Why You Need This: Today you'll find out "How to Easily Clear Your Hips in the Downswing"

One of the easiest ways to generate more speed in your swing and increase your distance is to get better hip rotation.

It just makes sense that using your bigger muscles in your thighs and abdomen is a better way to generate speed than relying solely on your hands and arms.

If you struggle to get good hip rotation in your swing it can lead to your body "locking up" and allowing your arms to solely take over.

In today's video, you'll learn a simple trick for creating a better hip turn.

You'll also discover two specific body parts to focus on to help drive your rotation.

Golf Pros Featured:

Instructors Featured: Clay Ballard    

Video Duration: 9:43

Video Transcription:

I bet you’ve tried absolutely everything to get your hips more open through contact. We know how bad it can be when you don’t open those hips, we start to have the hips go toward the ball, we lose our posture, we flip the golf club, it’s extremely frustrating.

No matter how hard you try to open, and open, and open, you watch it on video and it looks exactly the same. Well there’s actually one missing piece with this, it has to do with your knees, and I’m going to go over it.

Once you learn this trick it becomes so much easier to pen the hips. We’re going to talk about how to do that in a step-by-step process. It’s going to be really easy and really fun to do that.

Why is it exactly that it’s bad to not have the hips open through contact? The main reason is, when you’re not opening your hips, what’s happening is your body is locking up sooner, and your hands and arms have to do all the work.

I like to imagine that my body is almost creating the momentum in the golf swing. If I imagine myself kind of encased in a giant concrete block.

Well I’m going to use the big muscles of my body, my legs, my hips, my upper torso to be able to move that big concrete block, that boulder, that wrecking ball if you can kind of imagine being encased in that.

I’m getting the momentum of my swing happening from the big pieces of my body, from my feet to my shoulders, create the momentum.

That’s why it’s so important to have the hips opening up, that momentum gets started toward the target.

Now from there, our hands and arm add to that momentum to get that flash of speed, that real snap happening at the golf ball. That’s what gets your really high club head speeds.

So my body creates the momentum, my hands and arms are lagging back, my club is lagging back, and then bam, I want to release all that to create a ton of club head speed right at the golf ball.

Now when I stall out my body, and I don’t have that momentum going, my hips stay square to the ball, what ends up happening is, as I start my downswing, my hips lock up, they stay facing the golf ball.

All of this slows down, the momentum is cut off, and now to keep some kind of speed in the swing, I have to flip with my hands and arms to force that club through contact.

Let me show you want one of those looks like real quick. So there, even though I hit that one pretty solid, I’m going to lose 20, 30, even 40 yards off my drives.

I’m going to get inconsistent because I’m flipping. I’m going to get inconsistent because I’m standing up out of my posture, and now I have to kind of save contact with my hands.

That’s the negatives from slowing down your body and not opening the hips. Now let’s talk about what to do to solve this problem.

All right, so what is this missing piece? This missing piece that we’ve been leaving out is bending the legs.

Now I want you to imagine when I’m opening up, that’s the same as me kind of twisting or jumping.

If I was going to do jump up and do a 180 or a 360, or really spin around like that, what I would have to do first is I’d have to bend my knees and load my body, and then straighten my knees, push into the ground to make my body turn.

I want you to do a little experiment for me. Lock your knees straight like you would if you’re losing your posture and your hips get locked up in the golf swing.

Lock your knees straight, and now try to jump up and twist. There’s no way you can do it, it’s impossible, right? You can’t do that. You don’t have any muscles to move your hips.

If I want to get these hips opening, I first have to bend the legs. There’s an easy drill to do this. What we can do is go to the top of the swing, and the first move I want you to do down is to squat with your knees.

I’m going to go to address position, again without hitting a ball at first. I’m going to the top, I bend my knees, and now from here, I’m kind of loaded into the ground.

I’m going to feel like I push into the ground to get those hips open coming through contact. If I feel like my knees straighten, then that’s not really going to work.

Now the piece that also plays in with this, which also works great with your irons, is that if I’m locking my legs up, if I’m standing up out of my posture, let me grab an iron real quickly.

When I do that, my club shaft gets more vertical. Let’s imagine I’m hitting a golf ball off the ground here.

As I stand up out of my posture, my hands get higher, the club shaft gets higher, and when that happens the toe of the club actually starts to dig into the ground.

If you look at your divots, if you’re someone that turns off the hips, stands up out of your posture, you’re going to notice the toe side of the divot starts first.

That’s because the shaft, the sole of the club isn’t perfectly parallel with the ground, this shaft stands up and the toe digs in first. So it’s going to solve a little bit of two problems at once.

When you’re making these swings, when you bend your legs, and we’re trying to open the hips, that’s going to be a really good key to tie all that in together.

I want my club shaft to go from here at contact, being much more vertical, to feeling like my club shaft is lower, almost like the heel of the club is coming down into the ground.

What I’m going to do is go to the top of the swing, get my little squat, and then I’m going to rehearse coming down to contact, feeling like the heel of the club is lower down, my shaft is lower down, and my hips are more open.

Then from there, swing all the way on through. Now once you’ve done just a few of those pausing just to get the overall idea, now we need to make it more fluid so it’s going to be more like your real swing.

Here going to the top of the swing, a little squat engaging my legs, now my heel’s lower and I can go ahead and swing on through feeling like the club shaft is lower when I’m doing that.

Now, let’s take a look at Jacob French who’s been a member of the Top Speed Golf website for a while. He’s done this exact change in his golf swing.

What you’ll notice in his after video, look how much lower he is to the ground and how he’s able to open up his body much more, stay in his posture perfectly, and man, he’s just got a beautiful looking golf swing.

That’s the kind of swing that we’d all love to have. You can definitely see that shaft is not standing up like this, he’s hitting the ball pretty dag-gone pure there.

If that’s the case, let’s go into even more what the feet do, and I think that’ll help you to break through this habit once and for all.

When I’m making that downswing squat, or that end of the backswing squat and starting my downswing, so I’m here at the top, I’m starting to bend my legs, what exactly going on with my legs to be able to open up my hips?

Now when I open up my hips there’s two things that are happening, the right foot is actually pushing this way. That’s happening from your toe.

When you see good players, a lot of times when they swing, that toe’s going to stay on the ground, it’s pushing down and back that way and the heel starts to come up as I go through the ball.

That’s a good thing, when I push down that way, that pushes my hip forward and around. That’s what gets my right hip to move forward.

Now in the opposite direction, your left heel’s doing the exact opposite of that to get your left hip to come back and open up.

As I get into that squat, now my left heel, this part, is going to be pushing out this direction, so it’s pushing out and that takes my hip and pushes it this way.

So I’m really exaggerating there, but you’ll see a lot of pro players, their front foot, their toe will start to come off the ground sometimes when they’re opening up, you’ll see their foot kind of swivel like that.

That’s because their heel is pushing into the ground, that pushes the hip back, and that allows you to rotate. So again, let’s take that into this same drill and do a few reps of that.

Go to the top of the swing, a little squat, and then feel your feet push into the ground to rotate those hips open. The club shaft is lower, and then we’re going to go ahead and finish the swing.

Do a few more without any pauses at all, there we go. Now we can really see the feet engaging, rotating our hips open. That looks really fantastic there. So let’s go ahead and give it a whirl now.

We saw the earlier swing didn’t have a lot of distance on it, let’s try to do one where I stay in my posture, and see if we can really crank one out there. All right, killed that ball.

So much more power when you’re adding the momentum of your body to get things started, and then I can get my hands, arms, and club releasing on through.

Well, there’s two parts to this system that this all ties in with. Number one, is the Power Turn.

When I talk about really loading up my body, getting into the ground where I can leverage it, and then finishing all the way around, really that’s the Power Turn.

The Power Turn mostly focuses on your shoulders, but what’s going to happen when we move our shoulders is that makes it so much easier to engage the legs and rotate around to a good, full finish.

Now the second part of this, is the Straight-Line Release. Once your hips start opening more, it makes it so much easier to get that lag and then now that my hips are opening out in front, I can release that club in front.

My hips, my shoulders, my hands, my arms, my club, everything is going to want to release in front of that golf ball to that Straight-Line Release point. You can even see that same thing with Jacob here.

Now the cool thing about this, when you’re opening your hips and the Straight-Line Release, both of those concepts work with every club in the bag, whether you’re using the pitching wedge or the driver.

We’ll see here originally in the video, Jacob’s standing up, flipping a little bit, losing his posture, and that club is releasing early.

Now in this after video, we’re going to see him opening up the hips much better like we saw, releasing that club much more in front, and now he’s got a lot more consistency in his swing, a lot better contact when that’s happening.

If we really want to ingrain that, do the hip drills that we talked about in the video today, but then don’t stop there. We’ve got to make this automatic.

Go to the Power Turn section of the Top Speed Golf System, and go to the Straight-Line Release section of the Top Speed Golf System.

Start working through those, start right from level one. Do the drills and do the reps, as you work through those, your swing’s going to get so much better.

That’s one thing that Jacob did here. I didn’t mention this earlier, but he’s just followed the system, he hasn’t come in for in-person lessons.

There’s nothing more than just following the drills in the videos, putting a little time on the range and some work to get the swing to improve, you guys can do the exact same thing.

So let’s go ahead and get started, let’s jump in the Power Turn, let’s jump in the Straight-Line Release, and I’ll see you there.