Why You Need This: In this video, you'll get a very detailed description of how how to use the shoulders in your golf swing.

To show you how to use your shoulders, you'll get a close look at Adam Scott's swing.

He has one of the better swings on tour and is a great model for this discussion.

Note that you shouldn't obsess over every single detail about your shoulders...

But the goal is to clear up any misconceptions you may have on the topic.

So I don't want you to make a 20 point checklist about your shoulders and spend the next 3 months trying to get your shoulders to move just like Adam Scott's.

Here's a quick overview of what you'll learn in the video...

Shoulders at Address

Your shoulders should be square to the target...

And your spine angle should be slightly tilted away from the target.

This will give you a slight tilt in your shoulders.

Shoulders in the Backswing

Your overall posture shouldn't change much in the swing.

Don't worry about the exact angles.

You just need to know that your spine angle and shoulders should be stable throughout the swing.

At the top of your swing, the shoulder angle shouldn't have changed much.

As you'll see in the video, Adam Scott does an incredible job at keeping his shoulders stable (again, just get the general idea; you don't have to swing exactly like Adam Scott!)

Shoulders in the Downswing

As the lead arm is half way to contact...

Note that your hips should be rotating open more than shoulders at this point.

There's a separation between your shoulders and hips that'll help you whip your club through contact.

As you make contact, the shoulders will cinch together but are slightly open while making contact with forward shaft lean.

Shoulders in the Follow Through

Through contact, the shoulders and spine angle are still stable.

You'll see that Adam Scott stays in posture well past impact; it's stable to the point where his chest is facing the target.

Only after this point does Scott come out of posture.

He rotates so much that his chest points way left of the target.

You don't need to be this flexible, but make sure you turn through as far as you safely can.

What You Need to Concentrate On

Throughout the video, focus on the stability of Adam Scott's shoulders and spine angle.

Your consistency will shoot through the roof if you work on improving your stability and maintain your posture.

Watch this video now to learn how to use the shoulders in your golf swing.

Work hard and improve your consistency!

Golf Pros Featured: Adam Scott    

Instructors Featured: Clay Ballard    

Video Duration: 13:52

Video Transcription:

Hey guys, welcome back to Top Speed Golf. In today’s video we’re going to talk about a very detailed description of what the shoulders do in the golf swing.

Now I took both a face-on and a down the line view of Adam Scott. I think he’s got some of the best shoulder movements in the swing, and one of the best overall swings in the history of the game. Really beautiful swing.

We’re going to talk about a lot of detail, every single piece of this.

Now this video isn’t to be taken as you need to go out and work on every single little tiny piece of this, but it is to help to clear some misconceptions that some people may have that are hurting them from getting a bigger turn, or to getting the shoulders to work properly throughout the golf swing.

So we’re going to get really, really detailed, and it’s more of just gathering information that it is to say OK, you need to go and work on these 20 things that we mention.

Keep that in mind, this is going to help to get an overall idea or better picture of how the shoulders work in the swing, but don’t try to go out to the range and work on every single piece of this all at once.

Let’s take a look at address here. We’re seeing that his shoulders are nice and square to the target, ideally, we’d like that to happen.

Since his body is slightly tilted away --so you can see his upper body is slightly tilted back away from the target – that’s going to put – and since also his right hand is lower on the club than his left hand – that’s going to give him just a very slight tilt in the shoulders.

Now we wouldn’t want to go more than this and get a lot of tilt, that means that we would have the right arm more bent and we’re maybe getting too much forward shaft lean on the club. Several things could happen there.

We wouldn’t want to get the shoulders too level, because that may mean our upper body’s leaning more toward the target, and going to make it difficult to get loaded up in the backswing, get our weight shift to the right side.

Now if we start from the down the line view – let’s go back from the beginning again – we’re going to notice that the overall posture – let’s actually draw a line on that.

We’re just talking very general here, we’re not looking at exact angles or anything like that. But the overall posture is going to remain pretty constant with the spine.

So the overall, general angle that the spine is rotating in is going to be about the same. You can see as he gets to the top of the swing, that the overall tilt of the body has maintained pretty constant. So slight, slight changes but not a big deal there at all.

Now at the top of the swing, what we’re going to notice here is that the body’s still leaning forward, and at the shoulders have gotten good rotation but they’ve also stayed in their posture. I’ll explain what I mean by this.

If you draw a line from the right shoulder to the left shoulder, right through the center of them, that should hit somewhere between let’s say between 4 and 8 feet, roughly, outside of your golf ball.

If you’re going with more of a driver, it’s going to be a little flatter, a little farther outside the golf ball. It’s going to look more like that. If you’re going with more of a pitching wedge, it’s going to be a little bit steeper.

Now if we look at this from face on, what we’ll see is the same thing is happening. Now he’s gotten a weight shift to the right, so his body has loaded up a little bit. His nose, if you were to draw a line down to the ground, that would be loaded up to the right side.

The upper body, the spine has a tilt away from the target as he goes to the top. To get that good full turn like we see here, he’s gotten well over a 90° turn. A couple things have to happen.

Number one, the hips need to rotate, got to get those hips rotating as we can see in both screens, is they’ve rotated about 45°. We have to feel like the lead shoulder, the left shoulder for him, is protracting.

If you’re looking at it from this way, it feels like it’s stretching out away from the body. If you look at the back of your left shoulder, that’s what’s called your scapula, and that is stretching out away, that shoulder’s protracting or moving away from the target.

If you’re looking from this angle, the left shoulder would be moving kind of toward the camera. The opposite is happening with the right shoulder.

That right shoulder is what’s called retracting, which means the scapula is moving in toward the center of your spine. That’s going to really stretch you out.

Now when those two things happen together, along with the turn of the overall torso, you’re going to get a big shoulder turn. So really big shoulder turn there.

We can see that the shirt buttons on his chest would be facing directly back toward the camera. They could even go a little bit farther than that for some players who really want to get wound up.

If you look at Dustin Johnson, he’s going to turn even more than that with his shoulders. The shoulder turn is combination of the hips rotating, letting those hips rotate, letting the torso rotate or your rib cage rotate, and then adding to that, protraction of the lead arm, retraction of the right, the back arm, the right arm.

When you put all three of those pieces together, that’s when you get this really big turn, this really big loading up.

As I mentioned, he’s stayed in his posture, so this shoulder is staying down, this shoulder is feeling like it’s going a little bit up and you can see how the back shoulder is higher than the front shoulder as he gets to the top of his swing.

As we do this in the downswing what’s going to happen is, we’re going to simply reverse that and turn around this pretty stable spine angle. It will change a little bit, but not too much.

As you go into contact – actually let’s pause once before that, I can mention some things here at halfway down. As the lead arm gets about halfway down, you’ll see how now the hips are opening up.

They’re leading the way and we still have that separation between the hips and the shoulders. The shoulders are still back halfway down, the hips are leading the way, and they’re keeping their angle pretty well.

Now as you get to contact, we’re continuing to rotate around that again, that overall spine angle is pretty similar to where we were at the beginning.

The right arm is nice and in to his body. The hips have rotated open. Now here’s a key point to note when you’re looking at the swing, the difference between the shoulders and the torso.

If you look at his shirt buttons or his ribcage, you would see that that’s pointing about 20-30° open.

Same things here, we can see the logo on the back of his shirt up here, the ribcage itself, or the shirt buttons would be facing kind of up here in this area around the cart path. Maybe just slightly behind that. But the shoulders themselves are pretty square.

All right, so these shoulders are pretty square there. That means the left shoulder is kind of protracted, or in against the chest. The left shoulder’s going to feel like it’s across your chest as you’re coming down to impact.

The right shoulder is also going to feel like it’s kind of cinched in to your chest. So both your left and your right shoulder are feeling like they’re coming in together as you’re coming at contact.

Notice how the right elbow is really tight and close to his body. That’s something that’s happening when that right shoulder is kind of protracting in.

People talk about staying connected in the golf swing, and that’s a big piece of it of what they’re feeling, at impact the right shoulder and the left shoulder are both in to be very, very constant throughout the swing.

At the same time, like we talk about in the Top Speed Golf System, we have that stable, fluid spine. We have that body tilted back away from the target. The right shoulder’s going to be a little lower than the left shoulder, which is exactly how we should be in the swing.

Now the reason I left these two lines up there is for what’s going to happen next. As we get these hands about chest high in the follow through, you’re going to notice that those shoulders – let’s actually go a few frames back.

Those shoulders have maintained again, the spine and the shoulders have maintained their relative posture from where they were at address, from where they were at the top of the swing, from where they were in the follow through here.

So we’re looking at the shoulders pretty much staying in the same posture. If you wanted to get exact with this, they’ll actually be steeper in the follow through.

If we’re drawing a line down, that line, if we put a club across our shoulders, should be hitting somewhere in the general vicinity of the ball.

The ball was here, anywhere from just outside the ball to probably three or four feet outside the ball means that you’ve stayed in our posture really, really nice and rotated on through that shot. We can definitely see how that’s happening.

That’s happening because there’s side bend, so the body’s turned sideways, this right shoulder feels like it’s down now, and the left shoulder feels like it’s up.

You may feel nice and long with the left side of your body, you may feel almost crunched in, or like you’re bending to your right with the right side of your body, which is going to steepen up those shoulders and allow you to stay in your posture.

That’s a big key to consistency, in the backswing, through impact, into the follow through, we want to keep those shoulder angles nice and consistent and let the arms, and the hands, and the club rotate around that.

We look at that same position as we’re going from the face on view, we’ll see that the shoulders are back, we won’t want them to be chasing way forward.

So if you were to draw a line directly down from the middle of the shoulders, that’s just behind the ball still, where the ball was on the ground. We don’t want our upper body going way forward too early, we’ve got to stay behind it.

The reason for that is we can get this club, this handle of the club, to whip upwards to accelerate the club as we’re coming through contact.

Again, if we look at that, here’s the same position in the swing, we can see that the chest is facing the target and also just like we mentioned, the right shoulder is down, it’s switched roles, now the left shoulder is up.

This is the opposite of the backswing, and now the right shoulder is much farther below the left shoulder. So that’s really going to help with that.

Again here, you’re feeling like not quite yet, but this left shoulder should feel like it’s in retraction. It was protracted at contact, it’s going to start retracting away from the body. The right shoulder is really protracting here, meaning it’s moving forward as much as you can.

Now as we finish the swing, we’ll take it to the last piece here. All the way into the finish, you’re going to go ahead and let the shoulders turn all the way around.

If you look at his shirt buttons here, let’s go ahead and go to the full finish, or at least as far as we can go for this video. Sorry it doesn’t go all the way to the end here. We can take it as far as it’ll go, though.

You’ll start to see that his shirt buttons are facing into the left rough. His shirt, the buttons on his shirt, are probably facing over here toward this tree behind his body.

You’ll notice that the right shoulder has really come forward, it’s rotated all the way through to where it’s facing the target. We’ve stopped a little short of that here.

The left shoulder is rotated back, so he’s really let that chest come all the way on through with a good amount of momentum, rotated all the way around.

Then one last interesting note here, you’ll see that the right shoulder is usually going to finish a little higher than the left shoulder, and that’s just saying, that’s got his body into a position where he can rotate it on through there.

Now unfortunately this didn’t come around all the way to the end of his swing, but he’s going to keep his posture with his spine pretty well. He will straighten up some, but his spine angle is going to be about like that, even when he comes to the full follow through.

So those are the key pieces with the shoulders, a little bit more detail than I would normally go into, but I think that will help to clarify some ideas of what is really good shoulder action, what should we be looking for, and to me, I’m looking for some major pieces here.

Number one, are we getting that good, full turn going back and through? So are the hips rotating, are the shoulders getting past 90°? In the follow through, are we letting those shoulders rotate all the way on around?

Again, not everybody’s going to be as flexible as Adam Scott, and you shouldn’t try to be, but just feeling like we get to our maximum stretch going the other way to where we feel like our chest is facing this way into the left rough as we finish.

That’s a big key, and then the second big key that I really like to focus in on, is as you go to the top of the swing, that our chest stay in posture, and that our shoulders rotate around our spine throughout the entire swing.

So at the top of the swing, coming into contact, coming into the release already rotating roughly, just as a very general idea, around that overall spine angle, and our shoulders staying down in posture.

I see tons of players where if we paused them here, their shoulders would look like that, just dead flat, and they’d be coming way up out of their posture. The hips would be sliding forward into the ball, something we call early extension, and we’d be losing our posture through there.

Work on any of these pieces that stand out to you, that look very different, very drastically different from your swing. I recommend getting the overall shape there.

It’s not about getting every little fine and tiny detail perfect, but it’s about getting the overall movements, the overall shape, and you’re going to have a beautiful swing, hopefully as good as Adam Scott’s.

Good luck, I’ll see you guys soon.

All right, so now that we’ve talked about the overall movement of the shoulders, for those of you that are members of the website, I recommend working through step-by-step, the Power Turn section.

We focus specifically on rotating the hips and shoulders in the Power Turn section. We have three levels, each drill along the way.

There’s several videos in each level, each drill builds on the one before it so that you can really get this good turn like we’re seeing Adam Scott doing here. I think I would definitely, definitely start there.

Then we also have a bonus series called Early Extension. So as I mentioned, some players are letting their hips slide forward and then their shoulders are leveling out. I talk about a lot in the Early Extension section.

Those are two great videos, two video series to work on for those of you that are members of the website, that are going to walk you through it step by step.

If you want to look like this, Adam Scott’s swing, as far as how the body and the shoulders are working, I’m going to walk you through that one piece at a time.

So good luck to you guys. Work hard. Go check out the Power Turn and the Early Extension series, the bonus series, and you guys will be playing better golf. I’ll see you soon.