One of the biggest challenges that recreational players face is maintaining their posture throughout the swing. Staying off the stroke – also known as “losing ground clearance” – leads to thin strokes, unstable contact and all sorts of compensations.
According to GOLFTEC Director of Teaching Quality Josh Troyer, adjustment starts with understanding a simple relationship: the connection between your forward swing at address and the pitch of your shoulders at the top of your backswing.
Every golfer begins the swing by establishing a slope for the ground in the setup – basically your stance, spine angle and forward bend. On the PGA Tour, players average about 40 degrees of forward shoulder flexion at address. Keeping this posture intact throughout the backstroke is essential.
What elite golfers do extremely well is maintain that pitch to the ground by matching the pitch of their shoulders to their original stance as they return. They do not keep their body static, but coordinate their movement.
Tour pros typically tilt their shoulders to the left about three degrees less than their original forward swing at address. So if a player starts out with 40 degrees of bend at address, he will top out with about 37 degrees of shoulder tilt. This close relationship is what keeps their heads steady and their attitude intact.
However, most amateurs do not lean enough. They can start from 40 degrees forward, but only reach 20-22 degrees of shoulder tilt from the top of the backbend. This creates a much flatter curve and on camera you’ll see their head come up out of the stance.
“They start to stand up,” says Troyer. “They get out of position and that creates unsustainable low points and a lot of downside compensation.
Key point: actual numbers matter less than RELATIONS between them. If a golfer tees off with 30 degrees of forward bend, maintaining stance means reaching about 27 degrees of shoulder tilt at the top of the backswing. Trying to force a 30-degree setup on a 37-degree shoulder tilt would actually cause the head to drop toward the ball and disrupt the stance in the opposite direction.
It is essential to understand that relationship between the slope to the ground and the slope of the shoulders. Get these two elements in sync, says Troyer, and you’ve solved one of the fundamental parts of a consistent golf swing.
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