Pete Finch – PGA Teaching Pro

Golfers wishing to keep their head nice and still and wishing to keep their spine angle nice and intact throughout the golf swing, really have to look at how they’re setting up, how they’re building their stance, and how they’re building that posture to give them the best chance of achieving what they wanted throughout the goal swing.

Now the first real key point to look at this is, how do you build a good spine angle? Now stance-wise, it’s important to build around the club that you’re using, so I have a 7-iron here for driving my stance to be wider for a wedge it might be narrower. But I’ve got a 7-iron here, my stance is going to be about shoulder width apart. I’m going to brace my knees just got to allow a little bit of flex in there. I’m not going to bend too much, I’m just going to add a little bit of flex into my knees. With my spine angle, we start off very straight. I’m just going to tilt it over.

Now there’s a couple of different drills that you can use to actually get that correct spine tilt probably the easiest to do is just to pop a club on your nose. The other end of the club on the belt buckle, and then just keep those two connected as you tilt over, then drop the hands down and that will help you achieve that nice straight spine angle. Now one of the keys after you’ve built this solid foundation to your overall technique is what you’re doing with your chin. You see so many golfers get over ball and all of a sudden their head dips down, the upper back arches, and you get into this position here.

Now the problem with this, is as that chin goes down, the left shoulder as it moves back, it has nowhere to go, it’s going to move in to the left chin. Now as the chin starts to be impacted by the shoulder, hopefully not too dramatically, the head will have to move as a result.

So what’s going to happen, is as that chin dips down, as the left shoulder moves in, that head is going to be drifting and shifting away from the ball. Now if you’re all looking at head movement, and you want to focus on head movement, the head shifting up and off to the right hand side is not something that you want to see. It’s moving your way from the ball and shifting your swing center back away from the ball as well, and it will have negative effects on you overall shot. So building that stance, building that posture, and please by all means, get that chin nice and high address and allow that left shoulder to turn underneath without running into any kind of barrier.