Push vs. Pull in the Golf Swing: A Critical Concept

The concept of “Push vs. Pull” is central to the Rotary Swing Tour. Sir Isaac Newton established that all movement is fundamentally either a push or a pull. You can visualize this quite simply by recalling the era when golfers actually walked the course using pull carts. If you ever used one, you noticed immediately that it was far easier to keep the cart tracking in a straight line when you let it trail behind you and pulled it. When you tried to push it from behind, you would inevitably develop a little “zig-zag” path as the movement became less stable. But why?

When we examine the definition of a pulling motion in its simplest form, it is the act of moving something toward you — toward center. A push is the exact opposite. If you’re pushing a box across the floor of your living room, you’re effectively moving it away from you, not toward you. The reason the pull cart tracks in a much straighter line when pulled is that the force acting upon it always moves it toward a centralized point — YOU! When you stand behind it and push, the cart could move in any number of directions — a full 360 degrees away from center. When we apply these concepts to the golf swing, some very interesting principles emerge that render old instruction clichés like “get your lead shoulder under your chin” obsolete. We would instead tell the student to pull the trail shoulder behind the head.

First, let’s define one of our core goals in the golf swing — a fundamental of the RST. That is the goal of creating centered rotation around the spine. The spine serves as a perfect axis around which to rotate if you want to stay centered and avoid shifting laterally off the ball. If that’s our objective, then the next logical step is to identify the motion that allows us to achieve this centered rotation.

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In our pull cart example, we discussed pushing and pulling as it pertains to linear motion — walking down the fairway toward your next shot with the pull cart trailing behind you. But the golf swing is rotational by nature, so we need to introduce two more concepts from Newton: centripetal and centrifugal force. By definition, centripetal force is: the force that is necessary to keep an object moving in a curved path and that is directed inward toward the center of rotation (Webster’s Dictionary). The definition for centrifugal force is: the apparent force that is felt by an object moving in a curved path that acts outwardly away from the center of rotation (Webster’s Dictionary). Technically speaking, centrifugal force is a “false force” that is simply a result of centripetal force. The reality is centrifugal force doesn’t exist at all, and no object would continue rotating around a centralized point without centripetal force or gravitational pull. Rather, it would continue in a straight line. However, centripetal force is very real, very powerful, and amazingly efficient.

To fully understand centripetal force, imagine a ball on the end of a string attached to a stick. By moving the stick in a very small circular motion, the ball on the string can be accelerated to tremendous speeds with minimal effort. Your tiny hand movements create centripetal force, always pulling in the opposite direction of the ball to keep it moving at maximum velocity. The bigger your hand movements become, the slower the ball begins to travel and the more effort you must invest to continue accelerating it. As part of these larger movements, it also becomes much more difficult to keep the ball orbiting on a consistent plane. At maximum speed, the string naturally extends to 90 degrees relative to the stick, and the ball travels on a single plane as long as the stick remains centered and moving with those same simple, tight little movements. The looser the movements, the more difficult it becomes to keep the ball “on plane.”

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