Pete Styles – PGA Teaching Pro

Okay. How can you keep your head down? That’s a really interesting question to me because I’m not sure whether you should be keeping your head down and a lot of people that are trying to keep their head down are probably not helping with their swing. Now, okay, we don’t necessarily want your head to go up. But trying to force your head down could often cause more problems than it’s worth. I see an awful lot of golfers that make this swing and they’re determined to keep their head down so much that they can’t follow through. And worst of all, they might still top the ball doing that because they don’t understand the top is not caused by the head rising up but the golf club rising up and most of the time, that’s caused by the hands lifting up, not their head. It’s a very common thing for your friends, your playing partners to tell you that you lifted your head when you hit a bad shot, but very, very rarely do we actually see that that’s the reason why people have hit a bad shot.

So, I’m going to give you some tips to try and keep your heads stable but I’m not going to necessarily refer to keeping your head down so much. Firstly, when you’re taking your address position, we actually want to make sure the head is up in a nice tall position so we’ve got a nice long neck position. This position keeping the head down, this is no good. We want the head nice and tall here in a straight line. That then will allow your shoulders to rotate and the club to fit underneath your chin and underneath your chin again. If your head is down too low, you can’t rotate then you have the lift up. So, that’s one way that you actually force your head up is by having your head too low at the start position.

So, nice, tall chin position for a nice high head, left shoulder will come under the chin, right shoulder will come around underneath the chin. And actually, as the right shoulder hits your chin on the follow through, that’s when you should allow your head to come up into the air. So, I’ve got nice posture to start with. My head is still on the backswing, comes through here, my right shoulder hits my chin, then I’m going to allow myself to look up and have the full finish. Without letting my head rise in the follow through, I can’t accurately and completely finish my turn through the ball. So let’s not focus on keeping the head down too much. Let’s focus on keeping the head up at the setup position, stable during the backswing and then allow the head to rise as you follow through the ball. And I think that’s a much better way of understanding your head movement.