It’s pretty obvious when you look at a golfer like Hunter Mahan; his effortless moves swing is certainly helped out or created by his physique. He’s probably in better physical shape than most average golfers that we see out in the golf course or the driving range and that will clearly help particularly in his hip rotation area. In fact you might even feel you’ve tried to work on your hip rotation, you’ve tried to generate more power using your hips but you are struggling to do so due to physical constraints. So let’s have a little think about what areas, what problems we have with the hip area that are going to cause us those physical limitations. And I guess the first one is just simply carrying too much weight.
If you feel that you are overweight and you are not able to turn your hips as efficiently because you’ve got a little but too much mass to move through the ball and balance, having that extra weight is not going to help you make that live agile action that Hunter Mahan has. The second thing to consider is simply the strength that you have through that. If you struggle to do sit ups or crunches or whatever, then there’s probably going to be issues within your golf swing where you get to the top and you ask your hips to move and turn across with some power and they struggle to do that. Maybe you get across but it’s all a bit late and it’s all a bit slow and it’s all a bit tired.
The last thing to consider as well would be the simple flexibility. The fact that we want to try and turn the upper body without the lower body following us too much and then likewise, we want to turn the lower body back this way and then slowly drug the upper body round. If there is no flexibility through the hip and in the core region and everything ends up just following each other, you’ll generally find that your swing lacks a certain amount of power. So those are three areas where you might actually start to investigate the physical limitations you have within your own body within your own hip region and hopefully improving those three hours flexibility strength and the general weight that you carry should help improve your hip flexibility, the strength and the power you can generate in your swing to make it out more graceful powerful swing like Hunter Mahan.