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Fix Your Early Extension
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Many golfers struggle with moving into their toes during the golf swing. This can create a strong sense of power in the quads, but typically limits the abilities of the glutes. Most elite ball strikers are more hip and glute dominant in their motion than quad dominant. Set up with the alignment stick just under your toes and take swings ensuring that you finish toward your left heel.
Tags: Impact, Follow Through, Backswing, Drill, Beginner
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The drill is heel toe awareness with an alignment stick. So often times golfers can
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follow a pattern where they're drifting in towards their toes and the simple drill using an
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alignment stick can elevate your awareness of that problem. Many golfers you get
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in towards their toes either have more of kind of a scoop style release, more of a cast pattern
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or they may struggle with shanks because moving in towards your toes can shift the upper body
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in towards the golf ball and so if I start a certain distance away from the golf ball like
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this and just shift in towards my toes if my arms extend and I get into a good release pattern
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that can create some shanks. So often times I'll use an alignment stick just a heighten the awareness
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of where you're pushing through your feet. So to do this basically what you're going to do is
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you're going to put the alignment stick just under the front of the feet. So or just under
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the toes. So the balls on my feet and my arch are still on the ground but you can see that the
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stick is basically under just the front of the biggest joints of the toes. So right
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in through there I can still pick my toes up and keep my weight in my center but it's not
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all the way to the tip of the toe just like that and it's not under the arch. Okay so I get set up with
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it right underneath that tip of the toe and I'm going to allow a little bit of freedom in the
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transition but during the backswing I don't want the weight to go dramatically in towards that
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right foot or the trail foot and then during transition you can get a little bit of pressure into the
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stick but as early as you can or definitely before the arm is about parallel to the ground
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it's going to feel like it starts working more in towards that left heel. So I'm going to
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do if I get into a little bit pressure I'm going to make sure when I get towards contact
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that the toes of the left foot are able to come up off the ground. That's going to actually help
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me stay more centered. Create some room with my ribcage so that my arms will be able to do that
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good white movement and help get the bottom of the swing out in front of the golf ball in a shallow
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position. So once you're comfortable with feeling like you're saying a little bit more centered
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then you can step away and try to recreate that same feeling just with your own awareness.
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Now some of you may be thinking that there are a lot of really good golfers who are up on their
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toes say Alexey Thompson or a Lori Davies or even Justin Thomas. But what you'll typically
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see is that most of those golfers who do get up on their toes well you'll see is when they
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when they land they'll actually land more towards the heel so they'll get into that position
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where basically they're getting more towards the heel side and the outside of the foot.
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So the pressure is working more towards the heel not so much towards the toe.
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They'll never see a really good golfer get in towards their toes and then land and kind of
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stay forward like so. Because they'll impede how well you'll be able to rotate into your
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follow through and it'll make it challenging to have continued body rotation without falling over.
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This counter move in towards the heel helps for basically balancing the pull of the club
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in the direction of the golf ball which is balanced by me pulling away from it which helps
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create a lot of the speed and shallowness down at the bottom of the swing.
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Okay so demoing you've got the stick underneath the front of the toes again just on the
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other side of the kind of the balls of the feet and you're going to try and you can start
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with nine to three's but you're going to make sure that when you finish you can pick up those
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toes that you're not pressing down on that alignment stick. Once you can do it consistently with
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some nine to three's then you can take it up to more of a full swing.
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It can be a little bit tricky kind of dialing in your ball position. So you may want to use a
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key just until so that you can keep the distance and set up a little bit easier.
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Left the club face open just to touch on that so it's good enough for the demo but we'll do
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one more just for my sake.
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There we go.
