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Tyler Ferrell is the only person in the world named to Golf Digest's list of Best Young Teachers in America AND its list of Best Golf Fitness Professionals in America. Meet your new instructor.

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Set Up Overview

  • Hips back - are your bending from your hips?
  • relax knees
  • arms hang
  • grip (location and strength)

The purpose of set up is to prepare for what you want to do when you hit the ball. Impact and the downswing are the real reasons that we get set up the way that we do. Our primary focus is to control the location of contact with the golf ball. On this site, we refer to the place where the club hits the ground as the brush location. Where and when the club if furthest away from your body will dictate how solidly a golf ball is struck and in large part how successful we will be in golf.

Our set up will differ from an “athletic position” because our intentions are different than other sports. We are not going to need a lot of lateral motion or agility, a mere 6 inches of body shift is more than sufficient to play good golf, and the object that we will be striking in resting on the ground. Other than that, we are going to strive for a position that allows for freedom of movement of the spine, hips, shoulders and wrists. The process for getting into a good alignment is fairly easy. We want to bend from the hips, and not collapse the spine. We will have a slight bend from the knees and the arms hanging. The alignment of the body should match the shot that we intend to hit. The grip strength should match the swing but allow for freedom of movement in the wrists. We should also be aware of our ball position and it’s relation to the intended low point of our swing.

Playlists: STS - Swing Phases

Tags: Set Up, Concept, Beginner

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In this concept video, we're going to talk about setup.

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There are really three key components to your setup layer or setup position.

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First is going to be your body position.

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Kind of your spine angle, knee flex, arm hang, all those things.

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The second thing is going to be your grip and how your hands are positioned on the club.

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Then the third thing is going to be where to locate the body, compare to the golf wall

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or ball position.

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So, let's go through each one of those pieces and then we'll set you up to go practice

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the drills to learn how to really do it.

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We're going to train how it should feel.

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The first thing that we discussed is posture.

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Poster can be looked at from two positions.

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The primary one that we look at is this down the line view.

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The reason posture is so important is because posture sets up your muscles so that the

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right ones are ready to be active where if you were to set up with incorrect posture,

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then the wrong muscles are ready to be active.

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The right muscles that we want to get active are going to be your core muscles, your

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back muscles, your butt muscles.

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The wrong muscles that are going to get active will be primarily your quadriceps, too

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much in kind of your upper neck shoulder area like so.

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So, our posture is going to be largely just a pretty neutral spine with a good hip

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hinge.

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So, I teach you how to find your hips so that you can learn how to bend straight from

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your hips.

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As opposed to bending from either your knees, bending from your upper spine or bending from

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your lower spine.

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The reason we have to bend is obviously because the golf ball is on the ground and so I

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have to angle my body down towards it.

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So, that first key of that posture is going to be hinging from the hips, letting your

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arms hang and just having a little bit of relaxation in your knees.

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So, not a major knee flex, just kind of a relaxed knee flex.

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If you do this correctly, you can see that I can kind of wiggle my toes because my weight

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is a little bit more towards the heel side of my foot as opposed to on the ball on my

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feet which would be more common in a lot of other sports.

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The reasons why in other sports you want to be on the ball's ear feet because that activates

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your quads which gives you really quick change directions.

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We don't really need a ton of reaction or change direction in golf because we're not really

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moving a whole lot.

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What we need instead is to anchor into our hips which will activate kind of our glutes

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and hamstrings which will provide for the engine on the downswing and provide pelvic

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stability during the back swing.

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So, the last piece to this posture puzzle is looking at your arms kind of hanging naturally

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as opposed to being locked and rigid, being too close to you too far away, etc.

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We've got drills that help you figure out the right distance and all those things.

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So, then the second piece or this brings us to the second piece is when I'm in a good

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posture, now what?

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How do I hold this thing?

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How do I hold my tool?

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So, you're going to take the golf club and the keys for finding a good grip are mostly

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to have it somewhat in the fingers, primarily in the fingers of both hands and having

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the grip strength match your body movements.

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So, I can't give you one absolute guarantee this is where your V should point, etc.

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I can give you guidelines and ways to adjust it because everybody's going to be a little

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bit different and when I look on 3D I have about 45 degrees of range of motion or 45

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degrees of variance in grip strength between some of the weaker grips on towards some

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stronger grips that I see.

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So, how do we figure out where you should adjust yours?

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Well, you're going to use ball position because let me or sorry you're going to use ball

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flight, I should say.

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Here's why.

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When you take your grip, the purpose of having your hands somewhat turn to one side or the

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other is that when you extend your arms the club face is going to be in a certain orientation,

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like so.

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The more that you turn your hands clockwise or to the right for a right hand a golfer, this

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creates a strong grip.

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It is called a strong grip because when you are arms straightened due to the weight of

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the club, that club face is going to be pointed more down or more to the left.

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This will tend to launch the ball lower and create a little bit more of a draw spin because

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it will have the tendency to be close to the path.

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The opposite would be if I turn my hands counterclockwise or to the left on the grip for

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a right hand golfer.

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Now when I extend my arms that club face is pointed more up or to the right, you can see

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that.

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This will tend to launch the ball higher with more spin which will tend to create a weaker

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ball flight.

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That's how we call this strong and why we call this weak.

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Now in general you want your hands to somewhat match up but what you are going to do is rely

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on where your body is turned so that when your grip releases the club it hits a relatively

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straight ball flight or the ball flight that you prefer.

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We have videos on how to determine what is a good kind of finger grip and how to adjust

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your grip strength based on your ball flight.

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The last section is going to be ball position.

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So ball position is roughly going to look at two different areas.

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Where is the ball on the ground compared to my feet and where is the ball on the ground compared

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to my upper body because both of those have influence.

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The reason is with my feet are very narrow like so but my body is positioned like this.

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Is that ball position forward or in the middle?

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Well it's in the middle compared to my feet but it's forward compared to my upper body.

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Our terminology we get confused if we only look at it from one perspective.

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Our stance width will be explained where we are going to have the ball position.

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Those will all be explained but the general key for ball position is your ball position for

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every shot should be for every shot except for your driver and your putter should be just

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slightly behind where the low point is going to be.

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It's much as a few inches.

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So if you were to take swings and see where the club bottoms out or brushes against the ground,

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if you were to position the ball just slightly back of where the club is entering the ground,

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then you will have more or less a solid strike on the golf ball.

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So these are the basic keys.

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We'll go over the details of them in the drill videos and how to get around them in the

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troubleshooting video.

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