Starting Golf Downswing from Ground Up

Hi! Chuck Quinton, founder of rotaryswing.com here. I want to talk about a really important concept that you've heard a million times but probably still to this day, no matter how hard you've tried, no matter what else you've done to try and drill this into your golf swing, you haven't been able to do it — and that is starting your downswing from the ground up.

                How many times have you heard that? "Elite players start their downswing from the ground up. Use your legs for power." Yet nearly every amateur golfer I teach starts their swing from the top down. Why is that? It's a really simple, yet really important concept, and understanding it is going to help you finally make this change. So let's take a look at what causes you to start from the top down instead of the bottom up.

                The reason is that your body uses muscle tension as its primary indicator of what muscles to fire and in what order — the sequence in the golf swing. Your body is really clever in that it listens to you when you tell it what you want it to do — we're just usually giving it the wrong information. That wrong information is tension typically in the upper body or the shoulders. That's the area we sometimes refer to as "the rectangle." You want to swing more from your core rotation from the top of the downswing, and you know that — but no matter what you try, you still can't do it. It's because you're giving your body the wrong signals.

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                When you go to the top of your swing, stop and notice which muscles are tightest in your body. What you'll probably find, in most instances, is that it's going to be the muscles in your shoulders and arms. So of course, what you're telling your body is, "Hey, these muscles are really tight." What does a muscle want to do when it has a lot of tension in it? It wants to release the tension. So what you've got to do is start telling your body the right signals — but before we do that, let's look at what the wrong signals actually are.

                The wrong signal is when you first start the club going back and you take the lead arm — what we'll refer to as "pushing" — and you start pushing it across your body. Instantly you'll feel tension in the upper part of your back and the rear delts of your shoulders. By doing this, you've moved your arms and club a long way, but your body hasn't turned much; you haven't created any healthy tension or load in your trunk and core — the area we sometimes call "the box." Instead, you're loading up your shoulders, so by the time you reach the top, you're so tight that guess what your body wants to do? It has to get rid of this tension in your shoulders immediately.

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