Tip Tuesday – Ground Series Part 5: Exercises to Generate More Vertical Force

Now it’s Eddie’s turn! In part five of Classic Swing Golf School‘s ground series of instructional tips, instructor Eddie Young steps in to discuss the importance of using the ground and your lead leg to generate vertical force in the golf swing, and demonstrates some practice drills to support this process.

 

 

Eddie Young:

All right, we’re doing the vertical force here, and to get the vertical force to work, we are going to work on getting the left side to move out of the way so we can get this push out of the left leg. So I’m going to show you a couple of drills and a couple exercises we can do to work on this.

So coming into the ball, I’ve got this move into it. Well, now that I’m to here, at the point coming into impact, I’ve got to move this back out of the way so I can get here and hit this hard with the right side. So there’s a big push out of this. So one of my favorite drills if you’re going to do this on the golf course is I like to grip midway down the shaft. Imagine this had a pointed object coming out of it. When I get back to here, I’m going to take that pointed object, and I would feel like I’m going to jam that right into my thigh. My lower thigh. Okay? So I’m making this move to into the ball going over here to impact on my left side.

At this point, instead of poking myself in the thigh, I’m going to move it out of the way to let that come through. Okay? So the drill would look more like this going and just really get that to push into the ground. So once again, I’m trying to move this left thigh back so I don’t hit it and let that go right on through and then push up on it.

As a kid, back in grade school, we used to, you can record this if y’all want to, but we used to do this joke as kids, we’d go up behind another kid and stick our knee right into their back of their leg, and they go like that and almost fall over backwards. Well, the more I move this out of the way and get that to move back to apply that force, the more this drops down so I can stay down through the shot to hit the ball better with my upper body, but yet let the lower body just jump out of it. Okay?

So from here, I’ll repeat that again. Into the left thigh, right here, to move it out of the way to let it go on through.

Another drill I would do would be the chair drill. This is one you could do at home. I’m going to take the back corner of the chair. I’ll turn this way so you can see me. All right. And I’m going to put my left hip about two or three inches away from that, just in front a little bit. When I’m coming back, I want to take that and push back into the chair and just push up on that left side.

So I want to be feeling a drill just going back like that to turn it out of the way and let it come through. All right? You can do that at home.

Or you could use your golf bag if you wanted to. If I had a stand bag, I could put that behind me. Don’t hit yourself. And just use that as a drill over here, to work on I’m going to take my left hip and just push it back into the chair. So you can see that’s moving it out of the way so I can drive down and through and push up on that left leg.

So those are just a couple of drills we can do to work on getting the left side to clear so we can get that vertical push out of the left side.