Transcript for:
Mastering Golf Footwork and Pressure Control

Shawn we see this all the time in lessons and golfers come in worrying about something that's happening kind of above the waist and it's actually the fault or the calls from what happens below the waist ya know so time we try to get people to understand that they need to get to the footwork correct first or the foundation of their swing correct before they should even be worrying about some of the upper levels like up hips upper body arms and wrists that's exactly right so we're gonna take a look in this video we're gonna take a look at something that the greatest players and the history of the game have done exceptionally well and it's something that you can do really today and really start to improve your golf swing to really kind of make this as basic and relatable as possible right we all learned at some point hopefully how to walk probably don't remember that we just did it right uh-huh well how we want to move the feet how do we want to improve our footwork in the golf swing is very similar to walking or even throwing exactly it all comes down just to basic human movement right and you know when you learn to walk you landed on one foot the heel hit you landed on the foot a fall on the foot basically a little bit to fall it's exactly right the other foot hits you fall the other foot hits you falling there's our timing to that almost like a heel-toe heel-toe and a rhythm that happens as you learn to walk that allows you to progress and as you grow out of crawling that's we ready to walk and then run now let's really let's equate that to the golf swing and talk about some of the things that we see in lessons where it would make walking very difficult much less the golf swing yeah exactly and there's a few things that that come to mind during a lesson that you see that don't make any sense when it comes to to movement patterns especially with the ground correct right so one of them would be just the idea that as you turn back that you keep the same amount of weight into the heels for the whole swing and you see that a lot right golfers set up in their heels and they've been taught to keep their weight back right so they don't early extend or whatever that swing fault may be and their weight never changes and never have that heel toe pattern that we like to see with good movement yeah I think you're exactly right I think there's a there's a mindset that if I'm gonna resist right we don't want this swaying in the golf swing so the opposite of that is to kind of like play in concrete loafers or yeah mafia thing right playing concrete boots yeah so I'm not gonna move anything and that's gonna create stability and give me that really pretty kind of pressure trace in a swing but it doesn't work that way Mike makes a great point and I had a lesson a couple weeks ago they came in and a lot of times I'll tell you what their problems are and they said iswe a lot so his idea of fixing this way was to lock his knees into place so he's like well if I just lock my knees and try to turn from up here I can stop the sway well that's not the that's not the way to fix this way that made him sway worse when I taught him to lighten the pressure in the left heel and let the knees change that totally eliminated his swing and what you see there is a lightening in the left heel right and you might see the pressure go kind of mid foot here on the backswing and that totally eliminates the need to do this so trying to lock things in place actually removes us athleticism when we don't want to do that right there's a phrase you know throwing the baby out with the bathwater that's it right there we can get rid of a slide by not doing anything which is gonna create a whole other set of issues make your swing less dynamic we want to get rid of the slide the slide plus some time I think our audience now knows what happens if amount of time get rid of the slide by improving what we're doing not just by throwing out any chance for a good movement exactly good concepts with what you're doing down below in the ground is gonna help everything as it moves up the chain it's exactly right and we can get this below the knees working correctly you'd be amazed at how much better much better how much better everything works above it absolutely all right so let's come back now assess let's show them some gears enough dears let's show them some swing cat images of how these great players move between the heel to toe in each foot and when that happens throughout the golf swing so you'll be able to see what this is looks like from good players you incorporate that into your swing and we're gonna show you some drills on how to do that so you're looking at a multiple winner here on tour and he's one of those pros pros when it comes to ball striking he's one of the kind of golfers that Rose will want tip balls he's that good at what he does now won't explain to you what you're looking at here on the screen if you're not familiar with as we look at his pressure movement so you've got his left foot here on the left that was right foot then you can see the percentages under each foot down on the bottom of your screen and then that little white ball in the middle is his combined center of pressure and that's what actually traces this line this light grey line here that you see is pressure trace so as we get this call from moving you're gonna see some really cool things here and how he moves efficiently and how you can move efficiency as well with the proper timing and forces generated throughout your golf swing so you're gonna see him start roughly at 50/50 and then there's a slight increase to his left before he gets the club moving in the backswing then as he starts to ramp up his club head and speed in the backswing right here is where he's actually moved his mass he shifted his body maximum amount to the right right here in his golf swing so it's very early in the golf swing when this particular player shifts his body to the right you can see the pressure still has a ways to go and right here is where he gets to left arm parallel in his backswing this will call it 8020 spot in the backswing his his mass has already started to recenter but his pressure now is peaking on the right at just before this left arm parallel spot so right here at 80/20 he is just before left arm parallel in the backswing now as we take him up to the top he hits the top of his swing now right at 50/50 and this is also right when his mass has resented so his mass was much slower to recenter than his pressure his pressure moves fast and that's what everybody does everybody moves pressure faster should move pressure fast the body mass the body weight moves slow now he's got both Reese entered at the top of his swing now as he goes down and the left arm parallel in the downswing we can see now way more pressure under that left foot 73 to 27% we like to have most of our players just about everyone in that 70 to 75 percentage on the front foot at this point in the downswing then the cool thing that we want the one of the takeaways from this video is that from this left arm parallel in the downswing into impact right here we want a very tight movement between those two benchmarks you can see moved from 73 to 82% forward that's not what we see for most average golfers we see as much as 4045 sometimes 50 percentage points of movement in that left arm parallel spot to impact in the downswing that's too much ground to cover to consistently play out in the middle of the clubface and we've charted that for years we've looked at impact locations with our camera based launch monitors and pressure data and we see those impact locations grow when the number between these two benchmarks grows and when you see those numbers shrink like you do here with our Pro we see that impact location shrink golfers are much more consistent out of the middle the clubface when there's far less pressure movement from left arm parallel into impact and then let's contrast that with one of our amateur traces here and you're gonna see a couple things that are similar but a few important things that are quite a bit different so as our amateur gets moving into his backswing we notice now just the opposite of our pro who lightened his left foot going back we see our amateur now sinking into the heel of his left foot going back and this is him at left arm parallel virtually identical but how they get there was quite a bit different than what our pro was doing then as we get him to the top of the swing we see now he's shifted 90 percent into his trail side into his right foot at the top of a swing remember our pro was 50/50 at this point now we've created our golfer here has created what's called a very late pressure movement and this this really is gonna expand his center of contact which which Rob's him of compression which Rob's him of ball speed and direction dispersion we're gonna take him down the left arm parallel in the downswing so he's still 65% on his back foot at left arm parallel in the downswing our pro was almost 75% on the front foot quite a bit difference now you're gonna see this golfer knows he needs to be on the left side at impact so he's gonna make a mad dash and try to cover a lot of ground in a very small window point zero eight second window two right here at impact he's gone from 65 off his back foot to 76 on his front foot that's just too big of a area to cover too much distance to travel with this pressured race in that short of a window and his his impact location consistency was suffering a great deal because of it so the tighter we can make left arm parallel in the impact the more consistent and the more compression we're gonna have on our golf shots now let's take a look at a few drills to help you improve how you move this pressure during your golf school so now let's take a look at some ways to Train what we just saw on the swing cat videos with the pressure movements so Shaun let's have you set up okay and we've got our live view system camera down here and this is a this is a remote camera that feeds directly links directly to an iPad or an iPhone and allows Shaun or you to get direct feedback without having to kind of stop film your own swing go back and look at us this is a live connection it's a live feed the whole time so you can see instantly the movements you're making make corrections if you need to that's right so let's have you set up Shaun we got the camera position down the line right behind the hands and I'm gonna put the iPad down here so Shaun can kind of watch his knee movements and what we're looking for is that he has the right knee flex right knee bent and both knees as he's doing this so start with equal bend basically right now as it go back I'm watching myself on the DeFede here at the down-the-line feet I'm gonna see this right leg lose a little bit of flex but I'm gonna gain more in the left-right and when I do that the left heel is gonna lighten just a little bit it doesn't really need to come up but it needs to feel like it lightens in the shoe a little and as you make that motion to the top you can start training that as you watch yourself on the live view and the slower you go at first to feel it the better because as you go slow you start to change your motor patterns and what we see with the great players on gears is the trail near Shaun's right knee is going to lose five degrees of knee bend so it's gonna straighten a bit it's not locking out or anything like that it's gonna straighten and then the lead me has left me is gonna double ya and Ben so Sean's gonna start right around if I remember correctly Sean your gears had you right around 18 degrees start yeah so he's gonna go 36 and his left knee about 13 and his right knee and from from your angle you know it's it's that kind of look this knee comes out just over the inside the toe here gains a lot of flex and this one just loses a little bit and that gives you my tilt to my hips and like we said if you get the ground correct now the hips and the shoulders can have the correct tilts now one word of caution when doing this drill you do not want to go boom and feel this weight come out of your front of your left or right foot great point that into the heel you do not want to shift pressure dead into that right heel it might go a little bit back toward the middle but you definitely don't want to be driving that pressure into the back of that heel no because the first thing you're gonna do from there is early extend and hop and drive that hip forward it takes too long in that quarter of a second downswing to get pressure deep from that heel back around onto the left heel which is where it really matters absolutely so you want to thank middle of the foot left heel and down swing okay now let's come back and look at the second derivative so another issue that we see golfers struggle with and this happens a lot and it's it's on the downswing and an attempt sometimes to get open too much or too soon and or just not on really understanding the timing of this pressure movement like we saw in the swing camp this back foot will tend to go like this and I'm sure you guys have either recognized this or I've seen someone do that and then kind of fake the finish after the ball is gone this is a great drill it's a Butch Harmon drill it is a Bitterman drill this is this is a death move for sure right you know this is something if you have this it's got to come out of your swing and there are some things you might do in your swing that are inside our windows but if you do this one this is out of any window and this is a move you've got to fix right away this makes a lot of things difficult the swing yeah so what Mike's saying is and then what I've done here is I've teed up a ball just inside my right heel I took this drill from Butch Harmon years ago in Golf Digest he always used to have a monthly article and he probably still does but this is when I was just playing as kid I think it was in there and what it shows you is on the downswing a lot of you don't shift enough forward and if you do a lot of you still spin out it's a hip spin out and the center of the hips actually backs up two months right and when you do that you look more like a baseball player I was a decent baseball player and my dad always taught me to squash the bug all right you squish the bug under the foot and a golf is different right we're not playing baseball so the footwork for this drill is as you get to the top and start down your pelvis shifts forward a little the foot kind of banks in a little and you should knock that ball off in that direction on the way up to your toe like it's almost like a drag of that front foot right are the rear foot you'll drag forward before it rotates we're so conditioned to getting on this toe that a lot of us just kind of yeah you can open the back his hips back she backed up yeah we get this angle on my front leg here right because I do that this front leg should be pretty darn vertical should be pretty darn straight up and down so you pull that right hip around you yeah you so you're your left hip will kind of get over your left ankle right and then as you rotate the hips through the ball that foot will have this angle to it that allow you to knock that ball off it almost acts like a governor to your hips you can't spin them out too fast because in all reality you don't want to be as open as you're gonna be at impact you're not gonna be as open as you're gonna be till way up here so why would you want to get is maximum open and impact you just don't want to do this exactly right a lot of you are gonna be where you do this yeah so the first thing would be put a ball down and hit some shots and see if you're even making that ball move yourself there live you will actually capture your swings right just hit the microphone button it'll trigger the hit it'll auto replay it back for you which is really amazing and then you can look and see if you have that foot spin out that's right if you do put them another ball down knock the ball off the tee within the motion of your golf swing keeping what we saw on swing catalyst of mind of wind and how this pressure moves and do it very slowly at first the slower you do it the faster you're gonna learn it and then ramp up the speed exactly alright then let us know in the comments if it's working or if you need some extra help getting it to work we'll be happy to help you we'll see you guys on the next one hey guys we hope you enjoyed today's video if you did enjoy it go ahead and give it a like also if you have any questions about today's video or you have an idea of a video you want us to shoot go ahead and leave it in the comments below we read every single comment we also respond to the comments so again leave us a comment if you have any questions or there's anything you'd like to see now if you haven't already click the subscribe 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