Tyler Ferrell is the only person in the world named to Golf Digest's list of Best Young Teachers in
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Fix Your Flip
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Simple swing thoughts can help you with upper body awareness. These include:
- "keep your head still"
- "stay on top of the ball"
- "don't sway"
- "don't stand up"
- "cover the ball"
Sometimes the thought is not enough. When you need to calibrate your upper body sway, use some simple visual aids to add to your mental map. This station is exceptionally helpful with upper body sway and the forward lunge.
Playlists: Train Your Release, Stop Moving Off The Ball (Sway), Fix Your Flip
Tags: Poor Contact, Cast, Iron, Driver, Fairway Wood, Backswing, Transition, Release, Drill, Beginner
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Astralis practicing upper body awareness.
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Many golfers lose sense of where their upper body is in space.
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And there's a few different times that this can happen,
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but practicing with a little bit of visual spatial feedback
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can help you dial in where your upper body is,
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or other parts of your body as well.
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So for this one, we're going to focus on where the sternum
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or the neck or your head is, depending on what you feel
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controls all that space.
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So the tour average is that the upper body shifts off the wall
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only a half inch to an inch.
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So it's very little shift.
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That would be, if here's my upper body,
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that's about an inch off the wall.
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So many golfers in a misguided attempt
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to really load up onto the trail side,
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either shift their body during the takeaway
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where their upper body is well over the wall,
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or they stay centered.
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And then when they go to set their arms,
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they tend to shift off the wall that way.
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So having a little visual spatial awareness
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can help either of those backswing flaws.
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There's a major downswing flaw as well,
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which would be an upper body lunge.
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Many golfers get loose track of where their upper body is,
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usually because of their release pattern
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getting a little scoopy or having more of a flip.
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And so they lunge that upper body well ahead of the golf ball
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so that they hit it so that they can hit the ball solidly.
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But it prevents you from doing a few key things.
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When your upper body gets that far forward,
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you're almost always gonna have a really steep angle of attack.
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And so many golfers shallow it out by scooping with the wrist,
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but it prevents you, or the other one
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that they'll shallow it out with is having more of the extension
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or a lack of rotation.
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So they'll kind of lunge forward like this.
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It really prevents having body rotation.
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It would be very hard to be in front of the ball
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and wide open without getting unplayably steep.
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So if you lunge too much,
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it's gonna disrupt your road-re sequencing.
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So this little training aid, it's just an alignment stick
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and I've got a pool noodle on it.
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The pool noodle is optional and you can see in the wind,
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it's actually not as helpful,
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but it makes it easier for you to see where this is on camera.
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And for many golfers, I'll use this pool noodle
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just because it's soft, it's not very threatening.
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And it takes up a little bit more space visually
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so it's easier to feel where I am.
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But I can either train nine to three
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where basically I'm staying on top of it
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during the back swing and on top of it,
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during the downswing.
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While still trying to use good mechanics,
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so while still trying to use my body,
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I don't wanna stay on top of it
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and just swing with my arms.
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I wanna still use my body,
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look, you know, pushing the right foot,
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pushing to the left foot, but while my upper body
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stays more centered.
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Then I can take that up to full swings
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or three quarter to, you know,
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L-D-I, length swings.
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But having this still kind of as a visual reminder
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of where I wanna keep my upper body in space.
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So you'll see that if I were to exaggerate
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some of these flaws, you'll see,
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if I shift well off the ball,
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I'm gonna have a tendency to hit way behind it
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or the very least, I'm gonna tend to see
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to have early arm movement
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because while my body is trying to get back
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into a playable position, it'd be really hard
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to delay and kind of maintain some of that good
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downswing loading.
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The other one would be more of the
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forward lunge where I'm not gonna shift as much
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during the backswing, but I'm gonna really go forward
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during the downswing.
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And you'll see, I tried to flip and get it up in the air,
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but it usually has a low, low lunge,
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unless we'll try to duplicate that one more time.
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I have a few students who do it beautifully,
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but they're working with something like this as well.
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So if I lunge forward, I've really got to flip
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and release this more behind
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and really get those arms going soon.
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So you can see, you got a little bit more height
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that way disconnected with my arms and lunge forward,
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but it cost me a significant amount of distance
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and it wasn't the most solid feeling strike,
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at least not to me.
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So now, just for good measure, we'll do one more good one.
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I'm gonna keep this spatial awareness here.
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For me, I have to be more careful during the downswing.
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I don't have a major problem swinging off the ball,
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but some of you may feel that that upper body
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has to stay a little bit more centered
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in order to keep this visual in the same space.
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So keeping that upper body in a good location
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is one of the fastest ways to improve your low point control.
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And it's sometimes easier than working on the release,
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which is the other major way.
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So use this if your turf contact,
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your low point control is out of a whack,
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especially if you have too much of a sway off the ball,
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or a lunge during your downswing.
