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This drill is calibrating spine rotation.
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So this is more of a awareness drill or appropriate
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ception drill that you can do at home to calibrate your spine rotation.
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Because there are times where as a golf instructor,
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I'm going to tell you I want you to rotate.
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And unfortunately your brain is not always going to interpret that as rotation.
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It may interpret that as a secondary movement.
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You may go in the more side bend, you may go into more extension.
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You may have a little bit of sway to it.
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You might not totally just be rotating.
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So we're going to do this one without a club.
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There are two different ways that I like to coach rotation.
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One is you're going to take your arms and place them across your shoulders.
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Kind of like the classic TPI Disassociation Test.
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And then from here I'm going to rotate my upper body and my lower body into a back swing.
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And I'm going to rotate my upper body and my lower body into a downswing.
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You'll see that I have a little bit of kind of natural golf movements in my lower body.
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But my upper body stayed pretty centered as it rotates.
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Many golfers, when I first asked them to rotate,
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what the end up doing is they'll have more of a lateral movement with their upper body while they rotate.
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So it's a blended movement to get this kind of golf rotation around your spine axis.
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So if you have a hard time feeling,
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if you have a hard time feeling rotation,
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then you can walk kind of staying centered.
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If you do it more like this,
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I'm going to show you another drill that I use using the arms.
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So now if I get into my golf posture with my arms kind of pointing out at the golf wall,
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I'm going to use them almost like train tracks.
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And I'm going to reach one arm away or one arm towards the golf wall.
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And I'm going to reach the other arm away.
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So I'm basically going to go just like this.
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Now if I put my arms across my chest,
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you can see that I rotated there.
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Many golfers won't feel the spine rotation when the upper body stays centered like that.
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They'll say, no, I just move my arms.
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I didn't really rotate my spine.
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But you can see clearly from this face on camera angle that I'm rotating my spine,
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a good amount.
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From the down line, if I do that same thing,
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what you'll see is that my chest is kind of opening up and facing the camera just like so.
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So there are two times where this is critical in your golf swing practice.
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One is in the backswing and two is in the downswing.
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Those are the two times where we need to rotate our spine.
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This one pretty much mirrors a drill that we use here for kind of feeling that backswing rotation.
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But many golfers when they try to first start rotating into the backswing,
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they're going to have a little bit more of an upper body shift or going to more of a side bend movement.
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You can see neither of those would really match that pure spine rotation
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where the arms are working on those train tracks.
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The opposite would be or the other side would be in the downswing.
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So now what I'm going to do is I'm going to have a little bit of the Jackson 5 little pressure shift
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where my upper body is getting into kind of that good flex posture.
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And now I'm going to do the same thing.
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I can either rotate my upper body while my hips continue rotating or moving in the direction of the target.
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So kind of like so or I can do the train tracks.
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So I'm going to get into that left side.
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And now I'm going to reach the right arm towards the golf wall and I'm going to pull that left arm away.
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Now if I was to then kind of lock this in place and bring my arms together,
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that's the same thing as rotating my spine correctly.
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Many golfers when they get into the downswing move.
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If it's not calibrated, they'll either go into excessive side bend
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or they'll tend to go into more of an upper body shift.
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So many times when I'll say rotate your upper body,
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you know getting into that left side and then rotate your upper body,
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they will tend to drift the whole center of their upper body forward,
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which can cause angle of attack issues.
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So if you're struggling with feeling pure rotation,
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here are a couple of awareness drills that you can do at home to calibrate more of a rotation of the spine.
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And your goal is to get it so that these two movements,
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whether I'm using my arms to help the rotation or I'm just using my ribcage and my shoulders,
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those two movements should match up.
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It's helpful if you use a mirror or a video tape yourself.
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If you're doing it at home, I recommend doing it in front of a mirror
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so that you can really check and make sure that when you rotate,
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you're doing pure spine rotation.