The Effect of Knee Separation on the Rest of Your Swing (Video) - by Pete Styles
The Effect of Knee Separation on the Rest of Your Swing (Video) - by Pete Styles

So now let’s look at how that super wide knee action and good solid base can have an effect through the rest of your golf swing. Now if stability and good balance are an integral part of a good swing, then tempo is definitely in that category as well. We need good quality tempo. So as we take the club away and we’re keeping this wide base, everything is winding up and coiling nice and slowly, in fact a wider base probably requires a slower coiling tempo than having a narrow stance that could get a little bit wobbly and little bit quick.

So we have a good solid broad base and a good smooth long tempo to the top and then a nice solid drive through. The downswing is obviously going to be quicker. We’ll not talk about a slow downswing, that’s not part of the argument. Part of the argument is a nice long slow wide takeaway, coiling up over that nice base with a nice knee separation, just like Sam had. Then we need to be looking at how your posture relates to this. So we need to make sure that we’ve got good strong posture and we maintain the posture. So we’ve talked about how during the downswing there might be that little vertical dip to come up but that isn’t a dip in terms of changing the angle of the spine and likewise the up action isn’t standing up. The up action is rising up from the legs. So we’re not actually changing the angle of the spine during any part of the swing. We’re keeping the spine angle nicely the same which is an element that Sam Snead had throughout his game. One last element here is just making sure that we do stay down on the ball in terms of our eye contact. So even during the downswing as there’s the upwards push, the McIlroy movement that he’s seeing and he’s swinging at the moment, we’ll still actually looking down at the ball. Lot of golfers, the classic advice of oh you lifted your head up, you looked up too early. If I’m advocating an upwards movement into the ball, I can understand a lot of club golfers might think, oh Peter said I was allowed to lift my head and look up and walk after it. That’s not the case at all. We’re going to try and keep the eyes down, the posture down and the legs coming up into a good strong impact position but the head is not lifting up at all. So we’re going to look at tempo, good posture, good eyes on the ball contact, working with that good solid Sam Snead wide knee base. And hopefully if you can improve on that, we’ll get good solid contact, longer, straighter golf shots with a good stable platform to swing from as well. 2015-08-11

So now let’s look at how that super wide knee action and good solid base can have an effect through the rest of your golf swing. Now if stability and good balance are an integral part of a good swing, then tempo is definitely in that category as well. We need good quality tempo. So as we take the club away and we’re keeping this wide base, everything is winding up and coiling nice and slowly, in fact a wider base probably requires a slower coiling tempo than having a narrow stance that could get a little bit wobbly and little bit quick.

So we have a good solid broad base and a good smooth long tempo to the top and then a nice solid drive through. The downswing is obviously going to be quicker. We’ll not talk about a slow downswing, that’s not part of the argument. Part of the argument is a nice long slow wide takeaway, coiling up over that nice base with a nice knee separation, just like Sam had.

Then we need to be looking at how your posture relates to this. So we need to make sure that we’ve got good strong posture and we maintain the posture. So we’ve talked about how during the downswing there might be that little vertical dip to come up but that isn’t a dip in terms of changing the angle of the spine and likewise the up action isn’t standing up. The up action is rising up from the legs. So we’re not actually changing the angle of the spine during any part of the swing. We’re keeping the spine angle nicely the same which is an element that Sam Snead had throughout his game.

One last element here is just making sure that we do stay down on the ball in terms of our eye contact. So even during the downswing as there’s the upwards push, the McIlroy movement that he’s seeing and he’s swinging at the moment, we’ll still actually looking down at the ball. Lot of golfers, the classic advice of oh you lifted your head up, you looked up too early. If I’m advocating an upwards movement into the ball, I can understand a lot of club golfers might think, oh Peter said I was allowed to lift my head and look up and walk after it.

That’s not the case at all. We’re going to try and keep the eyes down, the posture down and the legs coming up into a good strong impact position but the head is not lifting up at all. So we’re going to look at tempo, good posture, good eyes on the ball contact, working with that good solid Sam Snead wide knee base. And hopefully if you can improve on that, we’ll get good solid contact, longer, straighter golf shots with a good stable platform to swing from as well.