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Overall Shape Of The Swing - A Beginner Guide To The Golf Swing

The role of the body is to create speed. The arms should be relatively relaxed and direct that speed in the direction of the golf ball and target. Simply put, the body is the engine, and the arms are the steering wheel.

Tags: Concept, Beginner

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This video is going over the overall shape of the swing and the roles of the different parts of your body.

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Now this is really good for beginners, but if you're experienced player, this is a nice way to look at what we're trying to do with a golf ball with a golf club in my hand or when I'm swinging.

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So essentially what's going to happen is my body is going to be rotating and moving my arms and my arms are going to be transferring the speed that my body creates and directing that speed to the golf ball.

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Okay, so if you've played any other throwing or striking sport, a lot of the similar rules are going to apply, which is basically when I load up in my backswing, I'm trying to create some stretches in my hips and in my core and then as I start down, I'm going to try and use my lower body first, then I'm going to try and use my core, then I'm going to use my shoulders and then finally right before impact, I'm going to use my hands and wrists.

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So this pattern of going from the ground all the way up is the most effective or the most efficient way of creating speed if I was to break it down even further.

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Let's talk about what the body needs to do. The body is going to rotate and create some of this movement of the arms.

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Essentially, my arms are going to stay kind of in this little bubble out in front of my chest. They can move around a little bit, they can change with the wrist positions, but they're not going to work too much around my body or way up here unless I'm hitting kind of some specialty shots.

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So then what's going to happen is depending on how my body moves, that's going to control where my hands go. So if I were rotating kind of back and forth just like so, the club would move in a circle.

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If I were to then hinge my wrists and rotate and then go body arms, that kind of gets that timing of how the arms and the body work together.

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So the body job is to create the speed. The arms job is to direct that speed to the golf ball. What most amateurs or most beginner golfers tend to struggle with is they do the opposite.

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They will tend to create a whole lot of speed by chopping or throwing their arms kind of like so, which is a combination of a whole bunch of movements.

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And then they will direct it or control where that's going to bottom out by how much they stand up or how much they hang back or how much they move their body.

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So our goal in trying to correct that is to create these good impact positions so that when my arms simply extend the golf ball gets in the way.

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As opposed to if I'm creating speed with my arms, my arms are already extended and I have to use my body to perfectly position. Okay, so if I stand up that amount.

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That's kind of what most amateurs end up looking like. So as you go through these beginner drills, we're going to focus on a good grip so that we can use our wrists through full motion.

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We're going to focus on a good set up so that our hips and our spine are in position to make a good backswing.

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And then we're going to focus on some of the geometry of kind of keeping our body relatively centered. What I mean by that is if I was to stand up like so and then rotate, you can see that that club kind of moves around my body.

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Well, in the golf swing it'll actually have a little bit of variance to it. It kind of kind of loops a tiny bit.

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But when I'm bent over, the body is almost going to look if I make a good backswing as if it turned right around my spine.

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Now as you go through the layers, you'll understand that that's not exactly the case, but trying to keep this upper body or this head kind of over the golf ball helps control where the bottom of the swing is going to be.

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I'm not saying I want you to keep your head glued on the golf ball or your eyes glued on the golf ball because having some rotation with your head actually helps.

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What I am saying is that having a whole lot of up movement of the head or a whole lot of movement forward backward of the head is going to make locating the golf ball that much more complicated.

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So we're going to try to create this movement, this body movement around a kind of stable center and then you're going to transfer all that energy using your arms.

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