sean today's video let's talk about how we can consistently and accurately set our bodies up to hit a golf shot right before we make the swing to allow us to make a better golf swing and do something a couple of these are going to be secrets to you that you may have never heard of that you're going to see next time you watch a pro event you're going to see them do this every time [Music] so the first thing we want to talk about when we're setting up and we want to have a good setup to allow us to move efficiently and powerfully during the golf swing is where we position our spine relative to the ground yeah and we see this done a lot of different ways yeah it's one of the probably the first things i look for when i'm looking at somebody's setup position positions how they're tilted at address because in a lot of ways that determines the shot they're going to hit it's going to affect how you move the club right yeah playing the club for sure yeah so let's take a look at a couple common ones that we see with an iron i'll demonstrate it with a driver yeah i think the one of the main ones is someone that has been taught to stay behind the ball or they think they're gonna stay behind it to help scoop it up in the air they automatically start tilting their body back behind the ball too far and it really kind of puts them behind eight ball before they even get started right it really has a negative effect on the takeaway which we know how important that is to start planing the club and moving it correctly now with the driver we'll also see because again most people want to hit up on it and they're talk so they'll see boom like really where this center of the chest here is almost off the back foot and set up like this and again you're going to make a move more often than not just rolling it inside these shoulders are going to stay really high and then you're going to be really behind the eight ball trying to make a down swing from there yeah and then to kind of add on that with the iron in the other extreme um in order to hit down on it right basically because they've been taught to hit down they start tilting their body to the left too much and when you do that the club want tends to work up and down too much so for all intents and purposes you're building in the swing shape before you even take the club back so if you're having some problems on the golf course hitting the shot shape that you want try to figure out where the body needs to be at address that's exactly right and we'll look at gears here in just a second and show you what the bears players do and again this isn't something that that is physically taxing to do at all it's just knowing what to do so you can practice it now the next thing that we see is how golfers align their body to where they're trying to hit it yeah right with everyone thinks that okay i'll get up and we'll use the camera as our target line that all of these angles are going to be just dead square and that's not the case no what do you like to see there so what we want to see or what we see from the best players is if you have this neutral spine right right shoulder is going to be a little lower left shoulder is going to be a little higher what that does is kind of position everything a couple degrees open so this would be square that would be a couple degrees open it's slight with pretty much everything what we don't want to see and this comes in the ball position is when the ball starts to scoot back we start to see a lot of golfers a lot of recreational golfers will start to set up here then they'll start to tilt more and set up and tilt more now my target hadn't moved no it's still over here but i'm set up like this and i think we've captured the most setup it's 15 degree closed shoulders it's set up with a spine tilted away a bunch and you don't have a chance really to make a good swing from there now you've pre-programmed this basically inside racks flat shoulders yeah in fact he had high left shoulder coming back yeah and the other uh thing we see there was a setup i'll take the driver for a second you know golfers have been told to play the ball forward in their stance which they need to be doing right right they'll start facing the target facing the ball with their chest and that gets them way too old so those three or four degree open shoulders now turn into be 15 degree open shoulders because they're just pointing their chest at the ball yeah what you can do is when you get in here make sure that once the ball positions forward you still have basically square is shoulders slightly open if anything and you can have the shaft leaning away that's perfectly fine absolutely correct okay and then the final thing that we see is golfers will lose let's say you've got your spine on correctly and you've got your alignment correctly that can all go out the window when you start walking into the shot yeah right we'll see guys who work on their swings indoors and indoors is kind of a little bit of a cheat because you've got walls you've got everything that kind of aligned you and it's really easy to get a line now out in the real world we'll see guys have been working on their swings a lot and they'll send this video saying i can't carry it to the golf course and you can see plain as day on like a straight par-4 camera is the target again they're set up over here thanking their setup down the middle so you have to start making these massive compensations to pull the ball back on track and you can put adam scott in poor alignment and it won't look like adam scott for long yeah and at the end of this video we'll show you kind of a way to step into the shot and almost add it to your pre-shot routine so that when you get in there you know you're set up square every time have good engagement with the target and go ahead and pull the trigger and hopefully get some better shots exactly right so let's jump into gears we'll show you all these things what they should look like how they relate then we'll come back and show you some drills so let's just jump right into it here with our pro who's a multiple winner out there on the pga tour and who's also statistically one of the best ball strikers the past 20 years it'll be hard to find a better example of how a good setup sets the stage for a good consistent repeatable swing we'll also take a look at both his driver and his iron swing because when we do a video with a pro hitting an iron one of the first comments is always will this work with a driver or if we do a video with a pro hitting a driver we're always asked the same thing works with an iron so we want you to be able to see both so you can see where the differences and similarities might be whether we're working with a pro or an amateur the first thing we always evaluate in a gear session is the relationship between the spine angle and the hip angle we want to see the spine neutral 90 degrees would be dead neutral dead vertical and then we want to see the hips level to the ground and as you can see our pro here does a very good job at doing both of those with both of his clubs notice the shoulder tilt here that he has and also notice that he's not getting that shoulder tilt by tilting his spine he's using his independent range of motion in the shoulders to produce the tilt by adopting a setup like you see here you'll set the stage for a very neutral takeaway where the hips begin to tilt as the left shoulder begins to move down and around both are key for keeping the club out in front of you as you begin your takeaway and as we move these setups and stack them on top of one another you can see just how similar they are your setup shouldn't change a whole lot just because you pull driver instead of an iron it's much easier to own one setup one solid neutral setup than trying to master several different setups for several different clubs now as we look at him from down the line this is where you should see the biggest differences in your setup but only because there's a big difference in the clubs you're holding so the first big difference you'll see is in your spine angle here at setup because the club is longer and flatter you'll see a more vertical spine angle when you set it from down the line and the second big difference will be with your arm hang again because the club is longer and flatter you'll see the arm hangs just a bit out from the body compared to an iron but as you can see everything else is pretty similar i do want to point out something from one of our previous videos notice where the center of his hips are located if you've seen our pros versus ams video on hip rotation and thrust you'll recall we talked about why it's so important to have the center of your hips over your ankles you can see that our pro here is doing it with both of his clubs so from face on and down the line the big differences between driver and irons should be due to length of club a bit more upright spine angle with the arms angled a bit more out in front of you with the driver the rest of your angles should be pretty similar and neutral you should have some tilt to the shoulders without the spine veering too far from vertical and your hips should be level to the ground now let's have a look at alignment so our pro here is demonstrating a very common alignment scenario that we see with great players the feet are set pretty square or parallel to his target line while his shoulders and hips are set just a little open to it now i should also point out that this golfer plays a draw as his stock shot i think most golfers out there playing the game are under the impression that if you want to hit a draw you set up closed if you want to hit a fade you set up open but the reality is you can set up from here to square and you're going to be able to play any shot you want to hit think of it like this your setup has a big influence on your backswing and your backswing has the big influence on your downswing so these great players are using their setup to really influence their backswing rather than i think what most amateurs do is think of setup being very close kin to their impact and it's not the case you still have to go through the backswing and downswing to get the club at impact and these great players are using their setup to have a big influence on their takeaway and backswing so the big take away with all this is neutral adopt neutral as your motto for setup avoid the extremes and train yourself for neutral everyone's swinging gets off and when it does off from neutral is much better than being off from the extremes all right sean let's talk about now the spine angle let's show the drill that i learned from you that we use all the time in lessons to make sure that spine's not getting too biased okay so you take your driver right because it's a long tail on it put it in the middle of your chest and bend straight forward and try to keep this thing between your feet or between your legs you'll notice right away if you have over tilt in one direction or the other because this thing will be biased in one direction to the other so you want to keep the tail between the feet yeah and then as a bonus from down the line it shouldn't be between your feet if you bend over correctly from your hips you should create a little tail out the back here and that would show me that you're bent forward correctly from the hip joints and not just getting squatted in the knees like we see a lot of you doing so it's a little bonus drill yeah i love that some of you guys will have the tail way over to your left foot some of you have with tail on the right foot and a lot of you will have the tail straight down between your feet from this way so this is a really simple really easy one to do and this is something you literally spend three or four minutes a night doing and you'll have it knocked out really quickly exactly okay now as far as a drill for lining ourselves up to the target so what we've done here is lay an alignment stick on our target line so i'm gonna go with a little longer club what i want to do is put this tightly against my chest i'm trying to do this without hitting the microphone so i don't have any slack there so i want to stand in over it and try to get this so right there i'm close to this stick i want to make sure this stick and my shaft here match because my right hand is going to be slightly above my left hand right when we take a grip that's going to give me that one two three degrees open that we see from the best players in the world i don't want to get in here and then do this because now we see how much of a divergence we have so put a stick edge of a wall right or tile on the floor hardwood flooring get a long club the longer the better right there boom i'm ready to go and again three or four minutes a night it's really going to go a long ways with getting your body tuned up then notice where your hips are you can do the same thing with your hips okay i know my shoulders are good not my hips okay because not everybody's going to be the same amount we see guys all the time with open shoulders close hips getting crossed up right that's right then you go to the knees you just get everything start to become used to setting up pretty evenly squarish to parallel to where you're trying to hit it it just gives you a baseline to work from so you're not just setting up in a haphazard way every time because if you do that you're always going to be inconsistent right now as far as the last drill we have for you as far as now tying all this to the target line what you talk about is really good so it's that one two step right yep so you get your grip up here and we like taking the grip up in the air right a lot of you will go in thank your lineup then start taking your grip and then everything goes off so put the grip on up in here it's getting the face where you want it to go right foot in face first and then line up and i'm always glancing if not fixating where i'm trying to hit it okay see a lot of guys that come in here i see it all the time too much staring at them and they're fidgeting and then to look at the target they'll go stand up completely out of their posture right and then lock back down instead we want you to come in here get the face where you want it to go start really how'd you say it stare at the target glance at the ball you want to stare at the target and glance at the ball i don't know why i heard that but as many years ago and mike made a great point too you can see here when he's looking at the target you want to think you're looking underneath the target line a little bit more instead of his head going yeah that way right yes absolutely and what you'll find is that the more fixated you become out there the more your body will start to help you hit it that direction 100 if i get in here and i'm really fixated okay back and then one last look and then i go rather than here fidget you know yeah it's going to go much faster and you're going to find it much easier to pull the trigger yeah if you guys can't set up consistently every time using some of these drills if you're unable to do that you're never going to be consistent with your game and your swing it will literally change your golf swing so you can work on your swing all you want but if you can't tie it to the target you're not going to transfer that swing to the golf course no if you found this video helpful and you need more help with your consistency we want to help you with that go to the first comment below this video you'll see a link it's our first pin comment there'll be a link in there click on that link we'll take you to our number one consistency drill to help you get the ball more solidly and more consistent every time you're out on the course