Control Your Hips – by PGA Pros Pete Styles & Matt Fryer
Control Your Hips – by PGA Pros Pete Styles & Matt Fryer

In this video tip PGA golf professionals Pete Styles and Matt Fryer will talk you through the fundamentals of stabilizing your hips and your legs to create a more consistent and stable golf swing. Initially we will look at how we can stabilize the legs in the backswing whilst also creating a 45° hip rotation. From there we will focus on the transition of the golf swing and how we can move the hips into the down swing and ultimately into a full finish position to maximize the control of your hips during the entire swing.

An often under represented part and something that we talk about very much in the golf swing is going to be the hips. Which is strange really because the hips are in the middle of the body and therefore they control a huge amount of what your body does and if your hips don't work with you in your golf swing then they can definitely working against you and they can undermine everything that you're trying to do to hit very very good golf shot. I think also importantly much to understand is that they don't do the same thing for every different shot. Now yes there are certain movements are trying to create and so on that we aren't trying to create depending on the shot we select. I think there's a couple if we're thinking full swing here if we were talking about that there's a couple of key points we try to hit that we were with the hips as we're making a full swing that the hips obviously going to sit on top of the legs at the bottom of the body if the hips go the wrong way the legs are affected the upper body is affected. So we want to get that synchronization so talk me through some you're set to position. What you want your hips to be doing there and in particular what you want them to be doing during your back swing? OK so if we've got a face on camera here now what we need is a good stable legs. If I'm so you know where they're going to be a little bit to jelly like almost all the sudden my hips are going to be quite free going to be moving around too much and sliding quite a lot. So they can be too much movement within the hips. Definitely yeah one of the big things I tend to see you will do as well as we get someone who gets to the set up. They look OK to start off with and although some legs get a little softer and as they move back you get something where this hip is pushed away from target and slides out quite a lot.

There's no rotation in it it's something you know as we know we want some rotation in the hips as we make a back swing. Could you give me an idea of how much rotation you'd want to see? Yeah definitely if I could just borrow your club they're a great way to try and do this if we were to take off feet and take are normal stance. For instance here in if I just pop this in between we're probably what call that 45 degrees would you say it's good to me. What I'm then going to do is get my club here now and I'm just going to place it on my hips, and a great drill for us if we've just got our thumbs on our belt line and we're holding this club on our hips now. What we're going to look for now what we've got some stable legs is that we make a hip turn to match this club up to the one below us. So as we see here I've created some turn to 45 degree hip turn. Where you think that's good for the back wing I would say. Yeah if we can get some where around there obviously there's limitations in people's flexibility depending on where you can get to in terms of your flexibility but 45 degrees as a rule of thumb is going to be a really nice number where we can get the upper body turned against its lack of flexibility bad back bad hips you would accept less. No I wouldn't go over too much more because we want to say I say to see some of the body turn against the lower body to create some turn in the back swing. OK so we've got 45 degree rotation going but we resist with the legs a little but we don't really like the legs lock. Yeah it's not that I'm moving too much we're doing least one of the things we tend to see when we've got poor hip movement the knees will sway a lot will start to see sliding knees and sliding hips as opposed to something where rotated from the 45 degrees that's now got you to the top of the back swing. Yes so what's the start of the motion coming back down to the golf ball? OK so is were in this position now where we've got 45 degrees one of the things what we're not going to do straight away spin the hips out what we're going to look for is something where we actually get a slight lateral shift towards the target. So I've made my good back swing.

Now what I'm looking for now is my lead hip to actually just shift slightly towards my target that so be feeling almost if you were to stand and just have your hand I be almost pumping this hip towards that fist there in this direction going this way. It's interesting I still stays on it's 45 degree rotation it's rotated and maintained but as against the spinning these you talk exactly also one of the big things just spin them out get them moving away from target in it in a first initial movement. Right which is why we've grated the good turn in the back swing now we've got a little lateral shift towards target and the final piece of the possible is what they do from there. Which is going to be something where I'm going to think totally of my belt buckle now and pretty much what will say once I've gone here shift I'm going to turn my hips to face toward target which is allowing this spot to come up and get me into this solid finish position here. There you're close we saw the 90 agrees to its original position is and it's almost rotated fully to face target 90 degree turn. Exactly and so from there I've maintained some really good movement through the head and it's going to allow my body to function and help me hit some good golf shots from that and using the hip secretes power definitely I would like to see this feel slightly stable motion. We're not going to have any turn in the body when we try to deliver and how much it's a really good checkpoint for us in terms of how we want the hips to work in the back swing. How we want to work in transition quite importantly how we want to finish what I would now encourage us to spend some time maybe in front of a video cameras we've got set up here or even just in front of a mirror to see how the hips during their swing and it looks like that's warming up to finish this clip off with a good head motion any swing so hopefully we can see it it's go to 45 degrees back to 90 degrees through and you'll see it's smooth shot driven by some really good hip action through here which brings us refer to up to a good finish position. If you can incorporate good hip action in your golf shot hopefully you can hit shots as good as much as I have just done there.

2018-11-14

In this video tip PGA golf professionals Pete Styles and Matt Fryer will talk you through the fundamentals of stabilizing your hips and your legs to create a more consistent and stable golf swing. Initially we will look at how we can stabilize the legs in the backswing whilst also creating a 45° hip rotation. From there we will focus on the transition of the golf swing and how we can move the hips into the down swing and ultimately into a full finish position to maximize the control of your hips during the entire swing.

An often under represented part and something that we talk about very much in the golf swing is going to be the hips. Which is strange really because the hips are in the middle of the body and therefore they control a huge amount of what your body does and if your hips don't work with you in your golf swing then they can definitely working against you and they can undermine everything that you're trying to do to hit very very good golf shot. I think also importantly much to understand is that they don't do the same thing for every different shot. Now yes there are certain movements are trying to create and so on that we aren't trying to create depending on the shot we select. I think there's a couple if we're thinking full swing here if we were talking about that there's a couple of key points we try to hit that we were with the hips as we're making a full swing that the hips obviously going to sit on top of the legs at the bottom of the body if the hips go the wrong way the legs are affected the upper body is affected. So we want to get that synchronization so talk me through some you're set to position. What you want your hips to be doing there and in particular what you want them to be doing during your back swing? OK so if we've got a face on camera here now what we need is a good stable legs. If I'm so you know where they're going to be a little bit to jelly like almost all the sudden my hips are going to be quite free going to be moving around too much and sliding quite a lot. So they can be too much movement within the hips. Definitely yeah one of the big things I tend to see you will do as well as we get someone who gets to the set up. They look OK to start off with and although some legs get a little softer and as they move back you get something where this hip is pushed away from target and slides out quite a lot.

There's no rotation in it it's something you know as we know we want some rotation in the hips as we make a back swing. Could you give me an idea of how much rotation you'd want to see? Yeah definitely if I could just borrow your club they're a great way to try and do this if we were to take off feet and take are normal stance. For instance here in if I just pop this in between we're probably what call that 45 degrees would you say it's good to me. What I'm then going to do is get my club here now and I'm just going to place it on my hips, and a great drill for us if we've just got our thumbs on our belt line and we're holding this club on our hips now. What we're going to look for now what we've got some stable legs is that we make a hip turn to match this club up to the one below us. So as we see here I've created some turn to 45 degree hip turn. Where you think that's good for the back wing I would say. Yeah if we can get some where around there obviously there's limitations in people's flexibility depending on where you can get to in terms of your flexibility but 45 degrees as a rule of thumb is going to be a really nice number where we can get the upper body turned against its lack of flexibility bad back bad hips you would accept less. No I wouldn't go over too much more because we want to say I say to see some of the body turn against the lower body to create some turn in the back swing. OK so we've got 45 degree rotation going but we resist with the legs a little but we don't really like the legs lock. Yeah it's not that I'm moving too much we're doing least one of the things we tend to see when we've got poor hip movement the knees will sway a lot will start to see sliding knees and sliding hips as opposed to something where rotated from the 45 degrees that's now got you to the top of the back swing. Yes so what's the start of the motion coming back down to the golf ball? OK so is were in this position now where we've got 45 degrees one of the things what we're not going to do straight away spin the hips out what we're going to look for is something where we actually get a slight lateral shift towards the target. So I've made my good back swing.

Now what I'm looking for now is my lead hip to actually just shift slightly towards my target that so be feeling almost if you were to stand and just have your hand I be almost pumping this hip towards that fist there in this direction going this way. It's interesting I still stays on it's 45 degree rotation it's rotated and maintained but as against the spinning these you talk exactly also one of the big things just spin them out get them moving away from target in it in a first initial movement. Right which is why we've grated the good turn in the back swing now we've got a little lateral shift towards target and the final piece of the possible is what they do from there. Which is going to be something where I'm going to think totally of my belt buckle now and pretty much what will say once I've gone here shift I'm going to turn my hips to face toward target which is allowing this spot to come up and get me into this solid finish position here. There you're close we saw the 90 agrees to its original position is and it's almost rotated fully to face target 90 degree turn. Exactly and so from there I've maintained some really good movement through the head and it's going to allow my body to function and help me hit some good golf shots from that and using the hip secretes power definitely I would like to see this feel slightly stable motion. We're not going to have any turn in the body when we try to deliver and how much it's a really good checkpoint for us in terms of how we want the hips to work in the back swing. How we want to work in transition quite importantly how we want to finish what I would now encourage us to spend some time maybe in front of a video cameras we've got set up here or even just in front of a mirror to see how the hips during their swing and it looks like that's warming up to finish this clip off with a good head motion any swing so hopefully we can see it it's go to 45 degrees back to 90 degrees through and you'll see it's smooth shot driven by some really good hip action through here which brings us refer to up to a good finish position. If you can incorporate good hip action in your golf shot hopefully you can hit shots as good as much as I have just done there.