How Do I Turn My Body On The Downswing??

This is a very common question that gets asked and it's true that understanding this is vital to ensuring a consistent swing. Most beginner to intermediate players tend to over rotate too early on the downswing. When this occurs it will commonly result in 'pull' shots and 'slice' shots. The reason being is that if you turn too quick from the top, you will tend to push your arms away from the body causing the path to travel out to in through the ball.

One of the simplest way of explaining how to turn on the downswing is imagining you're going to skim a rock across the river. After you've initially rotated your body on the 'pullback', you then would naturally take a step forward first with your left foot and then rotate your body as you move onto your front foot. This is exactly the same as golf in that you want to feel the left hip bump first to the left around an inch without rotating followed by rotating your body and moving onto your front foot.

When you start applying the correct sequence, many times your path issues will start to fix themselves. For example if you are one that slices the ball caused by an 'over the top' swing, once you have bumped first with your left hip followed by rotation, your arms will naturally stay behind you for longer thus allowing you to travel more on an in-out path through impact. Nick Faldo used to call it 'keeping the back facing the target on the downswing' as this encouraged the motion of shifting the weight onto the front foot first before rotation.

What is really important to get right to master the rotation on the downswing, is ensuring the backswing is firstly in position. You want to make sure that when you reach the top of the backswing, that you hit certain check points. Firstly you want to make sure that the left shoulder has rotated 90 degrees (chin under the shoulder), secondly that the hips have rotated around 45 degrees and that the left knee has moved around 20 degrees. The reason why having the rotation right on the backswing is that if you don't turn enough coming back, you may over rotate on the downswing which will still lead to 'slicing'.

If you'd like to learn more about how to rotate correctly just contact myself at David Waters Golf located at Emerald Lakes Golf Coaching Centre.