Pete Styles – PGA Teaching Pro

So continuing the theme of creating stability in a golf swing. I want you to think about this sentence, one of my favorite sentences in all of golf coaching, you can’t fire a canon from a rowing boat. And it works on the idea that if you’re going to generate a lot of power, we’ve got to have a solid stable base. We can’t have the rowing boat going shooting across the water to fire a canon ball forward and the same in a golf swing. When we’re at the top of the swing, we’re about to generate a huge amount of power and really pull down aggressively.

If we were standing on ice skate here would be slipping and sliding all over the place as we try and generate power. So again looking at Sam Snead’s leg action, he worked really hard on this sort of squat motion to then generate the power. And here’s a great drill to see whether you can incorporate some of that in your own technique. Initially you can find yourself a football or a basketball or if you’re down at the driving range we’re going to use a range basket, all sort of similar size and shapes. We’re going to take them.

We’re going to place it quite high up against the knees, sort of above the knees sorry into the thighs depending on the size of the ball or the object you’ve got, higher up the better. And we take our address position, and we go ahead and turn that up to the top and you should feel like there’s a little bit of a twist but not a full-on so turn and face backwards there. So a little bit of a twist of the ball or the basket and then we’re going to drive down and what you’ll appreciate here is I can’t drive my right knee into my left this way which is that unstable, lacking in power sort of action.

What I can do is I can turn everything together but I keep the width in my thighs and in my knees as I drive off my right side and push around to impact. Towards the impact phase, the knees would generally come close towards – sorry, towards the follow through phase, the knees come close together but they’re not close to each other at impact. So I can go ahead now and hit a shot here, keeping that width in my knees, keeping that stability in that lower half and I can hit through the ball.

And it feels a little bit awkward here because my knee wants to come across but I was actually able to stay down, make decent contact on the ball and feel like I created that good width. Now if you feel like you’re struggling to make that swing or you’re trying to squash all the air out of the basketball or the football or you’re breaking baskets, that’s probably a good indication that your knee action is a bit too lateral and you’re turning in with your right knee too much. You’re not having the stability of a good solid Sam Snead golf swing. Try and work on that drill. See if you can work on more stability in your game. Remember you can’t fire a canon from a rowing boat.