#swingpower

With the conclusion of the Fed-Ex Playoffs, Ryder Cup, the leaves falling from the trees and the nights drawing in, it is time to start turning our attention to the off season and making improvements to the single most important piece of equipment in our bag - Our Body!

You may want to make changes to your swing but many times we are restricted by our own body.

Over the winter I will be posting weekly articles focussing on my four key areas of athletic development. Applying specific exercises and methods along with your technical changes will help you hit the ground running in 2017.

This is a great exercise for strengthening the glute max and quadriceps, and will also train the stabilisers of the knee. This will provide a stable platform to turn around when loading your back foot during the back swing, allow you to turn into your hip. This will help create a larger X-Factor angle and more torque, that in will help generate club headspeed during the downswing.

It is important that you focus on the correct movement pattern during the execution of this exercise. Loading your glute and hamstring whilst maintaining a relatively neutral angle at the knee (90 degrees).

Coaching Points

Take a step forward and place your foot in line with your knee hip and shoulder.

Lower your back leg until your knee lightly touches the floor.

Keep your chest and knee parallel to each other.

Explosively drive yourself back to a standing position.

In todays article I’m going to discuss why the lats are so important to the golf swing.

The Lats are the large muscle that make up the vast majority of your mid and lower back. A feature of the lats is that they attach to both the upper (top of the arm) and lower body (lower back, hips and ribs) therefore having a huge affect on your ability to turn during your swing. 

Tight lats can affect your ability to separate the upper and lower body, which will result in a loss of power!

Tight and short lats will limit your amount of shoulder turn (thoracic rotation). Tight lats may also affect your posture (see upper crossed syndrome) during  the swing and can cause a swing fault referred to as reverse spine angle.

Reverse spine angle will make it difficult to initiate your downswing and may lead to the upper body dominating the downswing. This will cause problems with timing, club path a LOSS OF POWER and may eventually lead to lower back pain!

The videos below demonstrate how you can increase the length of your lats that will allow you to separate your upper and lower body, create greater shoulder turn and more power.

Rack Lat Stretch from Tom Bullough on Vimeo.

Band lat stretch from Tom Bullough on Vimeo.

Coaching Points

Try and make yourself as long as possible

Move your hips around (remember your lats attach to them)

Add some rotation; this will engage all the fibres