Step 1 in Building the Perfect Golf Swing

Step 1: Understand Human Anatomy

Most golf instructors like to tell you that there are no golf swing fundamentals because all top level professional golfers swing the club differently. Therefore, by default, you need to rely on their expertise to teach you how to swing the golf club in a way that is best for YOU. After spending a lot of money on golf lessons and getting no results, you try another instructor and he tells you the same thing, but then teaches your YOUR golf swing in a completely different way. In frustration, you turn to the Golf Channel where you hear every single instructor contradict each other. Which one is right?

To understand the answer, you need to first step back and take a look at the golf swing from 30,000 feet. Get some perspective, be analytical. Define your objectives. Do some fact gathering. What are the requirements of your dream golf swing? Let's start there, with a list of requirements.

Requirements for the Perfect Golf Swing

1. Must be highly consistent and reliable
2. Must hit the ball a PGA Tour pro average distance
3. Must be pain free and extremely low stress on the body
4. Must hit the ball perfectly straight
5. Must feel effortless on every swing

That's a good place to start. Now, let's try and prioritize them. Number 3 should be of the utmost priority. If you're injured, you can't play golf. If you're sore after every round, you're not going to WANT to play golf. So, before we dive into all the mechanics and physics of the golf swing, we need to meet our most important requirement that it must be a pain free golf swing.

To build a pain free golf swing that keeps us safe from injury, we need to understand what creates injury in the golf swing. Typical golf injuries are lead shoulder impingements, low back pain, torn lead hip labrums, tendinitis in the elbow and wrist and thumb injuries to the left hand in right handed golfers. There are many more, but these are some of the most common and each and everyone can be prevented if we understand human anatomy.

Let's start with hip pain that often results in damage to the left hip labrum in right handed golfers. Labrum tears are very painful and often require surgery. Given that golf isn't a contact sport, this can easily be prevented by keeping the hip from moving past neutral joint alignment at impact. In other words, stacking the lead hip socket over the lead ankle at impact is a neutral position for the hip to be in that protects it from injury while providing for full range of motion. You can see the proper impact position for the hip to be in here: Proper impact position for hip in golf swing.

Perhaps the injury that comes to mind first for most golfers when they think of swing related pain is low back pain. This is typically caused by sliding the hips past neutral joint alignment in the downswing by pushing too much off the right foot for right handed golfers. This not only risks damage to the labrum, but causes the upper spine to lean too far away from the target while the lower back has moved toward the target. This compresses the discs in the lumbar spine which leads to pain and discomfort and can even create bulging discs and nerve damage. To avoid this, the golfer needs to ensure that they have their joints stacked in neutral not just at impact, but also in the follow through where numerous injuries to the low back and hip occur. This post on the Stack and Tilt golf swing shows what these positions should and should NOT look like.

Note the position of the Stack and Tilt follow through and how the lumbar spine is in a compressed position.

Understanding the anatomy and the biomechanical load that is placed on the joints, ligaments, muscles and tendons is paramount to having a perfect golf swing that lasts a lifetime. The only golf instruction method that abides by this fundamental is the Rotary Swing Tour method at RotarySwing.com. The RotarySwing Tour, or RST, golf instruction system was designed by this method of first defining the requirements and then working through them, one by one, until the perfect golf swing was born.

So, we know we need an understanding of anatomy to build a safe and injury free golf swing. What's our next requirement? For now, we'll stay on the body stress theme and focus on feeling effortless. Who doesn't love the shots that come hissing off the club face and felt like we barely swung? So, in my next post, I'll discuss how we meet the requirements for building an effortless golf swing.

If you want to improve your swing fast and make it last, get 25 FREE videos at www.RotarySwing.com.