It is easy for golfers to overlook the important role that the spine plays in the golf swing.

Since you can’t see your spine as you may your swing, and it obviously doesn’t come into contact with the club, it would be easy to believe that you could ignore this part of your body. That would be an error, however, as paying attention to the way your spine works in the swing is a good idea. Learn to manage your spine angle both before and during the swing, and you will be well on your way to improved ball striking.

In this article, we are going to break down a variety of points related to this concept. By the end of the content we have provided, you should understand why this is important, and you should understand how to work on it in your own game. Are you likely to see immediate results when you work on rotating around your spine in the golf swing? No – probably not. It’s rare that you’ll see immediate results in any part of your game, as golf provides all players with an imposing challenge. Gains are hard to come by on the links, so plan on working hard on your technique in this area before you see marked improvements.

All of the content in this article is based on a right-handed golfer. If you happen to play left-handed, please take a moment to reverse the directions as necessary.

Why Swing Around Your Spine?

The concept of swinging around your spine might seem a little strange at first, especially if you don’t have much previous experience with golf instruction. However, as we get into this topic and you start to understand why it is important and what it can do for your game, you’ll see that approaching your swing this way makes a lot of sense.

Without further delay, let’s dive right into some of the benefits you can enjoy as a result of swinging around your spine properly.

• Added distance. In order to get your attention right off the bat, we have opened with a point that is sure to entice you. Nearly every golfer would love to hit the ball farther and swinging around your spine correctly is a good way to do just that. The key here is the added speed that you should be able to create through the hitting area. When you rotate through the ball, rather than sliding from side to side, your club has an opportunity to rapidly pick up speed from the top of the swing all the way through impact. When you see professional golfers on TV hitting the ball impressive distances with swings that look relaxed and fluid, they are able to do so in large part because they rotate effectively. Body rotation is not something that the average amateur golfer handles properly, so working on improving your play in this area could dramatically elevate your performance.
• Clean ball striking. In addition to hitting the ball harder, you should be able to hit it cleaner when you swing around your spine. Why is that the case? It comes down to knowing where the bottom of your swing is going to be when you move the club through the hitting area. Controlling the bottom of your swing arc is an important skill as it has a lot to do with how close you are able to get to the middle of the club face at impact. When hitting a drive off of a tee, you’ll probably want to have your swing bottom out just before the ball, so you can swing up through impact nicely. On the other hand, it’s best to have your iron swing bottom out just after the ball, making it possible to hit down through impact and create backspin. By swinging around your spine – and not moving much from side to side – it should be pretty easy to place the bottom of your swing in the same spot over and over again. If you are someone who tends to struggle with thin and fat shots during the course of your rounds, making strides in this area is almost sure to lead to lower scores.
• Big shoulder turn. You may already know that making a full shoulder turn is an important piece of the golf puzzle. If you want to consistently hit solid golf shots – and hit shots with significant power – you need to be making a good turn. It’s not necessary to make the biggest turn in your group to play well, but you don’t want to be selling yourself short in this area. Swinging around your spine is a great way to focus on shoulder turn, as you’ll have no choice but to make a nice turn if you are trying to rotate around the position that your spine occupies at address. The exact length of the turn will depend on your flexibility and other factors, so don’t obsess too much about exactly how far back you are able to go. Simply focus on turning around your spine and the rest should largely take care of itself.
• Control your trajectory. Your ability to control the flight of your golf ball is going to go a long way toward determining how well you perform in this game. If you can’t consistently produce a ball flight that matches up with your intentions, it will be virtually impossible to hit your targets. That means controlling the shape of the ball as it curves through the air, and it also means you need to manage the height of your shots. Many amateur golfers just aim for their target and hope for the best, but you can do a little better than that. Players who intentionally shape the golf ball are able to play more strategically, manipulating the shape of the ball to access certain targets or stay away from hazards. That might seem like a lofty ambition if you are just getting started in this game, but don’t underestimate what you will be capable of down the line. By working on rotating your body around your spine in the swing, you can improve your control over the ball and take a big step toward managing your trajectory nicely in the future.

All in all, you simply stand to be a much better player when you rotate around your spine. Is mastering this point going to automatically make you a great golfer? No – of course not. There are plenty of other things to work on in the game of golf beyond just swinging around your spine. This is an important key, however, so it’s worthy of your attention during some of your valuable practice time.

The All-Important Address Position

When you take your stance over the ball to get ready for a shot, how do you build that stance? Do you have a plan in place, or do you just walk up to the ball and hope for the best? Ideally, you will build your stance intentionally, focusing on the small details that need to come together to make your address position a winner. It is all too common for amateur golfers to ignore the importance of the address position, and the results speak for themselves.

To rotate around your spine in the golf swing, it is essential that you start from a good stance. With a poor stance, you’ll have to make corrections along the way to get into the right position – and that is simply not a recipe for success. You don’t want to be adjusting your technique on the fly, since the golf swing only lasts a couple seconds and you really don’t have time to make any major changes as you go. Set yourself up in an excellent position from the start and make life a lot easier on yourself once the club goes in motion.

To build an excellent stance, keep the following tips in mind.

• Feet wide enough to remain stable through the swing. The exact width of your stance is something that you’ll have to figure out for yourself – it’s just too individual for us to tell you exactly where your feet should be with each club. However, it is wise to err on the side of being too wide rather than too narrow. A stance which is too narrow will make it hard for you to keep your balance, and this is a game that’s all about balance. If you are going to be able to rotate around your spine correctly, you’ll need to have great balance – and a big portion of that balance is going to come from the width of your stance. For most players, shoulder width with the irons and a little wider with the driver is a good place to start. But again, you will need to figure this one out for yourself, so get down to work on the range during an upcoming practice session.
• Flex your knees. This is a staple of a solid golf stance. You need to flex your knees at least slightly, and ideally a little bit more than that, when getting ready to make a swing. If you sit down into your stance in a comfortable, athletic position, you will be ready to use your lower body to support the rotation that you plan on completing with your upper body. Standing straight-legged over the ball is a common error in the amateur game, so pay attention to this point during practice sessions to make sure you stay on the right track. Just as was the case with the width of your stance, you may need to experiment a bit to find the right amount of knee flex. Try a few different levels of flex during practice until you settle on one that is comfortable and leads to good results.
• Tilt forward from the hips. At this point, we are going to get to the big key that relates most specifically to your ability to rotate around your spine. When building a stance, make sure to tilt forward from the hips while keeping your back straight, rather than hunching over. You want your spine in a mostly straight position, so it can act as the center of your swing as you turn your shoulders back and through. For many golfers, the best way to get into this kind of stance is to feel like they are sticking their backside out during the stance. As you settle in over the ball, bend your knees and stick out your backside behind you. That combination is almost sure to put you in a good spot and you should find it pretty easy from there to rotate successfully.
• Keep your chin up. The last point we want to include in this list is the need to keep your chin up away from your chest. It might not seem like your chin is terribly important in terms of your stance but keeping it up at address will make it easier for you to achieve a full turn. When the chin stays down, it tends to get in the way of the left shoulder as it tries to turn back, causing the entire backswing to fall short of its potential.

You don’t even have to be at the golf course to work on your address position. If you like, you can work on it in the comfort of your own home by standing in front of a big mirror (without a club). Practice putting your body in the right position over and over again, so you get more comfortable with the position that is going to lead to the best results.

Four Common Mistakes

One of the best ways to improve in golf is to pay attention to the mistakes that you need to avoid. By knowing what you should be avoiding, you can watch out for trouble as you make your way through practice sessions. In this section, we are going to provide a list of four mistakes which frequently cause golfers to struggle with their rotation. As you work on rotating around your spine, steer clear of these errors to keep progress moving forward.

• Slide early in the backswing. One of the leading causes of golf swing struggles in this game is a slide away from the target early in the backswing. Rather than rotating right from the start of the swing – which is the proper move to make – some players slide to their right, moving weight onto their right foot. This is an error which is going to give you problems for a variety of reasons. For starters, you aren’t going to be turning around your spine, since you’ll be sliding to the right instead. You might get some turn out of your backswing, but not as much as if you would have avoided the slide. Also, even if you do produce decent swing speed on the way down, you’ll struggle to strike the ball cleanly because the bottom of your swing arc will be harder to pinpoint (due to the lateral motion). Do yourself a big favor and simplify your golf swing by taking the lateral move out of the equation. Start by turning away from the target and keep that rotation going all the way through the swing.
• Turning too far. Yes – rotation is a good thing in the golf swing. Yes – it is possible to take it too far. If you are forcing yourself to turn farther back than your body seems to want to turn naturally, you’re going to run into trouble. Allow your body to tell you when your backswing is done and don’t argue with what it says. Basically, when you feel like turning any further would result in a loss of balance, you have reached the end of your backswing.
• Coming up out of the stance. We mentioned in the previous section that one of the keys to a good stance is tilting forward from the hips. Assuming you have done that correctly, you will then need to stay down in that stance all the way through the swing. It is relatively common for golfers to lift up on the way back, standing up taller in an effort to make the swing feel bigger. Don’t let yourself fall into this trap. Instead, stay down and turn nicely around your spine while maintaining your spine angle as consistently as possible throughout the swing. It will take some time to get used to this technique, but you’ll find that your ball striking quality will improve dramatically in the long run.
• Rushing through the action. You can’t turn around your spine properly if you never give the swing time to fully develop. Whether you are nervous about the shot and just want to get it over with, or maybe you naturally have a fast tempo and you have to work to slow it down, rushing is rarely going to lead to good results in golf. If you feel like rushing your tempo is a problem in your game, try taking a couple of slow-motion practice swings before your actual shot to get in the right frame of mind.

Rotating around your spine doesn’t have to be particularly complicated, but it will be difficult if you struggle with one or more of the mistakes listed above. Use this list to guide your practice and keep simplifying your technique until the only parts left are the ones needed to get the job done properly.

Your Spine and the Short Game

Is it important to rotate around your spine in the short game? Well, that depends on what kind of short game shot we are talking about. For putts, you don’t need to think much about rotating around your spine. Sure, you want to hold your spine angle steady while you putt, but there isn’t much rotating to be done on the average putt, since the putter head only moves a short distance back and through. So, for putting, you can pretty safely ignore the idea of rotating around your spine. As long as you build a good stance and hold that stance during the stroke, you should be good to go.

The story is pretty much the same when you start to talk about chip and pitch shots. You still don’t need to make a very big swing, so you don’t need to worry much about rotating around your spine. Again here, it’s important to set yourself into a good stance, and it is important to maintain that stance throughout the shot. There shouldn’t be any sliding from side to side while you chip, and you shouldn’t be coming up out of your stance, either. Stability is your friend in golf, whether we are talking about the full swing or the short game.

It is when you step down into a greenside bunker that you need to start to think about how you rotate your upper body around your spine during the swing. Why is it important in the bunker but not when chipping from the grass? The key is the size of the swing you need to make. The typical explosion shot out of a greenside bunker requires a rather sizeable swing, so plenty of shoulder turn will be needed. Turn your shoulders back and through while you maintain your spine angle and you should be able to put the club into the sand at the right point over and over again.

Rotating around your spine is a key factor within a solid golf swing. We hope the discussion in this article will help you improve your game in this area. Remember, it always takes time to improve your play, so don’t get frustrated if there are struggles early on. As you make improvements and your confidence grows, hopefully you will find that your results begin to come around as you hoped. Good luck!

If you are struggling with the vertical height of your golf shots, by that I mean hitting the top or hitting the floor too much thins and fats then maybe this next exercise where we look at rotating your golf swing around your spine angle will help you. For a lot of golfers, if they hit the top of the ball or they hit the ground too much, their playing partners will always tell them, you lifted your head up or you dipped your head into it. But actually, the head isn’t really doing that on its own. The head is just a puppet of what the spine angle is doing. So if I set up the golf ball, I set my spine into a good angle position here. If my spine angle goes up and down, my head has to go up and down as well. And actually the spine angle is very often the cause of the head lifting or the head dipping therefore the topping or the fatting of a golf ball. So if we can get your golf swing to rotate around your spine more consistently, I’m sure you’ll hit the ball better.

Really good exercise to make sure you get the feeling of rotating around your spine is just to start off with a sort of club held out to a baseball height here and then just swing around and back through on a vertical spine. So we are not tilting the spine here, we set the spine angle up nice and straight and we swing back and around. And as long as the club stays nicely horizontal all the way back and all the way through, I’m now I’m rotating around my spine. If my spine angle was tilted as I did this, the club would go up and if I was to lean back as I did this, the club would come down. So nice stable spine angle and around and a back. It’s quite a good warming up exercise as well; it gives you the feeling that you have started to turn your spine angle nicely. Now what we want to do is tilt that spine to a good angle and then get the same feeling of rotation. So this time I’m going to tilt myself forward to my golf posture, place the golf club nicely over my shoulders and now rotate. And as I turn, that handle goes downwards down there and my spine has been maintained. If I was to turn and stand up which is quite a common problem, you see how the golf club points across the room there.

So if I was to set up, make a good swing, my spine angle’s maintained, make a back swing, my spine angle stands up and I’m going be struggling to get back down to the ball, possibly topping the ball. Now the good feeling now is to add in the down swing point the handle down to the ball then point the club head down to the ball. You can see I’ve still maintained my spine angle. I haven’t made the classic golfer’s mistake of lifting out which everyone in turn says, you lifted your head. In the reality it wasn’t the head lifting, it was a spine angle lifting. So if in this side I take my setup, I set my good spine angle, I point the handle down to the ball, I point the club head down to the ball. If I’m making this turndown to through motion, my spine angle is maintained. I’m going to be striking the ball more consistently. So if you could warm up with your baseball swings, or your club across shoulders spine angle tilt, I’m sure when you go out and play, you’ll be more consistent with your spine angle, more consistent with your head position, therefore more consistent with the contact on the ball.