Start The Down Swing With Your Lower Body?

One of the most common statements made about the transition from the back swing to the downswing is you have to start the move with your lower body. What a lot of people portray that move to be is a slide forward with the hips towards the target. They believe that move is going to do a couple of things for them, the first thing they believe it will do for them is get their pressure into their lead side and secondly get the club to shallow out in the downswing. In this article I am going to describe why that is NOT the ideal scenario for the downswing movement.

In order to for me to describe what the movement should be, I have to describe why it needs to be this way. A predictable golf swing is built generally on two things at impact, one is having a good path direction into the ball, and two being a stable clubface through the hitting area. These two things lead to repeatable golf shots and control and understanding what the ball flight tendencies are going to be. If you take away one of these 2 aspects, you end up with a swing that can produce wildly different results from one to swing to the next.

In the example I described above, that player will have a very difficult time controlling the clubface position from one swing to the next as well as have a hard time with making solid contact with the golf ball every time. Because of the movement that the hips have made to shift laterally toward the target your body is forced to counterbalance by tilting in the opposite direction. When your upper body tilts in the opposite direction it can help shallow the club for you but at a huge cost to the clubface control. With your body now having trail side bend you are now not in a place to rotate properly into the impact area. This requires your hands to make up for the difference at impact and that is how both the clubface position and bottom of the golf swing can be negatively affected.

So what should your downswing movement be? Your downswing movement should be a way for you to move into impact with a shift of pressure to your lead leg and well as give you the ability to rotate into impact with both the upper and lower body. The transition from back swing to downswing there should be a whole-body shift toward the target. In a lesson I describe it as a lean or a fall toward the target followed by a rotation of the entire body. By the entire body shifting forward you do not throw off the balance of the body which doesn’t require you to have as much side bend, this makes it much easier to start the rotating aspect of your downswing. All of these things lead to a shift of the pressure forward which puts you in a great position to contact the golf ball solid much more often, as well as getting the energy of the body building speed. Now that the shift happened now you are rotating, which is making the clubface and the path more consistent through the impact area. This is what I believe is the most ideal way to make the transition from back swing to downswing happen.

I hope with this article you are now more aware of why starting the downswing with your lower body only is not the best idea for the overall health of your golf swing.

Give It A Try!!