The hip movement plays a key role in your golf swing. In fact, it is a huge problem for many amateur golfers and also one of the main reasons why they often struggle to get the accuracy and distance they want in their golf shot.
Whether you just start playing this sport or an elite athlete, there is always room for improving this essential area. With that in mind, this guide will show you some simple yet effective golf swing hip turn drills. Read on and practice these drills to have a better golf swing.
The role of a hip return in a golf swing
A correct hip turn is a little known secret to ensure accuracy and distance in a golf swing when you hit the ball. Also, the actual strength (or power) of your shot mostly comes from the middle parts (hips) of the body, including the hips and shoulders. Basically, the hips are responsible for controlling the whole body when it swings through the golf ball.
To have an effective shot, you should rotate your shoulders 90 degrees and your hips 45 degrees. This is the optimal posture to maximize distance and precision in your golf swing. Some golfers who have smaller stature would hit further since they would rotate these parts to a greater degree. The mechanism is quite similar to a spring in which you start to unleash the power of the coil by turning it first.
If you don’t turn your hips correctly during a backswing or downswing, the arms, wrists, and shoulders will be forced to do the hard work. This might lead to many negative effects and reduce your performance of your swing.
With that in mind, below are 4 helpful golf swing hip turn drills that can help you have the correct movement of your hips with the relationship with your swing.
1. The Easy Hip Turn Drill
For this hip turn drill you will not need your golf club. Hold your arms out to your sides parallel with the ground. Now rotate your hips. Now rotate your hips in way that your right arm is about the same angle as your club would be. Your left hand is still straight but angled toward the sky in a straight line with your right arm.Swing your arms rotating your hips keeping this angle. This is all there is to this very effective hip turn drill
2. Basic drill
Place a club on your shoulder and try to hold it your left and right hands. Next, practice swinging it with a hip pivot. Keep in mind it is a pivot rather than a weight shift so you would feel most of the weight on the right leg. This will result in more power in your swing.
While swinging through the ball, your weight should shift to the left leg or forward and the whole body should move forward slightly. This movement of the hips will make it simpler to swing the club through correctly with the aimed target line. Practice this drill daily in your yard and try to focus on the target rather than the ball. Over time, you would improve your accuracy in the golf course.
3. Parallel club
The parallel club is a drill that requires an entire backswing rotation. This will put your body in the right position to establish a complete turn down through the golf ball.
To practice, you first need to set up a golf club on the ground so that it is parallel to your right toe’s interior side. Hold another golf club along the chest area and make sure it is aligned to the shoulders. Have a backswing motion and rotate the torso until the club along the chest region is directly above the right toe and parallel to the other club. Hold this position in a couple of seconds to become familiar with this movement.
4. Belt buckle
This is probably the simplest golf swing hip turn drills in this list. The main goal of a belt buckle drill is to focus on turning your upper part of the body to achieve the needed acceleration during a swing. This posture is where you complete rotating the upper body just before hitting your golf ball and make sure the belt buckle can face the target.
To practice this drill, you just need to focus only on rotating the hips when you are swinging the club. Also, make sure to move the torso and speed up the whole upper body to the ball when hitting with a club. Do this many times during the day will help you perform better hip turns over time.
The bottom line
With these simple golf swing hip turn drills, you will achieve better hip motion and movement to improve your performance in the golf course. You can easily practice them in the back yard or even inside your house.
The key is to focus on how you move your hip and ensure it combines well with other parts to create a perfect golf swing. After only a few weeks, you should see significant improvements in both accuracy and distance of your golf shot.
Check out the many other great golf swing improvement articles on this website: 1 Golf Instruction , 2. Golf Swing Plane. 3 Golf Swing Speed.
