How Poor Posture Can Damage Your Game (Video) - by Pete Styles
How Poor Posture Can Damage Your Game (Video) - by Pete Styles

So if we’ve established now that having good golf posture is important, well why is that exactly? What do we see when we have good posture that we don’t see when we have bad posture? Let me run you through a couple of key mistakes that I often see. First we see golfers in this address position, bring the ball up here, we get bit near to the golf ball, the hips tuck under, the chin tucks down and we get this bad posture position. Now the classic mistakes here are that golfers won’t hit the ball very far. They’ll often get poor contacts and they’ll often be off-balanced during the swing. So they won’t hit the ball very far mainly because they can’t rotate very well. If we find ourselves in this hunched over position and then try and turn, we’re very limited in how far back we can turn. You can try, you can crouch up like this and turn, you’ll get stuck pretty quickly. But if you stand up, you’ll turn so much more easily. So a good golf posture can allow a much bigger shoulder rotation in the backswing and therefore in the downswing as well and that in its own way generates a lot more distance, a lot more power. So poor posture will lack a little bit of power, better posture will generate a lot more distance for golfers.

The next thing we see from this bad posture position is we can’t generate enough weight shift, enough weight transfer. So we’re tucked up into this bad posture. We don’t move back well enough and we definitely don’t move forwards well enough from bad posture. So again we end up hitting the ground in the wrong place, hitting the top of the ball in the wrong place, so inconsistent distances and inconsistent strikes also. One other area that we see is because that posture is so curved; it kind of straightens or bends more or less during the swing, so we get an issue with the height of the swing. So the club is either hitting the top of the ball or the ground, not enough consistence enough height. So a good posture position here is almost like a javelin has been put through the top of my head, sticking out to the back and into the ground and then I rotate around that straight line, meaning I don’t come up or down in relation to the ball, so my strikes are better. If I’ve got bad posture, tend to find that golfers will stand up and then drop and hack down at the golf ball and get really inconsistent in their vertical height of swing. So work on in improving your posture, get more distance, get better strikes and make sure the contact on the ball is always clean. So a good posture can help all of those aspects of your game. Improve your posture to improve your golf. 2015-08-12

So if we’ve established now that having good golf posture is important, well why is that exactly? What do we see when we have good posture that we don’t see when we have bad posture? Let me run you through a couple of key mistakes that I often see. First we see golfers in this address position, bring the ball up here, we get bit near to the golf ball, the hips tuck under, the chin tucks down and we get this bad posture position. Now the classic mistakes here are that golfers won’t hit the ball very far. They’ll often get poor contacts and they’ll often be off-balanced during the swing. So they won’t hit the ball very far mainly because they can’t rotate very well. If we find ourselves in this hunched over position and then try and turn, we’re very limited in how far back we can turn. You can try, you can crouch up like this and turn, you’ll get stuck pretty quickly. But if you stand up, you’ll turn so much more easily. So a good golf posture can allow a much bigger shoulder rotation in the backswing and therefore in the downswing as well and that in its own way generates a lot more distance, a lot more power. So poor posture will lack a little bit of power, better posture will generate a lot more distance for golfers.

The next thing we see from this bad posture position is we can’t generate enough weight shift, enough weight transfer. So we’re tucked up into this bad posture. We don’t move back well enough and we definitely don’t move forwards well enough from bad posture. So again we end up hitting the ground in the wrong place, hitting the top of the ball in the wrong place, so inconsistent distances and inconsistent strikes also.

One other area that we see is because that posture is so curved; it kind of straightens or bends more or less during the swing, so we get an issue with the height of the swing. So the club is either hitting the top of the ball or the ground, not enough consistence enough height. So a good posture position here is almost like a javelin has been put through the top of my head, sticking out to the back and into the ground and then I rotate around that straight line, meaning I don’t come up or down in relation to the ball, so my strikes are better. If I’ve got bad posture, tend to find that golfers will stand up and then drop and hack down at the golf ball and get really inconsistent in their vertical height of swing. So work on in improving your posture, get more distance, get better strikes and make sure the contact on the ball is always clean. So a good posture can help all of those aspects of your game. Improve your posture to improve your golf.