How To Stop Losing Spine Angle in Golf – Why Posture Matters (2022)

How many of you struggle with losing your posture in the golf downswing and you look like you're standing straight up, or as we affectionately call it, the puppy dog humping the fire hydrant. This is not a pretty move in your golf swing. It destroys your swing plane and destroys your path and basically makes it impossible for you to not have to use your hands to try and time a flip. The tendency is you're gonna be coming so far from the inside because your spine is standing straight up, the club's gonna be swinging way out to the right, and if you do this while standing straight up, you just think I'm way over the top and hit a big pull slice.

So the trick is understanding the basic move that's causing you to lose your posture, and it's one thing and one thing only, and it's a super easy thing to understand and fix. So first, let's understand why you're standing up like this through the hitting area. What movement could your body do? Forget golf for a second. I want you to think objectively.

Think outside the box. So you don't know anything about golf and you've got some guy like this. What movement, what muscles could you activate and engage to get into this position? Well, it's pretty simple. If you stand up and get in front of a mirror and start experimenting with this, you'll figure this out for yourself. The only way to do that is to push off your right leg. If you activate your right glute, calf, quad, everything that's gonna move your pelvis into the target line, that's the only way for you to create early extension in the downswing.

I've talked a ton on the rotaryswing.com website about the concept of pushing versus pulling, and this is exactly where this stuff comes in super handy to understand, because if I do the opposite, instead of pushing off my right leg and moving my hip into the target, what would happen if I pulled from the left side? What could I use to pull with? Well, primarily our primary rotators in the golf swing for our hips and torso is our left oblique in the downswing.

Our left oblique could move our hips this way. As you can see, if I just stand this way, instead of moving into the target line by pushing off the right, if I pull from the left, which way is my hip moving? Away from the target line. If anything, that's gonna cause me to increase my spine angle instead of decrease my spine angle. That's why the Rotary Swing tour method is the only golf swing that is built off this concept of pushing versus pulling. It dictates every move that you do in your golf swing.

So you quickly realize that almost every single swing fault that you have is coming from pushing too much at the wrong time. There is definitely pushing involved, but for the most part, you need to focus on learning how to pull and watch all of these crazy swing flaws from swinging over the top, slicing it, standing up losing your posture. They all come from pushing.

So instead of driving my right leg into the target, what I wanna do is I shift to the left, use my left hip, leg, and oblique to pull my hip out of the way, and look at my posture. I maintain my spine angle no problem, and that's all come from just moving from the left side. I'm just taking my left leg and using that to help move my hip out of the way. I'm using my left oblique to move my hip out of the way, and I'm not only maintaining my posture; I'm even increasing my spine angle so the club has a chance to come down on top of the ball instead of way on the inside or way over the top.

When you really wanna fix your golf swing and stop struggling, you have to understand all your faults, almost all of them, are coming from pushing. When you understand pushing versus pulling, you'll be able to fix every single swing flaw in your game. So I want you to take a look at this quick bonus video, talk a little bit more about pushing versus pulling. It applies to every facet of your game, even putting. So take a look at this bonus video and we'll see you on the other side.

All right, guys, listen up, because if you're like everybody else that's seen this video, it's gonna completely change the way you think not only about your putting, but about the entire golf swing in general. That's how important this is. So it seems like I have a toy truck here, but this is really the most important golf training aid that I have in my arsenal because it helps really illustrate ... it helps you understand why you're struggling with your swing and how to really change the whole concept of the way you think about the swing, because what most golfers do is the opposite of what I'm gonna show you.

If you've ever pulled a trailer or tried to back a trailer up into the driveway, you know exactly how finicky these things can be. If you're trying to back it up, if I push from the front of this, you'll notice that the trailer and the truck wants to jackknife right away. But as soon as I pull it straight, notice how the trailer follows in a straight line. As soon as I start backing it up, it wants to rotate really quickly, and I'm not doing anything to cause it to do that; that's just the nature of how this works. But when I pull it, notice how the trailer, even though it's at a 45 degree angle here, as soon as I pull it it instantly aligns itself with the truck. How weird is that? But now why, when I push the truck, does the trailer jackknife like this?

If I take the trailer and move from the trailer side, watch what happens to the truck. It just follows along. But if I push from the trailer, all of a sudden the trailer jackknives. Now what's different here? The difference is the force of movement. And what I mean by that is what's causing this stuff to move?

In this case I am the force of movement and it's where I'm applying my force that causes this trailer to do two completely different things depending on where I am moving the object from. Your golf swing abides by these same laws. All movement is a push or a pull. When you think about it, everything that you're doing in life can be boiled back down to a push or a pull. In a rotational movement like a golf swing, this is still true because we have two different pushing or pulling forces. The pulling force in a golf swing is what we call centripetal force, and the result of that, which is a pushing motion moving out away from the force of movement, is called centrifugal force.

Now when it comes back to our putting stroke, what we have to understand is that what most golfers do is they try and push the putter head through the hitting area and they do the exact same thing in their golf swing, which is what Rotary Swing is completely built around, is this concept of pushing versus pulling. When you take your right side, your dominant side, which most all golfers are right handed playing from the left side of the golf ball, that they use their right side because it's the most coordinated hand in their body. So they don't wanna use the left side cause it's not trained very well, it's not coordinated very well, so they use the right side. But this right side is a pushing force because it's behind the object you're trying to move, just like if I'm the trailer and I'm moving the truck from the trailer, it wants to jackknife because the force of movement is behind the object that I'm moving versus if I am in front of the object that I'm moving, if I pull it stays straight.

Now, in the golf swing, what do you have that you can pull or push with? Well, it's pretty simple. I can only pull with the lead side, or in most people's cases, right handed golfers. I can only pull with the left side of the body and I can only push with the right side of the body during the downswing at impact when it really matters.
So what you're really doing in your golf swing and in your putting stroke, if you're using your right side in a conventual putting stroke to move the putter, you're doing the equivalent of trying to push this trailer down the highway. Not gonna work out real well.

As soon as you start backing up it wants to jackknife because the two centers of gravity of these two objects have to be perfectly in line in order for them to travel in a straight line. As soon as the center of gravity gets moved to one side or the other from the other center of gravity, they wanna rotate around themselves. And so in this case we have the pivot point, which is the trailer hitch, and it wants to rotate around this trailer hitch because the two centers of gravity aren't aligned. When I pull it, by the nature of pulling, these two centers of gravity align themselves automatically, which is part of the nature of it. In the golf swing and in the putting stroke, guess what you need to be doing?

So in this next video I'm gonna show you how you actually start to ingrain this movement and learn how to move your body in this pulling motion to get rid of this jackknife in your golf swing so that you can start having a much more consistent stroke in your putting stroke and in your golf swing.

Hey there. Chuck Quinton and founder of Rotary Swing University here. I hope you enjoyed the preview, the premium video. I wanna show you what you're gonna get once you join Rotary Swing. Our new course for Rotary Swing University is a game changer. It literally walks you through every single aspect of building a perfect golf swing, a powerful and safe golf swing, and all you have to do is literally click "next." You don't have to think. All you gotta do is follow the drills, watch the videos, click "next." Everything is in sequence and walks you through everything you need to know about building a perfect golf swing step by step.

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