This article is about improving your golf posture.

A bad posture at the address affects your body’s natural balance points and forces you to make compensations throughout the swing. Setting up in a good posture position is incredibly important for creating some consistency around your swing motion.

The problem

Golfers get themselves into many different incorrect positions in the address. These include: 

1. An over-flexing of the knees, leading to pressure back onto the heels, making you want to stand up in the shot, and,

2. A rounding of the upper spine, resulting in a very stiff, bent-over position, making you fall forwards towards your toes.

The solution

Here’s a little routine to follow that can help you adopt a better posture at the address:

1. Stand with your ankles underneath your armpits and your toes flared out. The flaring of the toes is quite important as it’s going to allow you to turn correctly and keep your balance throughout the swing.

2. Take your grip and hold your club parallel to the ground about a hand and thumb distance away (you can measure this distance by putting your hand into a hitch-hiker position from your belt).

3. Lock the knees making sure that your body is dead straight. Have your arms in a natural position and don’t artificially straighten the upper spine.

4. Now hinge from the hips down until the club touches the ground. When it touches the ground you want to feel like you’re going to fall forward.

5. Slightly flex the knees. This is to counterbalance the feeling of falling forward.

[Let your hands dangle off the club. If they return nicely back to that grip you’ll know you’re in a good position, as it means you’re not reaching for the ball (too far away) or you don’t have any room (too close)]. 

And there you have it. In this position you feel powerful, you feel active. You feel like you can make a dynamic move, an athletic move, and create some power. This is very different from how you see a lot of players, where they’ve got over-flexing in the knees or tilting too far down with their chest.

Helpful tip:

Here’s a great reference that you can use to check that you have the correct posture. Stand in front of a full-length mirror and assume the address posture as explained in the steps above. If you can dangle your golf club from the back of your triceps and a straight line runs from the back of your triceps, in front of your knees, and then down through the balls of your feet, that would indicate that your body is within its natural balance. If you were leaning too far forward, the imaginary line from the back of your triceps would fall too far out over your toes. Conversely, if you’re leaning back on your heels then the line from your triceps would be behind your heels.

Hopefully, this little routine will help you adopt a better posture from which to make your backswing, in order to improve the quality of your ball striking. 

Watch the full video here: