Transcription
Milo Lines:
Hey, everybody, Milo here along with Henry. And we’ve got a really awesome video for you today. What’s it on, Henry?
Henry Fall:
10 golf swing keys you’ve been told that are actually hurting your game. They are not keys. So they’re not essentials.
Milo Lines:
So these are 10 myths that you probably shouldn’t be trying to do necessarily, maybe, but they’re probably hurting you if you are.
Henry Fall:
Right. So let’s get into it.
Milo Lines:
Sweet. So you’ve got a nice list there that we compiled together today.
Henry Fall:
So number one, and you hear this all the time, especially at just driving ranges for some reason, but it’s keep your head down.
Milo Lines:
Yes.
Henry Fall:
Okay.
Milo Lines:
I get a lot of lady students. This is what I tell them all, “Keep your head down is what your husband tells you when he doesn’t know anything about what actually happened, that went wrong.” That’s his answer for everything, right? You miss hit it. Keep your head down.
Henry Fall:
Keep your head down.
Milo Lines:
Keep your eye on the ball. Not necessarily a fundamental. Some players do it. We discussed this in a video previously. There are definitely some players who keep their head down longer than others, but there have been some pretty darn good ones who are looking over there when they hit that thing.
Henry Fall:
Keep your eye on the ball can be a good one, as long as you associate that the ball is moving with your eyes. If you just keep your eye on the ball there, well, that’s just the same thing as keeping your head down. It’s okay to let your head move and watch the ball come off the face or even have your head move ahead of it, if that matches up for you.
Milo Lines:
And the other one that kind of goes hand in hand with this one is, keep your head still. Most professional golfers and most really good players, let their heads move somewhat. Yeah. They stay relatively still, they’re not trying not to move.
Henry Fall:
I would say in the back swing, I like to have the feeling for my students where they have their eye sort of on the ball versus turning off so much.
Milo Lines:
And I don’t mind if their chin moves a little bit.
Henry Fall:
Yeah. Because it’s staying on a plane.
Milo Lines:
If it stays on a plane, I just don’t want their eyes to move off plane. Because this might actually free you to be able to turn a little farther.
Henry Fall:
Right.
Milo Lines:
Because I can only turn to there if I keep my head here. So my eyes might move a little that way. Not necessarily a fundamental to keep your head on the Ball all the time.
Henry Fall:
Yep. Okay. Let’s go to number two. Keep your lead arm, in our case, right-handed players, left arm straight.
Milo Lines:
Straight.
Henry Fall:
Yeah. So, not true.
Milo Lines:
Not true.
Henry Fall:
You see it with Lee Westwood, Jordan Spieth. Lee Westwood’s impacts like this, where his left arm has quite a bit of bend in it.
Milo Lines:
Yeah. I was just looking at a few gears from different professionals and it’s pretty common to have the exact same amount of bend in the left and the right arm at impact, which is around 20 degrees. So your arms look like this.
Henry Fall:
But not just impact and fall through. How about John Daley at the top of his swing?
Milo Lines:
Yeah. My back swing, my left arm is bent drastically at the top of my back swing.
Henry Fall:
So a lot of you at home are trying to keep the left arm straight, which is creating a lot of tension and taking distance and speed out of your swing.
Milo Lines:
Tension’s a killer. So the left arm does stay relatively straight. And the reason it does is that the left hand is higher up the golf club than the right. So when my right wrist hinges, that moves this end of the club farther away with straightens my arm out, but my arm is very loose. There’s no tension in it. So it definitely straightens some amount, but it’s not pushed straight and locked out.
Henry Fall:
Right.
Milo Lines:
That’s death.
Henry Fall:
Yep. Okay. Number three, have the V’s line up for good grip.
Milo Lines:
So make the V’s both point the same way.
Henry Fall:
So the V is right between our thumb and our pointer finger, on both hands.
Milo Lines:
So that could be true. Could be not true. Some players have them pretty close to lined up. I would say most players probably actually have their left hand stronger than their right. So their left hand, this V might actually be pointing over here somewhere and their right hand V might be pointing up toward their right shoulder. So they don’t have to match, not necessarily.
Henry Fall:
Yep.
Milo Lines:
Okay. We don’t need to go very far on that one.
Henry Fall:
Cool. Keep your lead foot, in our case, our left foot, planted in the golf swing.
Milo Lines:
Well, I was doing a little study on this and looking at the all-time greats, there’s really only one of them who kept their left foot planted.
Henry Fall:
When you say the left foot, we’re talking like left heel?
Milo Lines:
Left heel on the ground.
Henry Fall:
Yeah.
Milo Lines:
So only really one of the all-time greats kept their left heel on the ground. He happens to be really great. And he was really great fairly recently, Tiger. But if you go back through all the next 20, so Jack is still ahead of him on majors, but everybody else who’s on that list with lots of wins, that left heel’s coming up.
Henry Fall:
Yep.
Milo Lines:
All of them. So it’s not necessarily… If all the best ones ever didn’t keep it down, I would say it’s not a fundamental.
Henry Fall:
And then when you look at the fall through and finish, especially modern day players, their left foot doesn’t stay planted there either. You see some of these guys like Jordan Spieth where his left foot is like this after impact.
Milo Lines:
Well, yeah and the guys who hit the farthest, their feet might even both be in the air. The guys who were smashing it, they’re jumping up in the air.
Henry Fall:
Baba.
Milo Lines:
Oh yeah. Justin Thomas.
Henry Fall:
Yep. All right. Let’s go to the next one. Keep your knees flexed.
Milo Lines:
So this locks you up and makes it so you can’t turn in the back swing. So if you try to maintain the same amount of flex all the way back, your hips can’t turn very far. So what we see from the greatest players ever, the trail leg in the back swing is losing some flex, the lead leg is gaining some. And then in the down swing, they gain the flex back and in the fall through, the lead leg loses some flex and the trail leg gains some. It’s symmetrical.
Henry Fall:
Now as always, there are some exceptions. There’s usually at least some extending of this right leg. But you look at like Koepka or Anthony Kim back in the day, they kind of kept the knee flexed, but that’s-
Milo Lines:
They’re from a little different era too though. They’re from the era where we were teaching restrict, restrict, restrict. We’re trying not to let our hips turn and to turn our body as hard as we could. We’ve actually discovered that that’s probably not optimal. We probably should stop that. But they learned how to play that way. You’re probably not going to want to change them. They might gradually change over time as they age. But you won’t probably won’t ever see Anthony Kim.
Henry Fall:
So a little flex that is up. And then in the back swing, the left leg increases flex a little bit and-
Milo Lines:
[crosstalk 00:07:09] The right loses loses. So yeah. And then the opposite on the other side. You gain flex and then decrease flex, increase flux.
Henry Fall:
There’s plenty of other videos on that. We’ve got that all sealed up for you guys. Number… What one are we on?
Milo Lines:
Six.
Henry Fall:
Push off your trail side. Got to get that weight shift, the weight transfer.
Milo Lines:
Now, I will say that there may be a push off the trail side, but it doesn’t happen when people think it does. It happens much later.
Henry Fall:
Very late.
Milo Lines:
Yes. And I would say it’s more of a reaction to the front side, turning around. So like a hitter in baseball, when they plant this front side and they start to put-
Henry Fall:
Position back up.
Milo Lines:
They’re pushing this back this way and it actually, this hip goes around so much that it actually pulls this hip forward. And so your back leg has to push a little bit so you don’t look like this.
Henry Fall:
Yeah. If anything, it might just be your big toe pushing up onto the top. That’s it.
Milo Lines:
Yeah. So you’re not really pushing off of your backside, at least not early, because if you do, you’re out here like this and you got problems.
Henry Fall:
So again, we’ve talked about this before is like a good feeling at home is you come off your left heel, don’t keep your left foot planted, and then plant that left heel. That’s kind of dropping into the left side or re-centering, that’s kind of the feeling versus pushing off the right side.
Milo Lines:
Exactly.
Henry Fall:
So number seven, roll arms over to release the club head.
Milo Lines:
Oh yeah.
Henry Fall:
That’s a common one. Make sure you square that face off.
Milo Lines:
Got to make sure we roll this so we get it squared up enough. Because you keep hitting it over there to the right, so you better roll it more.
Henry Fall:
Now it works for some players. We’ve seen it throughout history.
Milo Lines:
It’s a matchup.
Henry Fall:
But where’s it coming from?
Milo Lines:
Yeah. It’s a matchup that, if there was suboptimal things happening earlier, like the shaft is coming down more steep, face more open and you’re good, you’re going to figure out how to get that on the ball square. Phil Mickelson comes to mind.
Henry Fall:
Vijay Singh was pretty good.
Milo Lines:
Vijay Singh. They’re really good at playing the game. Is it the optimal way to do it? Maybe for them. But I would say that watch what’s happening in modern game. You’re seeing a lot less players with that pattern.
Henry Fall:
Yep. Face more stable.
Milo Lines:
Face is a lot more-
Henry Fall:
[crosstalk 00:09:45] of closure. Something you hear a lot of now.
Milo Lines:
So now the face is working more square to the arc, square to the arc.
Henry Fall:
Wrists working this way.
Milo Lines:
Wrists working more this way. Not nearly as much twist in them. More like a baseball swing. You don’t see baseball players rolling that over. Sure, it might roll over, but it happens over here, right?
Henry Fall:
Yep. All right. Number eight, hit down on the ball. That’s a great one.
Milo Lines:
It happens when the ball’s on the ground-
Henry Fall:
Well, I should say, the first word you hear in that sentence is hit.
Milo Lines:
Yes. So, that causes people to make this kind of a motion to try to get the club down onto the golf ball. Now, in reality, is the club approaching the ball down when the ball’s on the ground? Yes. The hands are actually going up though. So they’re getting to a point later in the arc, so the hands are working up and the club is starting to work down, creating kind of a little flat spot down there at the bottom. To me, it’s kind of a bad word trying to hit down on it. Sure, you’re catching it in the down swing, but really what you’re making is you’re making the club head go in a circle and the apex of the circle is happening just after you hit the ball. You’re not trying to hit down.
Henry Fall:
Easy enough, right?
Milo Lines:
Yeah.
Henry Fall:
Number nine, swing easy and grip it softly.
Milo Lines:
Yeah. So, I like the feeling of low tension in my grip and in my wrist and arms. But in reality, if you measured the pressure that’s in most really good players grip-
Henry Fall:
Well, especially at full speed.
Milo Lines:
At full speed there they’re gripping it fairly tightly, but with subtle wrists and arms, right?
Henry Fall:
Yeah. I would say if anything, the tension is maybe just in the fingers a little bit.
Milo Lines:
And they’ve done some studies on this. Most really good players have very strong grip strength.
Henry Fall:
Well, this is why you’re hear like Lydia Ko has been doing rock climbing. Some of these players are doing rock, so they build up some of that.
Milo Lines:
Get some strength in their hands because the stronger your hands are, what feels like very low grip strength to you, is very secure. Now swing easy-
Henry Fall:
When it’s breezy?
Milo Lines:
Maybe. To keep the spin off the ball, but how many people do you know who are really high level players who don’t hit it very hard?
Henry Fall:
Well, and the thing is too, the easier you swing, and you talked about this in a lesson the other day, I watched you go… On short game, it’s great because it allows you to kind of use some of the bounds. You can let the club head release a little bit sooner, but when you swing really easy, a lot of times that club starts getting past you. So if anything, sometimes keeping the speed up and rotating through the shot, that keeps the face stable and you strike it a little bit better.
Milo Lines:
And most really good players are hitting it pretty darn hard. I know when I’m out playing with driver, I’m generally hitting it, not as hard as I can, but not that far from it. I hit it straighter when I hit it hard and I would say most professionals, if you give them a choice, they’re going to hit the shorter club and they’re going to hit it hard when they’re nervous. They’re not going to try to hit it soft, feather it in there.
Henry Fall:
Yep. We talk a lot about building up or laddering. That’s kind of different where you’re starting to work on something, but once you’ve fine tuned it, speed it up and test it out. Because a lot of times when you speed things up, you can actually take some of the doubt out as well.
Milo Lines:
Oh yeah. The problem most people have when they speed it up, they speed up the wrong stuff. So they try to hit it harder with this. So maybe-
Henry Fall:
They try and hit down.
Milo Lines:
So maybe they are better off trying to hit it easy. But as you learn how to swing better, swinging faster actually creates more stability and you hit it straighter.
Henry Fall:
Yep. All right. Bend from hips and keep back straight for athletic posture. You might even hear, stick your butt out.
Milo Lines:
Like this. The old club down the back deal.
Henry Fall:
Yeah.
Milo Lines:
Yeah. No, thanks. I’ve also looked through all the best players in history and most of them set up kind of rounded off like this. Now we do have some anomalies these days, Adam Scott, maybe Rory McIlroy are a little bit more-
Henry Fall:
Keegan Bradley’s pretty bent over, but bending a little more bent over from the hips, that could be bio-mechanically a good matchup for him. But I don’t see Keegan in there like this either.
Milo Lines:
He’s more like that.
Henry Fall:
Right.
Milo Lines:
He’s round, but he’s pretty bent over. But in general, we want a little flexion in the thoracic spine. We want to have that nice, relaxed posture. We don’t want to have that rigid, flat back, pelvis tilted down too much posture. If you want to early extend, that’s a perfect recipe for it.
Henry Fall:
Okay.
Milo Lines:
Is that all of them?
Henry Fall:
There’s probably 100 more, but we did 10. So I think we’ll stick with that for now. But yeah I think that, look, everyone has these ideas. And these have been sort of said through hundreds of years of golf, keep your head down. That one always comes up and oftentimes it can lead to some issues for us with the golf swing. Some of them could potentially help, but more often than not, I would say, no.
Milo Lines:
More often than not those are not the right things to be putting in somebody’s head.
Henry Fall:
No. Anyways, if you guys liked this video, make sure you subscribe. Hit the bell icon so you get notified when a new video is up and make sure you check out the link, milolinesgolf.com. We’re doing monthly analysis and we have a subscription base for you there with extra content and more one-on-one approach. So make sure you check out that as well. And we’ll see you next time.
