Hi guys, it's Aimee.
Many of you guys don't recognize the importance
of the left leg in the golf swing.
So today I'm going to show you
how to use your left leg correctly,
so you can hit it long and straight.
So a lot of amateurs learn to turn their hips or straighten their knee
or jump to hit the ball.
But these movements are so bad for your joints,
we want to keep your joints nice and healthy,
so we can play golf for a long time, right?
So, in order to do that, we have to use the right muscles not joints.
So I'm going to show you the proper way the lower body should
move and then show you some drills to help it.
All right, first thing first.
If you divide the body in half,
from the belly button, we'll approximately call anything below
the belly button lower body, and above it the upper body.
If we just focus on the lower body, I usually use
rotational and lateral, these two things to explain this.
So if you look at people, they use a rotational power,
what happens is if you look at it from the side,
if you rotate too much then what happens is
the club exits inside a lot.
So when you do that you're going to lose accuracy
and plus if you rotate too much on the way down,
what happens is you lose balance.
And what you do is you tense up your shoulders
to try and not fall so that is going to hurt your distance as well.
If you look at the lateral movement it's not a very big motion.
It's maybe anywhere from 1 to 3 inches, very subtle movement.
But the pros what they do is they use the lateral momentum
to get the lower body turning thtough for power and accuracy.
So if you look at this finish, you've seen this a lot on TV, right?
So pros finish like this.
Whereas if you look at the finish you go
'Oh! the hips are facing the target, let me go ahead and do that too'
A lot of amateurs turn their hips like this
and the finish looks totally different because the left leg
has spun out of the way versus pros post their left leg.
So if you look at this the lateral movement
The couple of good things about the lateral movement
is if you look at it from the down-the-line view,
the club head is going to exit a lot straight even if your tempo is off.
Anywhere from like 3 feet behind the ball and 3 feet in front of the ball,
it's going to be a lot straighter to the target.
Plus if you shift to the left what happens is..
the left leg is going to post and you're going to have a very nice balance.
So your shoulders are automatically be able to relax
which will give you more distance.
So if you understand how the lower body should work
and post the left leg instead of spinning out of the way,
we'll go into a couple of drills I have for you.
All right, so the first drill is for those of you who twist your left foot.
Let me show you an example.
When you twist your left foot like that and that was exaggerated.
But if you twist your left foot like that,
you're going to lose a lot of accuracy and distance.
Fix that it's very simple.
What you do is you set up to the ball,
you're going to take an extra club,
I have it right here,
and you're going to lay it down against your inside of your left heel.
So our motive here is not to not kick the shaft when you hit.
So we want to keep that left foot as still as possible.
So if you are swinging and
you kick it like this then you'll know you're spinning
you're twisting your left foot, right?
So what happens is when you first start doing this drill,
your left leg can't move
and that's what you use to initiate your downswing with.
So you're stuck.
So your whole body might tense up,
and you may not be able to do anything.
But your body is actually very smart.
So if you keep at it, what happens is..
your body realizes I can't use the left leg so let's try and use
something right above it which is the hips.
And then you will start hitting a lot better.
But there are few people that can automatically adjust.
So I do have a second drill for you.
The second drill I have is actually, it applies to
people who couldn't do that drill properly,
plus people who use their left knee to initiate the downswing,
plus people who initiate the downswing with by spinning the hip,
it applies to all of those people.
So what you do is you want to set up to the golf ball.
The middle of your left foot goes at the golf ball.
And you're going to take your right foot off.
You're going to get into your set up.
So 100% of the pressure is in the left leg and zero in the right.
But I don't want you to fall.
So we're going to go ahead and place that toe down
with no pressure on it at all.
So you might have to bend your left knee a little bit more than usual.
So okay we're going to do a half swing.
So our goal here is to keep the left knee pointing
forward as much as possible.
And we're not gonna use arm strength, we're not gonna use anything,
but just rotation of your core.
So it looks like this, half swing!
You see how that sounded very soft.
We're not trying to kill the ball here
we're just trying to stabilize our left leg.
So if you do this correctly, you will be perfectly balanced.
And you would have made that sound, nice sound.
But if you do it wrong what happens is
you're going to maybe use your arms and look like this,
and won't be able to balance.
Or if you use your left leg, it's going to wobble around
and you won't balance either.
So you want to make sure your left knee stays still
and you use your abs to rotate back and forth.
And you're going to feel that pressure
a lot of pressure in your left leg on that one.
Some of you guys may say well I am not able to balance on my left leg.
Then what to do is we have to go one step back and do this exercise.
You can do this in your living room.
So it's something you can do whenever you get bored.
You're going to put your hands on your shoulders,
and you're gonna take your right foot off,
you're gonna get into your golf posture,
and if you're able to balance like this, great!
If you're not, then I suggest you keep
trying to get your balance properly, left foot only.
You can do the right foot as well. It'll help with the backswing.
So once you are able to balance, one foot only like this,
what you're gonna do is..
you're going to start rotating from the core like we did
when we were hitting, like this.
If you're able to hold your balance while you're rotating your core,
then you can go ahead and try that drill.
Alright,
so once we do enough of that left leg only drill,
we'll go ahead and hit a full swing.
But what we're going to do is..
we're going to make a full backswing with a half swing finish,
just like we did in the drill.
So it's gonna look like this.
My leg is engaged so the outer edge of the left thigh,
the IT band, is engaged.
And once you get used to this swing what happens is..
even if you go all the way into the finish,
your IT band is going to be still engaged just like the pros
instead of losing the pressure in the left leg and looking like this.
We don't want to look like this at all.
So I want you to try both the drills.
And I promise once you get used to this left leg posting,
you're going to hit it longer and straighter,
and you're going to end up with a nice
and balanced finish just like the pros.
I hope you're able to follow along.
And I'll see you in the next lesson!