❌ Don't Make these Backswing Mistakes!

It’s Thursday and that means you’ve got 3 things coming,

⛳️ One Golf Tip: Backswing Basics you can do at home!
🧠 One Stat for next time you think of hitting 3 wood off the tee!
🔥 Something extra (deep research!)

We’re next up on the tee, let’s go!

ONE TIP
The backswing things you need to know!

If you got my email last week you should have a little bit better understanding of how to grip the golf club. If you want to go back and double check you can click here. This week I talk about the backswing, and regardless of your skill level there are two main faults that I see a lot of golfers fall victim to. I'm going to talk about both of them in hopes that during this off-season you can work on these from the comfort of your own home!

Like with all golf instruction you see online please keep in mind that everyone's golf swing is different. I'm not recommending that you must do things a specific way, but more so trying to highlight a part of the golf swing that you can look at, and experiment with to see if it can help you improve. If you have any questions about this topic you can reply to this email and I'd be happy to dive into it further.

You can check out the video I have on the topic below,

Fault #1, Sway in the backswing (lower body)

How I describe sway is when a player makes a backswing, they lose the key pressure point which is the inside of the trail foot. On video if we're looking from face-on what that looks like is the trail foot starts to roll to the outside, or oftentimes we see the trail knee or trail hip get outside the trail foot. See the picture below for a visual.

In this fault there is a lot of excess lateral movement, a solution is to look at it as we're going to have less lateral and more rotation of our lower body in the backswing. a visual I like to give players when they get set up in their golf swing is to envision that their trunk is backed up against a wall, and when they make their backswing they should feel like their trail glute is going to push that wall back instead of sliding along it. While doing this you can also focus on maintaining that pressure point inside your trail foot. 

Fault #2, Inside Takeaway

For many golfers an inside takeaway has a lot to do with how they rotate their shoulders, and more specifically on the plane that they rotate their shoulders. A fault I see a lot is called flat shoulder plane, which is when a golfer makes a backswing and

start to lose their posture. In the picture below if you look at the orange alignment rod, when I make a backswing my shoulders are rotating on a different plane then my lower body is. 

Now, this is something you can work on at home very easily. Grab a golf club or an alignment rod, get setup up in golf posture and make a backswing. The objective will be to have the alignment rod pointing down in front of where the golf ball would be, and not off into the horizon or parallel with the ground.

Combining Both Feels

If you're still standing in your living room, we can combine both of these fields. As you make a back swing let's feel our trail glute going back while maintaining pressure on the inside of our trail foot and let's rotate our upper body on top of that lower body with that alignment rod or golf club pointing more down towards the ground. For those of you who don't get to swing the golf club at all in the off season this is a pretty easy way to work on a couple of key things to keep your body used to rotate in golf posture during the off season.

Things to remember:

• The amount of rotation you will have in your golf swing will vary from player to player. this can be influenced a lot by physical limitations. The one thing that I'll remind you is that in most situations your upper body will rotate more than your lower body does. for reference, when we look at PGA okay and LPGA Tour professionals we tend to see 90° of upper body rotation and 45° of lower body rotation.

🎙️ Have you checked out my Podcast? Find it here
This week I interviewed PGA of B.C. Teacher of the Year Kyla Inaba. Kyla is a friend and a Rockstar Golf Coach!

THIS WEEK’S SOMETHING EXTRA
Coach’s Curiosity

ONE QUOTE
Is 3 wood more accurate than the driver?

Most of the time the answer is no! A lot of golfers feel that if they hit 3 wood instead of driver they're going to be more accurate. There's a lot of data to suggest that that is not true. Oftentimes I try to explain it as if you're going to make a bad swing the ball is going to go offline regardless of what club you use. And if you're going to miss hit your 3 wood, you're also going to pay a much bigger distance penalty than if you miss hit your driver. For many golfers, I believe it's best to hit the driver and try to maximize the distance you can get off of your tee shots. The exception I will give you here would be on holes where we have trouble on both sides of the fairway, for you Kingsville Golf and Country Club members a perfect example is whole number 4 Red.

What it feels like making a par on #7 Red at Kingsville, if you know, you know2