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Keys To Transition
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- Weight into left heel
- left shoulder down
- chest down
- right elbow in
- wrists set
This is one of the most important moves in the golf swing and one of the biggest differentiations between elite golfers and high handicappers. The swinging of the club has a lot of similar transition moves to the throw. So, transition is like stepping into the pitch. First, you want to shift your weight by pushing off the trail foot. It is important that the trail foot pushes off the inside of the foot (toward the target) vs pushing toward the golf ball. When the weight shifts, you are going to let your chest stay down. At the same time you are going to bring the club head close to you. This gives the feeling of your arms falling and the shape of the swing getting narrow before the release.
As far as the details go, you want the forearms rotate to flatten the plane while the body stays over the ball. A big problem for novice golfers is standing up with the body, and steepening the arms. We want to do the opposite, flatten the arms and steepen the body.
Remember, the general idea is just to step into the throw, but the details of how you do it can be the difference between success and struggle.
Playlists: Keys To Transition
Tags: Concept
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In this concept video, we're going to discuss the transition.
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So the transition is basically after you finish setting the club as you start down.
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I don't like to really teach a specific top of the backswing position
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because the movement between setting the club and starting down is kind of timing dependent.
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But when you go through transition, there's three key things that I want you to pay attention to.
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The first key is I want you to get your weight into your left foot and towards the left heel as soon as you can.
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One great image that a lot of people have used and I've had drill about is
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if you had scales under your feet, you're going to try and put as much weight into that left foot as you can as early as you can.
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So if we look at this pelvis sway graph and we look at the lateral movement in towards the target,
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what ends up happening is the majority of the movement,
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laterally, happens during transition, which is before the left arm is below your waist.
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I mean, most of this lateral movement is going to happen there.
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That's that step into the throw before I throw with my arm.
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So I go to the top of the swing and I get into that left side.
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Now going with that during the transition, you want your left side to actually continue side bending.
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Now it looks funny because your spine is twisted. When you go to the top of the swing,
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my left shoulder is low. As I go into this transition movement, which is just right there,
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it's a small movement that left shoulder continues bending down, which allows me to put
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more pressure into that left leg. This prepares my body for the dynamics of the release,
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which we'll get into in the next section. The last piece is, what do I do with my arms?
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Well, during the back swing, my arms were rotating and getting kind of over here.
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If you remember, I'm going to bend my right arm externally, rotate and let my wrist start to
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kind of extend. Well, you're basically going to let your arms fall down into what we call
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delivery position. So it's basically, there's top of the back swing, there's delivery position.
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There's top of the back swing, delivery position. Top, delivery position. Most of the arm movement
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is going to be dropping in towards your side, and this is where a lot of players have come up with
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the feeling of my arms falling because what a lot of amateurs will want to do is from the top of
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the swing start straightening those arms too soon, which would get you more in this position as
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opposed to that position. So three major keys for transition, they sound simple, but you'll notice
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we have a lot of drills for them because they're one of the common places where swings really
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start to break down. It's when I'm starting to apply force in the direction of the target,
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it happens in a flash. So you want to make sure that you train it and don't just try and think it,
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but the three things we're going to focus on are getting that weight into that left leg,
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getting that left shoulder down, and letting those arms drop and get kind of narrow.
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That will prepare us for what we want to do during the delivery position, or sorry, during the
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release from delivery position, which is what we get into in the next section.
