Turn Your Shoulders To Start The Golf Swing (Video) - by Pete Styles
Turn Your Shoulders To Start The Golf Swing (Video) - by Pete Styles

I think an area of weakness in the takeaway for a lot of golfers is the fact that they don’t efficiently use their shoulders enough, golfers generally find an easier way to do things, the body finds an easier way to do things and if somebody said to me, take the club back over there, I could just do that. I have put the club back where you told me to, didn’t necessarily do it in the right way and the body found the easiest way to do it, its easier just to lift the hands and the arms, but it provides no power or consistency for my downswing. The correct way to take the golf club back from there is to wind the upper body and create a shoulder turn, but already you can hear my voice, that’s a little bit more physically difficult, it creates a bit more strain, and its that feel that we actually need to cultivate, we want that strain, we want that tension for the power generation of the downswing. So if we were to set up and we have the club laying over the top of the shoulders here and I imagine I am making a takeaway, I could just lift my right hand up, that’s going to be no good, we want to generate a shoulder turn and as I generate that shoulder turn you can see my shoulders very quickly hit the 90 degree angle as I have got my shoulders round almost pointing back behind the golf ball, to generate 90 degrees.

And as I am achieving that I am generating power as long as my bottom half doesn’t follow. If I made a 90 degree shoulder turn, but so did my knees, my hips and my legs, I have generated no power. But if I can make a 90 degree shoulder turn and leave my bottom half to all intents and purposes back where it was then I have generated some power in my upper body, generated a coil, generated some resistance ready for my downswing turn. So in any movement that you make to start your backswing it should feel quite tight, it should feel relatively like its building tension quite tense. So as I am setting up to the golf ball I’m not making the easy way out of just lifting my hands and arms and creating the tension of my upper body, aiming to the top and then I can generate my power on my downswing. So don’t allow your body just to find the easy way out and use your hands, let the body create the tension by turning the shoulders, creating a good solid X angle, X factor angle, turning the upper body, leaving the bottom half where it is, the bigger difference in your X angle, the bigger power motion you’ve got for the downswing generating more distance. Turning your shoulders is a great way of hitting this golf ball further. 2015-10-16

I think an area of weakness in the takeaway for a lot of golfers is the fact that they don’t efficiently use their shoulders enough, golfers generally find an easier way to do things, the body finds an easier way to do things and if somebody said to me, take the club back over there, I could just do that. I have put the club back where you told me to, didn’t necessarily do it in the right way and the body found the easiest way to do it, its easier just to lift the hands and the arms, but it provides no power or consistency for my downswing. The correct way to take the golf club back from there is to wind the upper body and create a shoulder turn, but already you can hear my voice, that’s a little bit more physically difficult, it creates a bit more strain, and its that feel that we actually need to cultivate, we want that strain, we want that tension for the power generation of the downswing. So if we were to set up and we have the club laying over the top of the shoulders here and I imagine I am making a takeaway, I could just lift my right hand up, that’s going to be no good, we want to generate a shoulder turn and as I generate that shoulder turn you can see my shoulders very quickly hit the 90 degree angle as I have got my shoulders round almost pointing back behind the golf ball, to generate 90 degrees.

And as I am achieving that I am generating power as long as my bottom half doesn’t follow. If I made a 90 degree shoulder turn, but so did my knees, my hips and my legs, I have generated no power. But if I can make a 90 degree shoulder turn and leave my bottom half to all intents and purposes back where it was then I have generated some power in my upper body, generated a coil, generated some resistance ready for my downswing turn. So in any movement that you make to start your backswing it should feel quite tight, it should feel relatively like its building tension quite tense. So as I am setting up to the golf ball I’m not making the easy way out of just lifting my hands and arms and creating the tension of my upper body, aiming to the top and then I can generate my power on my downswing. So don’t allow your body just to find the easy way out and use your hands, let the body create the tension by turning the shoulders, creating a good solid X angle, X factor angle, turning the upper body, leaving the bottom half where it is, the bigger difference in your X angle, the bigger power motion you’ve got for the downswing generating more distance. Turning your shoulders is a great way of hitting this golf ball further.