If you went to sleep last night with sweet dreams of finding
yourself in Martin Kaymer’s Adidas golf shoes, you’re not the only one. Any man
or woman who’s ever picked up a golf club and hit even a decent shot, knows the
fantasy of having a gallery cheer you to victory at a major championship. And
eight strokes ahead of your nearest competitor? That would make it even
sweeter.
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| Photo from GolfDigest of Martin Kaymer. |
In reality, most of us will never know the hallowed victory
of slipping on the Master’s Jacket or pressing our lips to a U.S. Open Trophy,
but that doesn’t mean that a better, more consistent golf swing is out of
reach. You can take the perfected techniques of a standout player like Martin
Kaymer and apply them to your own golf swing – making you a more competitive
player among your friends and club members.
One particular facet of Kaymer’s swing that is so important
to his performance is “the heave.” The heave, more commonly know as “the takeaway,”
is possibly the most influential movement in the entire golf swing, and it
takes place in the first microseconds of the back swing. This is the moment in
which you set the timing for the pace of your swing, and the only time that you
want to engage muscle tension in your upper body.
In the previous blog about balance, we talked about how the
arms comprise over 10% percent of your body weight; the heave is the moment
when you set that weight into motion around your body. A proper heave (what you
see in players like Kaymer and Rickie Fowler) starts with a strong burst of
energy. This dynamic movement is a combined effort of the muscles in the upper
body and torso, and when done properly, moves the arms and club quickly into
rotation. Once in rotation, the arms and club are carried by the weight of
their momentum, and no longer rely on active upper body muscle movement to stay
in motion. This frees the lower body to take over, moving through the
counter-fall and the rotation of the downswing. Without continued interference
from the upper body, the arms and club head become a sling-shot, maximizing
club-head speed, and ultimately giving you a more commanding golf swing.
Not every professional golfer uses a powerful heave to set
their swing in motion, and there are instructors who will tell you that the
takeaway should be a slow movement. This
approach guarantees that you will have tension in your upper body through the
entire golf swing, and therefore sets you up for countless opportunities to
unintentionally move your swing out of the proper path. While some of these pros have fine-tuned techniques
to counter-act that tension and keep the club in plane, this is a
labor-intensive methodology that keeps the swing from its full potential.
Imagine playing a game on an old-school pinball machine; so
much of the game relies on how well you finesse the ball-launch. If that ball
comes flying off the spring with power and momentum, it will stay in motion for
a long time, and it will respond with ease to the smallest movement of the
flippers. However, if you have a weak ball-launch that barely pushed the ball
into the playing field, you can wear yourself out constantly trying to flip the
ball back into play. The lesson here: it’s easier to begin correctly than
compensate later.
Now that you know about the importance of the heave or the
takeaway, it’s time to put that knowledge into practice. The strength of the
heave needed will depend on the club you’re using, but that is something that
your body will learn to feel. The best way to magnify the feeling of the heave,
and understand its effect on your swing, is to put yourself into drills that
threaten your balance. In Gravity Golf those drills are the One-Footed Drill and the Cross-Footed Drill. In either of these
drills an improper heave will pull you off balance in the direction of your
dominant arm. You will begin to quickly feel how brief the heave needs to be, and how long the tension stays in your arms before the controlling power is taken over by
the lower body.
Below is a video of the Cross-Footed
Drill, and you can find more drills on our YouTube Channel. The heave is explained in further detail in
the Gravity Golf book and videos, and you can always email us at answers@gravitygolf.com. Happy
practicing!
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