takeaways there are number one, you may have a faulty technique that’s slowing you down. You may be a much better athlete than you realize.

You may have a lot more club head speed left in the bag if we let our lower body and our hips and our legs angle in the right way and use those legs the correct way.

Number two, we’ve got to get those legs pointing forward. If my legs are pointing back, there’s no way I can really push into the ground and rotate. If I get my legs kind of moving this way, now I can really rotate my hips and gain a lot of speed.

Now I don’t want to stop here. In this video, we talked specifically about how to start that downswing, get those legs opening up.

Now if we really want to make this easy to do, we need to build that in with what we call the Power Turn in the Top Speed Golf System.

I want you guys, for those of you that are members, to jump over to the Power Turn section and pair that up with what we talked about here today.

What I’ve found is, if you can complete your backswing, get this good, full turn going back. If you’re not very flexible that’s all right, just lift your heel a little bit.

But if you can complete that backswing, it makes it a lot easier to give yourself time to start opening up the hips as you start your downswing.

If you make that short, quick backswing, you’re going to feel tight from the top, you’re going to start to want to cast, no matter what you try to do with your hips.

Make sure you complete that backswing, and work on those drills as you go through the Power Turn level one, level two.

Also in the Power Turn section I’m going to talk about how to finish your complete swing and get all the way through the shot. We’re going to ingrain that in the Power Turn System, as you work through those levels, you’re going to always be finishing y

our swing.

That makes it a lot easier, too. If I have the end in mind, if I know where I want to be completing my swing, it makes it a lot easier for me to get my legs in the position to get me to that finish position.

You’re going to ingrain this as you work through those drills. Best of luck, head over to the Power Turn section, pair that up with what we worked on today, and you’re going to get a lot more swing speed.