Why You Need This: Today, you'll discover "The LAST Lesson You'll Ever Need To Stop Standing Up"

And we all want that familiar “thwack” sound of the ball compressing on the face of the club…

…but, if it seems like it’s almost impossible to consistently generate that flush, ball-first contact…

…it might be because you’re standing up out of your posture in the downswing.

Today, Professor Q joins me to explain why you want to stay in your posture…

…and we’ll go over a drill that’ll make sure you stop standing up and get all the benefits that come from staying in your posture.

 

 

 

 

Golf Pros Featured:

Instructors Featured: Clay Ballard    Quentin Patterson    

Video Duration: 17:11

Video Transcription:

Clay: Hey, it's great to have you here today. Me and Q were hanging out at the office today, talking about a lot of different golf topics, bouncing ideas off each other. And we got on the topic of posture. We figured we'd make a video for you with some of the things that we were talking about here. So with posture, why do you think it even matters?

Like, uh, when we're talking about posture, we're basically saying as you make a swing. So if you're going from down the line, actually you stay in your posture, make a little half down swing to impact and then his angle of his body. Is he staying in posture this way, so is his overall body tilt this way, or some people will draw a line, go back to address again.

Some people will draw a line on the back of your butt here, a vertical line like that, and then as you go down, make a swing and come to impact, pause for me, your butt will stay on that line, or even be through there. So, Why do you think that's important or what do you, what do you think it matters in golf?

Q: Right. So, you know, what's the alternative? The alternative is, you know, it's standing up out of it, right? And what happens when you do that is one, you're going to release the club earlier, right? So you're going to be adding loft at contact. And when you add loft, you're just not going to be compressing as much.

You're basically turning your. You know, eight iron into a pitching wedge, right? Whereas, if we do what the better players do, where we're getting the hands more in front, right? That's gonna be compressing the ball, you're gonna be able to hit the ball lower with more consistency, with more power, right? And things like that.

Clay: So why do you think, why wouldn't you be able to, why can't I get shaft lean if I'm standing up out of 

Q: it? Right, so, basically, if my upper body, if my chest is moving away from the ball, right, if I were to have shaft lean as I'm doing that, well, I'm not going to reach the golf ball. I won't get there. So, I have to, as my chest moves away, I have to release the club to get to the ball, otherwise I'll just flat out miss it.

Clay: Yeah. So, if you do a split screen, where we have it down the line and face on at the same time, go ahead and stand up out of your posture this time, and imagine, like, the center of his body. is getting farther away from it. So as you stand up, the center of your body is getting farther and farther away. You can back up even more than that, like stand straight up out of your posture.

So now, you've reached so far, he's gotten so far away, his body's gotten so far away from the ball, even if he has a straight line from his shoulders down to the club head, he still can't even reach the ball there. So the farther you back up this way, the farther I back up out of my posture and stand up, now I have to reach really far with my club, and the club is the farthest when there's no shaft lean.

So if my club is extended like this, that's as far away as it can, if I, if I want to get some shaft lean and still be able to reach the golf ball, I've got to get closer to it. So this time stay in good posture, now his body's moved closer to the ball, you'll notice how he's got great shoulder tilt, which is a staple of great ball striking, look at the right arm, how it retains some flex in there, all these are things you're going to see with basically every single tour player, and now you've got some shaft lean so that, most importantly, You can hit the ball first and then take your divot in front of the golf ball.

So you get rid of those chunks and thins. So the why is like five wise, six wise, whatever it is, you know, that you're not gonna be able to have lag. You're not gonna be able to shaft. Well, you're not gonna be able to get a divot in front of the ball. It's all gets tougher when you're popping up out of your posture, which, you know, that doesn't sound too fun.

What, what do you see with the pros? This is another question I had. So I've struggled with this. I've studied tons and tons of video when I'm watching video from pros. Go ahead and pretend like you're in your posture kind of coming down to impact again. So I'll pause all kinds of different pros with different clubs at impact.

I've tried drawing a line that starts on the outside of the hips and kind of matches the overall back angle. I've said, okay, well that's quite a bit different between players. There's nothing that I can give as like a recommendation there. It's just all over the map. You got guys like a, uh, like a Justin Thomas who's almost like...

Here, his body is like parallel with the ground as he's coming through there because he's just so flexible. Um, not really possible for most players. And I said, okay, well, let me take one through the center of the hips. Go ahead and address it again. I'll take a, I'll take a line from the center of the hips through the center of the neck.

Maybe that'll work. Well, that was all over the place too. So you get all these different angles that never really hold up from consistently to player to player. So I don't like to recommend things that are preferences and not, like, must haves. Right. But when you draw a line on the back, it starts to get a lot more consistent.

So what would you say you like to see when you're, when you're drawing, you know, the line on your butt we mentioned earlier? 

Q: Right. So, basically, that, that, I agree. That's the most consistent thing that I, that I've seen among all tour players. Basically, if you draw the butt line, the tush line, whatever you want to call it.

If you draw that line going vertically, and it's touching, at address, and it's touching your backside at address, what you're going to see with most of the best players, or pretty much all the best players, is you're going to see is as they go up to the top of the swing, you're not going to see any space between their backside and that line.

And then as they come into contact, again, you're not going to see any space between the backside and the line. And many pros, Victor Hovland, there's a lot of pros that actually, Go into that line, their, their backside moves into that line even farther. There are some pros that maybe move off of it an inch, but I don't see any great players and I see this in countless amateur players, uh, recreational golfers where the hips move off the backside a bunch, a ton.

So, if it's, if it's happening more than an inch, um, I would say you're definitely coming out of, out of your posture and it's something that, that would be a point. Yeah, most of those 

Clay: guys that we're talking about earlier too, like when, when they're, they're setting up almost back on their heels more. So when you draw that line on the rear end, they're almost like kind of starting really far back there.

And then they come off of it, maybe an inch at impact, but they're still getting shaffling. They're getting lag. They're getting all the things. So to me, I could really care less if your rear end is right on that line, doesn't make that much difference. I care a lot more about whether or not you have lag in the swing.

Hands in front of the impact, compressing the golf ball. That's really the point of all this. It's not to stay in your posture. Like I said, spine angles move pretty wildly from one player to the next, but we have to be in a position that we can deliver the club through the ball really well. So, you know, given that we kind of covered a lot of bases here, what do you think is a great drill to, to feel this?

Like, if I don't know if I'm obviously I can draw the line on my rear end and check that. What else should I do to make it easy, easy, possible, 

Q: right? So my favorite drill for this is also a shallowing drill because we didn't, we didn't really discuss why is it so difficult for a lot of people to shallow out the club, but really what it comes down to for most golfers that I see it's because they're coming down steep and coming up out of the posture is a way.

to shallow out the club. It's not what the best players do, but it is a way to do it. So, if you imagine, if I'm coming down, and I'm coming down steep, and let's say I push my hips into that line, and I continue to rotate. Well, look where that club's gonna go. That club is gonna go way across the ball. I'm gonna be coming down very steeply.

It's going to be very, very difficult to be consistent with that because you're going to hit hooks, you're going to hit pulls, slices, and that's even if you're able to make solid contact with the ball. Usually you're just not going to make solid contact with the ball. So what, what a lot of golfers will do when they get this club starting to come down steep, what they'll do is they'll stand up and look what happens to the shaft.

Now, now that shaft lays down a little bit and now I'm able to have this club working from the inside and I can actually get the ball to go in the direction of my target. Now, I would much rather have somebody who stands up out of it and shallows it out than to have somebody who comes down way over the top because this move here, this is a high handicapper move.

This move here, I mean, I see, you know, three handicappers doing that, right? So you can play good golf doing that, but again, you're going to have the issues of thin contact, losing lag, and all, and all of those things. You're just. To take your swing to the next level, you really want to work on staying in your posture.

Yeah, when the 

Clay: hands go up there too, so if I start down steep and all of a sudden I stand up out of my posture, these hands get higher this way, so imagine like this is good, they're going to get higher this way, and all of a sudden, what happens is that pulls the heel of the club up off the turf, and now you're going to hit a lot of thin shots.

So if you find yourself having to like fluff it up on a perfect lie, then that's part of the reason why the hands are too high, we're getting up out of the posture a little bit. Yeah, you're going to have 

Q: a really hard time hitting it out of... Fairway bunkers, tight lies, anything like that because you're raising the sweet spot.

This heel of the club's got to come in and hit the ground first. And, you know, that just creates a bunch of problems. I think 

Clay: Blazer's a great athlete. It's like, usually I've found, pretty much everybody, you'll make compensations that may not be the perfect thing, but it's like to solve a problem. So people say, well, why don't, why doesn't everybody just get lag and shaft lean and do all the stuff that the pros are doing?

Well, Usually, it's because we start off, everybody, myself included, I'm coming down steep, I'm over the top, I have this giant slice, I'm kind of chopping into the ground, and then I solve that by staying up out of my posture. And then, if we're lucky enough to realize that's an issue and how to do it the right way, then we shallow out the club the right way, come into it, and start hitting it great.

For those of us that don't guess the right way, or maybe don't get the best instruction, or whatever it is, we never quite figure that part out, and we just, there's just kind of this one missing piece, so. You know, how do we get this last piece put together so we can get it up here? So 

Q: what I recommend using is a alignment stick with a pool noodle on it.

Um, you can use this swing plate This is an awesome Tool that we really like if you're working on stuff indoors. I mean, it's almost a must have I'll put a link in the description below the video here If you want to pick one of these up, we do make a small commission on these Um, it just helps us support the channel if you buy one from our link.

So we appreciate that. I said you can 

Clay: use a stick in the ground. Yeah. So you can. This is better because you can do, you know, you can find the angle on here. So this has a little angle finder on there and with an iron, set that to 60, that's pretty much going to be good throughout the, throughout all your irons to get the right swing plane on 

Q: there.

So I'll set this to roughly, this is going to be in 60 degrees is the lie angle of a, of a six iron. So if I hold this club flush to the ground. Right? That's going to be about a 60 degree angle. That's, that's what we're trying to create right here. Um, as we're coming in. 

Clay: So... Yeah, like I said, there's numbers on the side here.

So I can just put it right at, right at that 60 degrees. Get it fixed there. Yep, and now we know we're perfectly on it. Perfect. 

Q: Um, and then what I'm going to do, is I'm going to set this up to where this ball, we have this alignment stick that kind of goes through this, um, this hole in the, in the swing plate here.

I'm going to set this up about two, the ball about two club head widths. To the inside. So you can see it's, you know, roughly six inches, six to eight inches or so, something like that. And I'm going to have this about two feet in front of the ball. And you can see, if I do that, it sets me up to force my hands to go underneath it.

Because if I, if I start down steep, I'm going to be swinging down over this and my hands are going to go over this. So this is a really great drill that helps you to get your hands low. As we mentioned before, you know, the tush line, that's... That's just what we see with all the best players, you know, that is just a product of the hands getting low and all these things.

So this isn't about necessarily the backside. This is more about getting the club to deliver to the ball in the correct way. And if you're getting the ball, getting the club to deliver to the, to the ball in the correct way, the tush line is going to happen as a consequence of that. You're going to be able to maintain that as a consequence.

So what we would want to do is just start out with some shorter and slower swings, like some half swings. Where we're getting the hands and the club underneath this. And the goal here is that the movement is the most important thing. Right? So if you're struggling with the ball, take away the ball. And just see if you can do it in a practice swing, a slow practice swing.

And then maybe go toward clipping a tee. Then maybe go toward hitting the ball off of a tee. And then gradually building up the swing little by little from there. So I'm going to have Clay kind of jump in here and demonstrate. I like 

Clay: a little drill, I'll add to that. Sure. If I take a chair, this is like an exaggeration.

Yeah, yeah. So if I stand up out of the, if I stand up out of my posture, go ahead and demonstrate one where you're standing up out of your posture. Sure. The hips move toward the golf ball. Now all of a sudden, all this is jamming up my way. I feel like there's no way I can get underneath that. I'm gonna hit that.

A lot of that is the legs. So his legs are getting really straight, his knees are locking up, and it just puts your body in a position that's tough to get, to get under that, that noodle. So if you kind of scoot back there a little bit so you can see me on that camera. Imagine you're in your downswing, you're going to sit in this chair.

I'll kind of scoot to where I'd be hitting a golf ball here. I'm going to sit in this chair. This is way exaggerated. You're never really going to do this in a real swing. But I would be so far under this noodle now, my legs would be really bent. And then from there, I'm just swinging through and hitting this golf shot.

Now, like I said, that's, that's 10 times too exaggerated, but that's the exact feeling most people need to have if we're not used to using our legs and bending our legs a little bit. So here, I'll go ahead, feel like I'm sitting in that chair. I feel like the club shaft is now going to be lower. I feel like there's tons of room under this noodle now.

And I'll do what Q said and just go ahead and hit little, little, you know, 50, 60 yards, 70 yard, a hundred yard, whatever it is, shots. Until I get comfortable with that. Now, at first, that's probably a pretty common, uh, theme that I see. Is that you may start to go a little too far inside and hit them out to the right.

That's actually a good sign. I would rather see you do that. Maybe even get those balls that draw back to the left. So starting to curve right to left. And as you get more and more comfortable with it, you're gonna get a little closer to this pool noodle, a little closer to the pool noodle, and now all of a sudden they're gonna be pretty straight.

So if you start out too far to the right, I'm totally fine with that in the beginning. And then gradually back down on it until you can hit a pretty, a pretty straight shot. And then, like I said, there, 120 yard six iron. I'm just gonna go, practice that enough until I don't even, the noodle has not even bothered me at all.

It's like I'm not even thinking about it at that speed. As soon as you get to where you're not even thinking about it, then I can go to 140, 150, 160, whatever it is. So there, even a little small swing. I hit it so solid because the, the sole of the club's coming in level with the turf. You know, I wish I'd known that when I was, when I was clanking everything thin like I did for about 10 years, practicing eight hours a day and still not hitting them solid.

But now that I've gotten lower, you know, they feel just a lot better. And then eventually, once you feel like the noodle, you can't even remember it's there, then go ahead and make a few full swings. There we go. And I couldn't hit one a whole lot better than that. That felt pretty good. So, you got anything to add to that one, Q?

No, and 

Q: this is the ball flight you're looking for, starting to the right, curving to the left. If it's going lower than what you would normally see, that's a good indication as well, because that means that you're staying in your posture. Because if you, if you were to stand up out of your posture, or if you, if you were to release the club earlier and not stand up, well look what's gonna happen.

I'm just gonna throw that club into the ground. I have to, if I'm staying in my posture and getting my hands lower, I have to be getting my hands more in front. which is going to help me to deal off the club and hit a more compressed shot like that. 

Yeah, 

Clay: almost over compressing here. The, the vertical launch angle was 14 degrees.

Uh, that's, you know, almost on the lower end. So I know I'm exaggerating enough. I'm kind of really squatting down, getting under this pole. Or if you're not sure, like you can really just eyeball it to a certain degree. If I hit this shot, let's watch where it hits the net here. I'm going to know if I'm doing this the right way.

There we go. So that swing, um, One, two, three, four, almost, uh, five steps or 15 feet away from this net and it's about belly high. Right? If it's way up here by my head, I know I'm probably standing up out of my posture, flipping it and it's going way too high with a six iron. If it's way down low by your knees, you're probably just thinning it a little bit.

That's a little exaggerated, but I, I really liked that. Now one question that we didn't answer yet, and you're probably thinking is. I don't know exactly what to do on my own. So I'd really love to have a pro that looks at my swing, can tell the movements exactly what my grip looks like, what my shoulder tilt look like.

I know we mentioned several things there that can be overwhelming sometimes. You can work through this on your own. And if you follow through the steps that we did, you can get better for sure, but you got to pay attention a little bit. It's a whole heck of a lot easier if you have a pro like Q to take a look at your swing and tell you exactly what to do so I don't even have to think.

I just send in a video, Q sees my swing, tells me what to do. I don't even have to think, I just do what he says and I get better. That's kind of the best of both worlds, right? So we have a program called Swing Reviews, and Q has a couple spots open for that right now. Now usually he doesn't have very many spots open, and to be honest, when they are open, he usually has a wait list of people waiting to get in.

Those people usually take all those spots. There's a couple spots open right now, they may not be open for long, so if you click the button down below this video, You go to sign up for Q's Swing Review program and it's full. Make sure you join that wait list so that next time he opens up spots, you'll be able to get one of those.

But I know if you work with Q, you're going to have a tremendous amount of success. I work with him on my swing. I bounce ideas off him just like we were here today. And you're just going to love the program. So best of luck. Can't wait to hear about your great success with Q. We'll see you soon.