Why You Need This: In this video, "How to Rotate Your Hips in the Golf Swing | Real Science"...

You're going to get a unique video that explains the actual science behind hip rotation.

I put this together primarily for golf instructors...

So it's going to be much more in-depth and into the physics of the swing than normal...

But if you're a student, you can get a ton out of this as well.

You'll discover how your center of mass and various forces interact while getting a good, full turn going back and coming through.

Watch this video now to find out how to apply the proper forces to get maximum rotation in the golf swing...

Golf Pros Featured:

Instructors Featured: Clay Ballard    

Video Duration: 13:48

Video Transcription:

Hi guys, and welcome back to Top Speed Golf. I’ve got a little bit of a different video for you.

Today this is going to be geared more toward instructors, and talking about the science of rotation, how we can get a lot of rotation going back, and how we’re going to rotate our body coming through, and what we’re going to do with pressure and our center of mass.

It sounds pretty complicated, it’s really not all that complicated once we understand the terms. It’s mostly just getting familiar with the terms, and that’s pretty easy to do.

For those of you who are students and just want to listen to this and learn maybe something a little bit different than you’ve heard before, that’d be great.

Let me know, post in your comments below if you enjoy this video, you want to see more of this kind of stuff, the real science behind what’s going on, or if it’s a little too boring and complicated.

But this is vital information if you’re an instructor. In my opinion, instructors need to know the science, they need to know what’s going on, and then from there they can simplify it to teach it to students and make things a lot easier.

First let’s talk about the center of mass, and in the golf swing as I’m setting up, let’s imagine I’m perfectly balanced, 50/50 weight distribution which is not exactly true for a golf swing, but let’s say at address I’m sitting here 50/50.

Well you can imagine the center of mass, and it depends on how your body’s made up, but that’s basically just the center of all the atoms and everything you have, all the mass that’s in your body, the exact center of that would be pretty much just below your belly button.

A little bit below your belly button for guys, a little bit lower for females. You can imagine there’s a blue dot here which is going to be my center of mass.

Now if I do anything to move my body, that’s going to change where my center of mass goes. For example, if I start swinging my club to the right, now I’ve got all this motion swinging out to the right.

That’s going to move the center of mass because I’m not just a person, now I’m a person with a big long stick, and as I swing to the right, my center of mass is naturally going to move a little bit to the right. As I swing this stick to the left, my center of mass is going to move to the left.

So even if I look centered, even if my body is straight up and down, a lot of people say we want to have a stable spine, or not a stable spine, basically a centered spine angle that’s straight up and down vertical.

That doesn’t really exactly work, the science doesn’t match up with that. Just realize that whenever I move, my center of mass is moving also.

If we’re looking at this from the side angle, and I’m straight up and down, not holding onto the golf club, the center of mass would be directly in the middle of my body looking this way.

But as I hinge forward, realize that the center of your mass is going to be a little bit more forward, or if I was to bend back like this, now the center of mass is going to be, kind of that balancing point is going to be more behind my body. It can move around depending on how I’m moving.

This is very important, because we need to know the general idea of this to know even how to rotate. Now that we know where the center of mass is, let’s think about what happens to our pressure with our feet.

You might here this as ground force reactions or vectors. This basically means if I want to move my body, if I want to rotate, if I want to have a weight shift, that has to come from somewhere. We have to transfer energy from one place to another.

So right now, as I’m standing straight up and down, I’m 190 pounds roughly, I’ve got 190 pounds of pressure here on Earth going straight down into the ground, so you could imagine two arrows of equal pressure going into the ground.

Since I’m not falling over, the ground is pushing back up on me with the exact same amount of pressure, 190 pounds down, 190 pounds going back up.

You can also visualize this, imagine that you’re pushing into a wall. As I start to push into that wall, the wall pushes back on me. You can feel that pressure in your hands, the harder I push, the harder the wall pushes back. That’s exactly what’s happening when we’re standing up.

If I was going to shift my weight to the right let’s say, I would have to increase pressure on this foot, and I would have to start to get more weight on my right foot.

So for example, if I wanted, if I’m standing here straight up and down, and I wanted to move this way, I would have to take pressure off of this foot, and put more pressure into that foot going that way. I’d have to push into the ground going this way.

If I took a step like this, I lifted this foot up and then start applying more pressure out that way, that moved me to the right. Same thing if I’m going to move to the left, I’ve got to take pressure off this foot and I’ve got to push off that foot.

That’s going to be very important in the golf swing. Also realize our center of mass as we start to do this and move it around, we only can go until the center of mass is over my foot, and now I’m balanced, my center of mass is directly lined up over this foot.

If I go any more, well now all of a sudden, I’m going to topple over. That all sounds like OK, that’s nice to know, but how the heck does this relate to a golf swing?

It has a lot to do with when you’re going to rotate in your backswing, and how someone is actually able to rotate when they put pressure into the ground.

All right guys, so let’s go ahead and pause the video here for just one second. Let’s talk about what this really looks like from a science standpoint.

I know a lot of you may be familiar with ground force vectors, ground force reaction, but for those of you who haven’t seen this, this would be a good visual to keep in mind as we watch the rest of this video.

So what’s happening here, is this is called a vector, and this is showing how much pressure the ground is putting back up into our body. You see this tall red line here, the longer the line the more pressure that there is.

What we don’t see in this video is the pressure going down into the ground, that would be in the opposite angle at pretty much the equal length down into the ground.

For every action there’s an equal and opposite reaction, the harder you press down the harder the ground presses back up.

So as we start to walk, we’ll notice how as soon as his front heel hits, now your pressure is going to change. We can see this red line is at a shorter angle than this longer red line, so that means he’s pressing, this model is pressing harder into the ground with this back foot.

Since this line, the ground is pressing back up at a forward angle, that’s what’s helping to propel him forward, that means that he’s pressing down into the ground at a backward angle.

We’ll go a few more clicks, and we’ll see as he starts to transfer the energy forward, now the front foot is going to have a longer and longer line. It’s actually pushing back as he’s walking forward, to help to brace as his front foot hits.

Then we’ll see as he continues to propel and push of the back leg, now he starts to change that angle with the front leg, now the front leg’s pushing into the ground much harder, the back leg has no pressure.

As we continue to go forward and forward, we’re going to see how that pressure changes to where now the vector is pushing him farther and farther and farther forward and propelling him with more force.

What we’ll see here also is this little blue dot, that’s his kind of center of mass, or general area where the center of mass would be. As we push against the ground, we’re affecting that center of mass, and we’re affecting how this would work.

That’s what I want you guys to keep in mind as we’re sitting and watching this video, is how the ground force changes the way that you move your body, and how that would look in an actual more scientific model. Let’s go ahead and get back to the video now.

If I want to make to make a backswing, and I want to rotate and get a good, full turn. So a lot of times you probably have students out there that are doing their backswing, and the look something like this.

No real shoulder turn, the hips aren’t moving enough, the shoulders aren’t rotating enough, and all they’re doing is just kind of picking up the club. What’s happening here is, I’m just using my arms to pull the club back, and I’m not using this pressure into the ground correctly to be able to rotate my body.

So if I want to rotate my body, what I have to do is I have my center of mass, we can kind of imagine that here again with the blue circle, and I’m going to put pressure, I’m going to get a little more weight on my right foot, and I’m going to put pressure down and out into the ground, and that’s going to push pressure back up this way to allow me to rotate.

So if you’re having someone that’s not being able to rotate at all, they’re doing this, we need to get a little bit more weight on the right side, and they need to have most of their weight on the right side as early as just the takeaway here. They need to be pushing that out.

So if you’re looking at that from this direction, if I want to rotate, I’ve got to get a little bit more weight on my right side, and I’ve got to push the force vector going into the ground is going this direction, the force vector from the ground back up to me is going this direction, and that’s going to allow me to rotate my body.

That maxes out the amount of pressure I have on my right foot, maxes out around halfway back or so. Then it starts to shift over to the left as I begin to push a little bit more off my right foot.

When I want to rotate, here’s my center of mass, that force vector has to be outside on the right side of that center of gravity to get a lot of pressure in there. That’s going to allow me to rotate back.

Now same thing happens in the downswing, if I want to rotate on through, how many times have you seen this where you have a student, they go, they bump their hips to the left, they don’t rotate on through, and then you see some kind of finish like this. Right?

The finish is abbreviated, they haven’t really rotated their body, their hips bump to the left, but they didn’t rotate on around. If you’re looking at it from this direction, here’s contact, you’ll see that my hips aren’t really open, they’re just slid to the left.

Well the reason for that is, I haven’t been able to put the pressure in the ground properly. That same force vector, imagine I’m going to hit right toward the camera now.

As I start to make my downswing, if I want to open my hips, I’ve got to put pressure in the ground going this way, and then the pressure from the ground moves up and back in the same direction to clear my hip out of the way.

If I don’t push into the ground to rotate my hips, then there’s really no way for me to rotate open with much force. If that force isn’t in front of my center of mass, it’s going to be very, very difficult to rotate.

Now on the downswing, this is why you see very powerful hitters, watch the long drive guys, they’re going to be shifting to the left. If you look at their left ankle, left hip, left shoulder like we talk about in the Top Speed Golf System, the compression line, that is angled back quite a bit.

It’s not only to help them to launch them it high, it’s because now my center of mass is outside of this force vector, and I can push into the ground really hard, and I can rotate everything on through and open to get through to my lead side.

So now, if I take my center of mass and I shift it to the left like this, all of a sudden, I don’t really have any force vector, I don’t have any way to rotate my body open with a lot of speed.

Now I can just kind of twist my body a little bit, I have some pressure into the ground there, it’s not impossible to do, but I can’t do it with power. So as I’m coming to the left, now I don’t really have anything to rotate with.

You’ll see this is why a lot of systems, I won’t name any names there, but a lot of systems as you get to the left like this, your move is to try to rotate open as hard as you can and to lunge the hips forward so that you go backwards to compensate for that.

It’s a lot easier if all we have to do is make a little shift, get our body slightly tilted back, and now just drive into the ground to clear my hips and my shoulders, and get them rotating all the way on open.

The kind of simplified version, if it was me, I was having a student that was struggling getting rotation and they were just pulling it back with their arms, I would go with the visualization that we’re going to get a little more weight on the right side early, and then we’re going to push our foot this way to allow us to rotate. That’s going to allow us to rotate back.

As we start the downswing, as I shift to the left I don’t want to shift too far to the left, my weight wants to go to the inside of my foot, and then I’m going to push out this way, push this way, to allow my hips and body to rotate all the way on through to the good, full finish.

That’s going to look like this going back, let me do the backswing. Earlier weight shift, pushing this back, good full turn, little bit of weight shift.

My weight starts to shift to the left about right here, and then as I’m starting down, I’m pushing this way to get my body to rotate all the way on around as I’m coming through to the finish.

You hear people say a lot of times, I don’t have the flexibility to get a good full turn going back, I don’t have the flexibility to get a good turn going through, and what they really mean is, I’m not using ground pressure and I’m not using the science to this to get the kind of distance and the kind of rotation that I want.

Very, very normal, and knowing this, you don’t have to get that complicated when you’re teaching your students, but knowing this is now going to make you the guy to go to, because a lot of people aren’t aware of this information.

So for those of you that are students out there, maybe you just watched this video and you want to work on your rotation, go ahead and work on 100 repetitions.

Number one, I’m going to get early weight shift to the right, so I’m going to feel like I’m about 90 percent. Doesn’t have to be that much, we’re just kind of using ballpark feelings here, not the exact numbers.

I’m going to feel like I’m let’s say closer to 75 to 80 percent on my right foot early in the takeaway, and I’m going to push into the ground to rotate to the top. Then as I start the left, I’m going to push into the ground to rotate all the way on through but I don’t want to slide too much.

There is a weight shift to the left, but I don’t want to slide on over there if I want to get to a good, full finish.

Do about 100 repetitions of those in your living room, get nice and comfortable with that. Then you guys will really be able to go out there and make those good, full turns and some powerful swings.

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