Keep Your Head Still Until Imapct

Last month Steve Smith made a comment in the blog about the importance of keeping your head still in the backswing that I think is important for everyone to hear.

"Many golfers have their head and spine angle lower during the start of the forward swing. Most of them also are pulling up or out or both at impact to try to make room for the club.

Most of the better players keep that to a minimum and probably would prefer to not do it at all. Tiger does it much more with a driver off of the tee and, maybe not so coincidentally, that is also the part of the game that he has been the most inconsistent. In his controlled approach shots he is much more stable. He is also a tremendous athlete that can get away with things that most of us can't get away with.

My head goes down and then back up but I am constantly working at trying to keep that to a minimum. It's usually the first thing I look at when I look at a new video.

P.S. DJ's head moves down a little but stays down through impact. Don's head doesn't move much at all. (He could probably balance something on his head and still hit the ball). ;-)"

Steve is right on about how little DJ and I move our heads in the backswing and in the first part of the forward upswing. If you watch video of my swing, I'm able to keep it exceptionally still until impact. DJ is also very still in his backswing but when he bumps and initiates his FUS, his head does move back a little as his secondary spine angle tilt kicks in but he keeps his head well behind the ball until impact.

Why is this important? A vertical swing is basically an arc around a fixed point, i.e. the top of your spine. Our power does not come from twisting our upper torso into a tight coil as rotational swingers do, but rather from our ability to swing our arms faster because we keep them out in front of our body. Up until the early 90's anyone who learned this game was told to keep their head absolutely still. Then in 1992, the whole pattern of golf instruction changed with the rush to the rotational swing. By 1994, golf instructors were telling their students that it was OK to move their heads "a little", though there was rarely a precise definition of how much was OK and how much was too much. I think that's because the pros were coming to the realization that something had to give if you were going to make a big shoulder turn. It's virtually impossible to keep your head still when you rotate your shoulders 90 degrees and more because the plane of your shoulders has to change. If you are a gifted athlete like Tiger Woods you can get away with this--most of the time. But if you are like most amateurs, the big turn can cause movement forward and back and up and down which will result in a bad swing, more often than not.

But because a vertical swinger keeps his/her arms in front of their body it's much easier to maintain our angles and get the club on the aiming line and keep it there through impact. The key to better golf is less body and head movement because this will give us more consistency in hitting solid shots with greater accuracy and distance.

Keep it vertical!

The Surge

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