Keeping your Balance in the Golf Swing
How to Fix your Off-Balance Swing Problems
Maintaining balance in your golf swing is fundamentally important to the quality of your golf shots. And the way you keep – or fail to keep your balance – can help tell the difference between a beginner, average, or a professional golfer. Indeed, you’ll notice that Tour Pros are always perfectly balanced as they proceed with their golf swings, even at the break neck speed that those swings occur.
For amateur golfers, losing your balance can often happen during power swings, where you need the ball to carry over a long distance. And that can oftentimes happen with the longest club in your bag, the driver, where the golfer will try to swing very hard at the ball in order to try to gain some extra distance from the teeing ground.
While an off-balance swing is often visible at the end of the follow through, where the golfer might lose his footing, it usually means that the loss of balance began earlier in the swing. It’s just that the golfer was able to stay on his feet through impact.
The key to checking whether you are keeping your balance and in order to fix any related issues is to practice making slow motion swings.
– Get into a good setup position to begin with, with your weight split 50/50 between your and left and right feet and inside your feet (neither towards your heels nor your toes). A good way to tell if you are correctly positioned and in balance is to tap (raise) your toes or heels in succession.
– During the backswing, your weight should move towards the back foot and it is normal if you find it more difficult to raise your back heel when you reach the top of the swing position.
– During the downswing, your weight will move back forward as you move towards impact with the ball. At that point, your weight will be firmly on your front foot and your right heel will have started rising from the ground.
– Finally, at the end of the follow through, your weight should reside almost completely on your front foot. You should be able to hold that position for as long as required.
Practice with these slow motion swings and notice how your weight moves around your body as you progress from one swing sequence to the next. Make sure to remain perfectly in balance as you do and if you can, you should be able to translate that balance into your full speed swings.
