Gravity Golf Lesson: How's Your Golf Posture?

How’s Your Posture – Is It Helping or Hurting Your Game?

by David Lee

If you were to ask the question – what is the "ideal" posture for my body in the golf swing – what would you expect for an answer? Suppose you were looking at a human skeleton in an anatomy lab and trying to imagine all the potential angles for the various bones in a golf swing. How would you describe to someone the perfect way to position each of those bones? It wouldn’t be easy, would it?

For a golf swing to function in an ideal manner, mass rotation moving into impact should be over one axis only (left leg in a right handed player). By so doing, all available body mass below the head goes against the ball - like closing a single hinge door. If you have weight on both legs as you turn into impact, the body moves like a revolving door, where part of your weight goes against the ball and part of it is moving away from the ball and target.

With a driver, when the posture is correct at address, the feet will be close to shoulder width apart, with a slight bend at the knees. The weight will be borne on the hips and hamstrings, with the knees being as much over the heels as possible. Coming into impact, the body’s weight should be pivoting over the left heel only. If you study the construction of your legs and feet, it is easy to see that the feet are attached in an "L" shape to the legs. If you pivot over the "ball" of the left foot coming into impact, the left heel will be off the ground and the entire leg (or axis) will be moving away from the target. This causes movement in the swing-plane and potential loss of power in the shot.

Posture is one of the most critical elements in the recipe for making a technically correct swing. If you’ll study the Gravity golf "cross-footed drills" and the "heel-to-heel" transfer drills, they will teach you perfect posture for the address position and for the swing itself.

Cross-Footed Drill