If you want to hit solid golf shots on a consistent basis, you need to have rock-solid fundamentals. If you can’t get the simple pre-shot stuff right, you’ll have no hope of nailing a complex movement like the golf swing.
One of these pre-shot fundamentals that you need to focus on is your posture, i.e. the way you are standing when you address the ball.
GOLF Top 100 Teacher Tim Cooke sees errors in posture from his students every day, and it has a profound impact on their abilities to make a consistent swing. One of the most common errors he sees is the trail hip bumped away from the target, which leads to all sorts of issues in the full swing.
In an effort to correct these setup mistakes, Cooke uses a simple exercise where he has his students jump up and land on an alignment stick that is laid out on the ground pointing down their target line.
“When I land on the alignment rod, I want to land on the tripod of my feet,” Cooke says. “The big toe, the ball of the foot and the heel, I want them all grounded at setup so we can add some speed in the golf swing.”
If you want to try this for yourself, lay an alignment stick on the ground pointing down your target line and stand on top of it so it bisects the arch of your foot, favoring the front side of it. Now, just jump straight up in the air as if you are testing your vertical jump, and try to stick the landing back on the alignment stick.
“When you land, you should feel weight on the tripod of your feet,” Cooke says. “And I can feel my hips and my pelvis sit perfectly between my feet at address.”
If you’re someone who struggles to find the correct posture at address, give this exercise a try. By incorporating a little bit of athleticism into your setup, you will put yourself in a much better position to make a consistent strike on the ball.
