Warm up and Impact Drill.
This tip is a great way of loosening up the body prior to playing – importantly it stretches and awakens the muscles that need to be active in your golf swing and also mimics the correct position you should be finding at impact.
In picture 1 you will see that I have placed an alignment rod into the ground.
The angle I have set this at closely mirrors the angle of the shaft when hitting my 7 iron.
Take your normal posture position tilting forward from your hips and stretch your arms out also shown in pic 1.
- From here rotate your arms and shoulders so that your lead arm hand (left) pivots to point towards the golf ball. Your trail arm (right) should end up in a position on plane with the lead arm (pic 2). Ensure that the plane line between both arms isn’t too steep or too flat (pics 3 and 4 are both incorrect). The alignment rod indicates the plane you are looking to synchronise between both arms. A little tip to help you achieve the correct position is to make sure that your spinal angle at set-up doesn’t change during this movement.
- This motion helps you to open up the body on the backswing by rotating your core into the correct position. It also helps to awaken these big muscles by giving them a bit of a stretch.
- Simply reverse the process on the downswing until the hand of your trail arm (right) points at the golf ball and your lead arm (left) is on the same plane as the right arm but is in the air behind your head (pic 5). You will see that my chest has rotated towards the target along with my hips and right leg.
- Without moving your body, bring your left arm down to your right arm – join your hands together as if gripping the golf club. This position shown in (pic 6) is where you should be at impact. By repetitively repeating this motion, the consistency of your ball striking will improve as will your accuracy.
I like to encourage pupils to use it as a pre-range/game warm up exercise as it loosens the muscles as well as reminds the brain of the positions it should be mirroring when swinging the club.