Engaging Your Whole Body To Avoid Golf Topped Shots (Video) - by Pete Styles
Engaging Your Whole Body To Avoid Golf Topped Shots (Video) - by Pete Styles

If you're still struggling with topping the golf ball and you feel like you’ve improved in your balance and you're working on your movement through the ball, the next thing we've got to consider is what about engaging the whole body? If you feel like your golf swing at the moment is just a hands and arms operation, just an upper body operation then maybe you're not paying enough attention to what is going on down in the middle part of your body and particularly into the hips. So you might feel like you're addressing the golf ball and hitting at it with your hands and your arms but there's not enough going on down here. So really great exercise to help you here is initially just get rid of the golf club; go and stand in front of a mirror so the mirror will be placed exactly where my camera is in front of me here.

A window or patio or doorway you can see yourself in it would be good and then take the hands and place the over the shoulders, just to simply get the hands out of the way and then looking down into the mirror we want to go ahead and make a nice rotation in the backswing. And as we rotate in the backswing, you want to see that your shoulders -- try and get those round to 90 degrees but maintain a relatively stable lower half so it's building up a coil from the upper body but not utilizing too much turning or hip action in the lower body. And you will feel some resistance; it will feel like you're coiling a spring and creating a bit of tension which in this case is a good thing. So turn and create the tension in the backswing, now the key motion here is what we do from here and how we get round through a full finish and how we follow through. And it's really important to notice that isn't an upper body motion necessarily, it's actually led from the hips and the lower half. So we turn back nicely but it's not spin the shoulders because I have moved across to my left side, it's a turn back with the upper body and then a drive and turn through with the lower body and we finish over on that left hand side. So wind up with the upper body, turn through with the lower body and I can practice that in front of the mirror over and over again until it feels very natural, very comfortable, it almost becomes instinctive. So turn and through, turn and through and the faster I get into that left hand side and the easier it becomes to get into that left hand side then the better it should be when I pick up my golf club again 90 degrees on my shoulders, turn through with my lower body. And if I engage all of my lower body into the swing and it's not just a hands and arms action I should start to find I can strike the ball better. I can actually strike the ground at the same time and reduce my topped and my thin golf shots. 2016-07-27

If you're still struggling with topping the golf ball and you feel like you’ve improved in your balance and you're working on your movement through the ball, the next thing we've got to consider is what about engaging the whole body? If you feel like your golf swing at the moment is just a hands and arms operation, just an upper body operation then maybe you're not paying enough attention to what is going on down in the middle part of your body and particularly into the hips. So you might feel like you're addressing the golf ball and hitting at it with your hands and your arms but there's not enough going on down here. So really great exercise to help you here is initially just get rid of the golf club; go and stand in front of a mirror so the mirror will be placed exactly where my camera is in front of me here.

A window or patio or doorway you can see yourself in it would be good and then take the hands and place the over the shoulders, just to simply get the hands out of the way and then looking down into the mirror we want to go ahead and make a nice rotation in the backswing. And as we rotate in the backswing, you want to see that your shoulders — try and get those round to 90 degrees but maintain a relatively stable lower half so it's building up a coil from the upper body but not utilizing too much turning or hip action in the lower body. And you will feel some resistance; it will feel like you're coiling a spring and creating a bit of tension which in this case is a good thing.

So turn and create the tension in the backswing, now the key motion here is what we do from here and how we get round through a full finish and how we follow through. And it's really important to notice that isn't an upper body motion necessarily, it's actually led from the hips and the lower half. So we turn back nicely but it's not spin the shoulders because I have moved across to my left side, it's a turn back with the upper body and then a drive and turn through with the lower body and we finish over on that left hand side.

So wind up with the upper body, turn through with the lower body and I can practice that in front of the mirror over and over again until it feels very natural, very comfortable, it almost becomes instinctive. So turn and through, turn and through and the faster I get into that left hand side and the easier it becomes to get into that left hand side then the better it should be when I pick up my golf club again 90 degrees on my shoulders, turn through with my lower body. And if I engage all of my lower body into the swing and it's not just a hands and arms action I should start to find I can strike the ball better. I can actually strike the ground at the same time and reduce my topped and my thin golf shots.