Hi, I’m Rick Sessinghaus, PGA coach and coach for Collin Morikawa.
Hitting the ball in the center has a lot to do with can you sustain your posture throughout the motion.
I know a lot of you certainly would work on having proper posture at setup, having a straight spine, getting in an athletic position, and that’s great. However, I see so many people where all that hard work goes to waste when they get back to the ball.
They change postures which now means they either have to overuse their hands or they’re just not going to hit it on the center of the face anymore. So the visual on this again, is if I have this posture through my spine and I rotate and I rotate around the spine without any up and down because on this side, it looks OK, but you can’t tell that I’m moving further and further away from it, probably going to toe it.
So one of the simplest ways to kind of check this is actually just with a chair, and what we’re actually looking at is not necessarily focusing on your head, but more of kind of the pelvis and the
hip area.
If this can stay solid, the head will tend to stay solid also, and I can do some practice swings where my right hip is into the chair, my left hip is into the chair, right hip, left hip.
The issue becomes usually on the downswing. Both hips get away from it. And now we have lost posture. When you feel like you could do it without a ball. Certainly start with some half swings and get right hip, left hip.
And notice that I’m still staying in the same posture through the hitting area. As you get more confidence with that, we certainly can go to fuller swings. So the concept here, I’m in good posture. I’m going to stay in that posture. Right hip, left hip, and I’m staying in that posture.
It’s going to take a little bit of work, take a little bit of a stronger core. But when you do it, you’re going to start to become much more of a consistent ball striker. To add even more consistency, remember to practice your golf mental game approach regularly.