Should Your Head Move During the Golf Swing, (Video) - by Pete Styles
Should Your Head Move During the Golf Swing, (Video) - by Pete Styles

So here's one of the biggest misleading piece of advice that you could ever get told as a golfer: "Keep your head down." Don't. It doesn't work. For years, people have been told by their playing partners, probably well-meaning playing partners, "Keep your head down, keep your head down." Every time they hit a bad shot, "You didn't keep your head down. You got to keep your head down." Try not to believe that if you can, please, because it doesn't work for you. There's a difference: keep your head down or keep your head still or keep your head stable.

Now, golf instructors would generally use the phrase "keep your head stable" because we don't want to see too much vertical movement and we don't really want to see too much lateral movement. But that's very different from keeping your head down. So if you watch the head or the caps of the best players in the world, particularly when you see them in slow motion on the television, you'll see that there is a certain amount of head movement. It's almost impossible to make a full shoulder rotation without letting your head move a little bit. So, feel free to allow your head to move slightly to your right side or your rear foot in your backswing and then move back across towards your left foot in the target in the downswing.

Keeping your head down is a different action. Keeping your head down implies keeping it there the whole time, and you see I simply can't follow through the golf ball as efficiently as I would like to because I was too busy trying to keep my head down like everyone tells me to. So, this time, we're going to keep the head stable, but then as we hit through the golf ball, the right shoulder hits the chin and allows the chin to lift up because I'm not too preoccupied with keeping my head down. So, allowing the head to move slightly to the right side, back, and up to a finish means it's so much smoother, much more powerful swing but still with the consistency of keeping my head stable but not keeping my head down the whole time. So, stick to that principle: stability in the head but not down with the head.

 2012-04-11

So here's one of the biggest misleading piece of advice that you could ever get told as a golfer: “Keep your head down.” Don't. It doesn't work. For years, people have been told by their playing partners, probably well-meaning playing partners, “Keep your head down, keep your head down.” Every time they hit a bad shot, “You didn't keep your head down. You got to keep your head down.” Try not to believe that if you can, please, because it doesn't work for you. There's a difference: keep your head down or keep your head still or keep your head stable.

Now, golf instructors would generally use the phrase “keep your head stable” because we don't want to see too much vertical movement and we don't really want to see too much lateral movement. But that's very different from keeping your head down. So if you watch the head or the caps of the best players in the world, particularly when you see them in slow motion on the television, you'll see that there is a certain amount of head movement. It's almost impossible to make a full shoulder rotation without letting your head move a little bit. So, feel free to allow your head to move slightly to your right side or your rear foot in your backswing and then move back across towards your left foot in the target in the downswing.

Keeping your head down is a different action. Keeping your head down implies keeping it there the whole time, and you see I simply can't follow through the golf ball as efficiently as I would like to because I was too busy trying to keep my head down like everyone tells me to. So, this time, we're going to keep the head stable, but then as we hit through the golf ball, the right shoulder hits the chin and allows the chin to lift up because I'm not too preoccupied with keeping my head down. So, allowing the head to move slightly to the right side, back, and up to a finish means it's so much smoother, much more powerful swing but still with the consistency of keeping my head stable but not keeping my head down the whole time. So, stick to that principle: stability in the head but not down with the head.