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Using Your Legs In Your Takeaway

When you initiate takeaway, it will be the feet that make the first change. Feeling your feet work with the ground can be key for making your backswing training hold up when you take a live swing. If you find that you can make a great takeaway, but then it falls apart when the ball is there, try integrating your body with your feet.

Tags: Standing Up, Backswing, Drill, Intermediate

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This video is take away through the ground.

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So when you're working on your take away,

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it's very common to get upper body dominant.

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It's very common to get kind of position dominant.

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And then what happens is when you start trying

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to make an actual swing, your brain starts using your body.

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So you want to make sure that when you're training your take away,

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you're connecting it to your power source.

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So looking at the take away path,

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if you're getting the club coming way inside,

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or way outside, the ideal is we're going to try to get

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somewhat balanced or closer to on plane.

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So if I take an alignment stick and just kind of use it as

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a little bit of a visual guide, when I have my take away movement,

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I want to have the club roughly in line with this parallel

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to the target line, right, when I get to the about shaft parallel.

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It's a good sign that I've used good kind of body pivot.

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My shoulder plane has been pretty good.

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I haven't stood up out of my posture and I haven't

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dominated to take away with my arms.

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But what happens is a lot of golfers tend to practice this movement,

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and they kind of do them like this.

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And then what'll happen is they'll start to take the swing,

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and it'll look more like that.

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And they'll say, well, I'm doing these great looking take away moves,

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and then all of a sudden, when I step up to the ball, it doesn't work.

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And what you'll see is that during the take away for proper

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initiation, I'm going to, whether I feel it or not,

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I'm going to push a little bit with my front foot,

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and use my lower body in my core to help swing,

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start the club swinging back.

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So if I'm doing my take away movements and my lower body is doing nothing,

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I would look kind of like so.

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And then if I did that same movement, but now added

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hip rotation, you can see that my take away is now well to the inside.

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So when you're practicing the take away movements,

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you want to make sure that you're connecting what your arms and your hands

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are doing to the lower body.

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So connecting it to that power source.

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Once you're comfortable with doing that,

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then you can go ahead and take reps with some type of feedback,

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whether it's just an alignment stick, or just a position,

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whether you're a foam noodle, something of that sort.

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So in the rest of this video, I'm going to walk you through an example of a golfer

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who's struggled with this so that you can kind of visualize what it might look like

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if that's something that you battle in your own swing.

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OK, so here we have a golfer working on the take away kind of at the beginning of the lesson.

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You'll see he's making these movements, but it appears that all of this focus is

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in what the arms are doing and there's not a whole lot of connection to the lower body.

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So then what happens is when he actually sets up to swing at the golf ball,

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you'll see now his lower body has a lot more activity and so that tends to make the club come inside.

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So here he is after a number of reps working on a take away,

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but now feeling you can see as he's exaggerating the arm movement,

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he's really feeling the connection of his lower body to the movement.

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And so then when he makes that same kind of lower body movement that he made in the early session,

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now it's connected to where the club wants to go and so he's doing a little bit more of a one-piece take away.

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Now the club-based position is more a reflection of what he's specifically working on

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with his game and where he is at his level, but what I really wanted to do to see was how

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integrating the lower body into take away drills can help you when you go from the

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practice station to actually hitting a live ball.

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