Here’s another great drill to work on indoors during the winter months or rainy days. This is something that a lot of people don’t like to work on and only really gloss over this major problem. The reverse pivot is a huge problem and can’t seriously affect your ability to get the club on the correct swing plane. The reverse pivot is when your secondary spine angle changes and causes your back hip to slide back and the orientation of your spine become the reverse of what it should be. When you look at a really good player, if you put a line on the back side of the player, when the shoulders turn back, the hips stay in place and a bit later, the hips turn. There is no lateral slide to those hips. When we laterally slide, we have to make some compensations to get back to the ball. So how do we fix this?
We are going to learn this one piece at a time. First, we want to be able to feel what the correct motion feels like. So start this without a club and a ball. We are going to bump our hips toward the target and let our head drop back behind the ball. But you still want to be vertical. Then we are going to put our club across our chest. When we turn back away from the target, we should feel some resistance in that rotation. We can feel some pressure between the ball and the heel of your foot. This is really helpful if you can use a mirror to see what’s going on in your body. When we make that turn, we should maintain the integrity of our spine in that secondary spine tilt. So first, let’s make sure you can rotate those shoulders 90 degrees around your spine. Practice the rotation in the mirror for about a week and make sure you can do this without sliding those hips.
Next, we add the primary spine tilt which is the bend at the hips so that we can hit the ball from the ground. When i bend at the hips, I want my hips to be directly between my ankle bones. When I bend forward at the hips, I want to make sure the club is 90 degrees to my spine.
Finally, this is a great drill to do on the Perfect Motion app. I am going to start the app and I’m not going to take a full swing, I am going to cross the club across my chest and go through the swinging motion with the club across my chest. You can use the feedback on the app to see what’s going on in your swing. Position one is position at address, position two is the top of my backswing, and position three is impact position. We are focusing on position two with this drill to make sure we are getting into a nice pivot position.
Fix the reverse pivot and golf will become a lot more fun!