5 Fundamentals of How To Make A Golf Swing with Joe Park

none of this sitting in a bar stool. We're basically taking a golf swing that close around our body and the balls on the ground. So what we need to do is to tilt forward from our hips and make the whole swing circle angle down at a forty five so now we can go ahead and hit that. So the best way to work on your posture is making sure that you don't sit like you're in a bar stool. What you want to do is you want to bend from the hips and you want to bend forward until

the club touches the ground. And so now what I've done is I've taken my shoulder plane. I've taken my hip plane, and I've got a much better chance of getting the swing on plane.

You know, if a golf swing is one second, the backswing is three quarters of that, and so the downswing is a quarter of a second. So even the best athletes, doesn't matter what sport you play, you're going to have a difficult time getting from the right side back to the left side. And so weightshift has become a big you know, depends on what kind of camp you're in. I you know, science wise, yes, you need that weight shift.

If you're going to do long drive contests and you're going to be hitting four hundred and fifty yards and you want to win, you're going to be using some of that mass along with velocity in order to get as max distance as you can for one ball. Though you know, in golf you need more than one ball in play, and the distance you certainly don't need as much now on tour and professionals and those guys that are playing for living, without a doubt, there's a certain

distance that they need to hit. And I think amateur golfers as a whole, up to like ten ten handicap golfers, they don't realize that they don't need to hit it as far in order to have a very good game. And you know, with things likes Arcos, who has that all that information, they got over a billion bits of golfers doing things so they know what golfers need to improve on and improve in order to lower their handicap.

And one of the things in there is that for a ten handicap, did you know that you only need to hit the ball what two hundred yards in the fairway and two twenty five in the rough to lose zero strokes to all ten handicap golfers. So when you think about that and I look at the size of the golfers that are on the golf course, I'm like, I think he could hit it two hundred and twenty five yards with a driver in their hand, probably with

a three wood in their hand. The problem is when you stand there and you put all these extra curricular movements mostly to try to get more distance, and then you're sacrificing solid contact and other things that is very beneficial to get the maximum distance and to keep it

in play. So when Tony was a big promonent of the single pivot, he was really staying more on your left side as much as you could so that in the back in the downswing, the weight is kind of transferred over there and now you don't have to shift your weight. And when you think about the golf swing and think about it in a circular motion, and you have at the very bottom of the circle, we have a low point and that's the bottom of the swing art, and so we need to move that bottom of that

swing art in front of the golf ball. And so when we start moving to the right and left, we're constantly moving that swing art and don't even realize what we're doing. We're moving our swing the whole time. So it's much easier to just stay stationary feeling wise where you've got. You know, when you said sixty forty to stay on that side, and then eventually at the top of the golf swing you even felt a little bit

more on that side. Now some people would say, oh my gosh, that's crazy, because you know, it doesn't make a lot of sense, but scientifically it does make sense when you think of the circle right and you're making the golf swing, and let's go back to like the first position in the backswing where the shaft is kind of parallel to the ground, and that part is going to be the farthest, outermost part of the circle. And then from there the circle starts to come back towards

the target. So when we stand at the tarp. Yeah, so we stand there after that position, the club is already starting to go towards the target. And so as the club is going towards the target, the best golfers we know now with technology there are already have started their downsliding before the backswing finishes. And now you can I can explain it to you just from the circle that after P two or you know, shaft parallel, it's starting to go back up and it's going in and

it's going towards the target. So it's staying on plane, but it's also moving and so some of that is going to move you and shift you. And there's where you get the seventy where seventy more, you know, instead of sixty forty, Now you go seventy and you feel more of that on that left side. And now all you have to do is focus on hitting down and compressing that ball because you've already you know, in a sense,

shifted your weight. Now you can delay that longer for of course, if you're trying to hit the ball farther, but as I mentioned, it's unnecessary for a lot of golfers. You can play a lot of very good golf just staying on your left side or feeling like. And that's the other thing, yeah, because you know when we're moving it off to the right, and you know, it's just for that split second and then everything comes back to

the other side. And the reason why is our brain is getting ready for a lot of our intentions that we're trying to do. So for example, when you're like getting ready to really hit a long ball and you wind up and you get ready, your muscles are and your brain's getting ready to put the brakes on and stop your golf swing and get ready for that. And also usually shortens up the swing when people are trying to hit it farther unless they're really loose and they

don't realize that. So our brains are reacting to what we want to do. All we want to do is really understand, you know, obviously the ball flight laws and some of the swing mechanics so that we can repeat the shot over and over again and staying on our left side feeling like, because you will shift a little bit. And if we talk about shifting, you know, we know now with gears and three you know, a lot of high tech equipment, the amount of shift off to the

right is about the size of a golf ball. So but so even if we did right, let's say that we did, that's how much Rory is moving off the ball. Okay, So, and he's hitting it a long ways and he's winding up and the rest of us don't need that. We can play a lot of very good golf by first starting to hit the ball more solid, and by hitting the ball more solid and hitting down on the golf ball, you know, not hanging back and scooping up on it

and getting under it and adding too much law. So there's just way more benefits to staying on your left side than there is to getting onto your right side. And if you think about, you know about weight shift and legs, you know, I'm not going to say that they're not a part of it. It's just they get too much of the of the you know, publicity. When we know that you can hit balls off your knees quite a way. You know, we've seen tiger woods to

long drive people hit the ball a long waist. About seventy five percent of your clubhead speed is going to come from your hands, wrists and forearms. And so if you get too much of that body involved, and you know, and think that the arms come along for the ride, you got another thing coming. If you want to increase your clubhead speed, you know, the simplest way when somebody says I want to get faster clubhead speed, you know

you got to think about you. You're holding the club with your hands, and so in order to get that to go faster, you got to move your hand faster, and to move the hands faster, your arms and then your upper body. So you really got to get those upper body parts moving and then the lower body helps adjust the rest of that and you know, transports the package into the delivery, so it allows your arms and

hands to do some work too. Everybody plays a role, so we just have to understand who plays what role, and the body plays a role, but we've got to get the arms and hands to play a little more, and I think that helps when we stay more on our left side.

the fairway. But to get greater distance, you really do need to work on your body to get that faster club head speed, don't you. You need to increase your muscle mass somewhat, your body mobility or flexibility.

of your hips as a circle. Now that's smaller, and then your shoulders, you know, that's the next size. And so when we come back down on our downswing, all the circles, which circle has the most to travel and that would be the club head and so they need to get going. But you'll never see this on video. So on video, what you're going to see is sequencing.

So you're going to see the lower body starting as I mentioned before, if we look at it from behind the golfer, the golf swing's already going towards the target, towards the top. So a lot of times when we see a video face on, we'll see the golfer, you know, start the down swing from the lower body and then working their way all the way up. What we're not seeing in that from a science or engineering standpoint is

the acceleration rates. So how much faster does the clubhead have to move in order to catch up with you know, the hips and the body as they turn. You know, the body the hips are turning what forty five, you know, forty five degrees, the shoulders ninety a little bit more if you can, and then you know, the club head is going to how much farther. So it's an unfair race when we start the downswing that we start with

the lower body. We start with the you know, turning and spinning that's going to get our hands to come out to end. For the high handicap golfers and for the better golfers, what they do is get stuck. And so what happens is they get trapped as they start too early with the lower body. So what you want to do is get those arms and hands to move as quickly as possible and the rest of the body

will catch you up. It's like running. When you want to run faster, you move your arms faster, and then also your legs are moving faster too, and you don't even realize it. So by moving your arms and hands faster, it picks up the speed of the rest of your body to turn. So we got to look at it, you know, take a step back, look at it from an engineering and science of how it all happens, and then come back and then you can tell me what

you like and what you don't like. But you know, we have to stay with the golf swing with physics and geometry, you know, physics is what's powering the swing, and geometry is the shape of the swing, and so how we stand to the ball and how we make our swing plane is going to have a huge effect on the clubhead speed. Way more over, I got to spin my hips, or I got to turn my body, or that I got to be in the gym. Okay.

You know, even Tony was mentioning how old he was and he was hitting the ball long ways, and he didn't feel like he needed to work on doing much. He could always do it in a presentation, and he's absolutely right. So a lot of this, I understand, is my talk. But my children who I'm training, they are professional golfers today. So if you go on if you go on my Instagram, and you'll see the pictures and the videos of them demonstrating some of my fundamentals that

you know that I've taught them over the years. You know, they're going to be going to Q school this fall, and so both of them, yes, and so we're grad thank you, but you know, we still have to get through that.

for at the highest level. You know. This is for when I'm with with my sons at a golf tournament. You know, we got you know, five ten thousand dollars invested in the tournament. We can't miss this cut. And so there's no you can't be doing a lot of swing thoughts and a lot of ideas. You're going to pack your bags and go. And we've been at this for over twenty years. Trust me when I tell you a lot of the stuff that we're talking about is real world scenarios of what you really can do on

the golf course, even at the highest level. And so my kids are the perfect example. It's like a lot of teachers can talk concepts and ideas and maybe have somebody that they work with and that they've taught. But here, I've worked with my boys from you know, they started golfing at four and all the way up to now. So I've seen the swinging progress. I've watched it at the highest level, and so I know what's going to be the simplest way. And what I just have explained

is what I just basically taught to boys. And if they can do it, being what they only weigh like one hundred and thirty hundred and forty pounds and they can hit the ball three hundred yards. So if they can do that, I know anybody listening can do what the fundamentals that we're about to talk about.

part of all of our teaching. So it doesn't matter if you're a teacher today, all of that had an effect on your teaching. You know, one nugget here or there. We're all sharing that example in order to find the big picture, which is to make the golf swing simpler and not have more ideas and more confusing concepts. So what I did is I just narrowed down basically the five on them that I have worked on with my sons. And these are the same fundamentals that I do in

every one of my golf lessons. So it doesn't matter who comes in. These five fundamentals that we're talking about is grip, posture, backswing, down swing, and impact. And it doesn't matter what concept or belief you have, You're going to have to have all of these five fundamentals in

every golf swing. And so I've just what I've done is I've created a little ebook to show you how to just hold the club, how to take the back swing just a simpler way, and hopefully I can explain that to you today in a simple way so that your listeners can have something to work on.

faster on the downswing, they got to swing harder. Now is there a difference there between faster and harder, because with harder, again my observation, with swinging it harder, you're increasing the tension in your arms and your shoulders, in your body, and the I guess the ultimate goal is to be tension free throughout your swing.

I holding it? It's dow I the lee that swinging my arms faster will get me more clubhead speed and the amount of tension will naturally, you know, happen.

did it in three nights. I mean it's pretty that's pretty fast for me. And you go chapter one the grip to stance and postures, so you know what you talked about, your five fundamentals grip, posture, backswing, down, swinging the follow through. How does your book, your Ebook differ from Ben Hogan's Five Fundamentals.

so he knows what they're suffering as well. Now, the book itself in general is a great book with all the fundamentals. The difference is that he had a problem hooking the ball. And so if you go to ball flight laws, we understand that you know, the face and the club path have a huge influence as well as the clubhead speed obviously, but have a huge influence on

the direction of your ball flights. And Hogan was a hooker of the golf ball, and so what that meant is that he hooked it to the left alive, and so he needed a way to make sure that, according to ball flight laws, that the face wasn't close to his swing or to his swing path. And so he says it in I think in page thirty two, I weakened my grip to the left because I have a hooking problem. And unless you have that problem, you know, that's he forgot to say, unless you have that problem,

don't do this. But he said I had a problem hooking, so I turned it to the left. I made two changes, and he says that in there. So it's not for somebody to find that and see that red alarm. But that's what he did in order to fix his hook. Aside from that, uh, and then his downswing, he worked on really starting his lower body to start the downswing. And so if you think about somebody, somebody that hooks the ball for a better golfer, I talked about the downswing.

When they start with the lower body, they can get stuck. Okay, so they can get underneath. Now he didn't get stuck, but what that does for him is it opened the face up a little bit more and it delayed it. So between that move and that it kind of helped him hit a straighter ball.

the ball, okay. And what happens from that is because maybe they start with the lower body starting to spin the hips or their upper body and keeping the arms up, and that forces it to come come down out to end, and they don't realize that they're actually making that happen. For a better golfer that doesn't do that, they have,

they're not gonna do that. What they're gonna do is they're gonna spin, and their hits are gonna clear, and the right elbow is gonna get stuck right here between the right elbow, and so you can see how much flatter the swing plane gets. Okay, and so from this position you either have you're gonna end up having to roll it and hit a big hook shot or hold the shot and what they call a block out to the right. Okay, So it's not advisable for the high

handicap or the better golfer. Okay, thet either way. From here, you want to try to get your arms and hands to come right back down, back down the plane that you went back up on when you set up at a dress here and hopefully when you set up at a dress that the shaft is sitting in the in the right angle, which should be about forty five degrees to the ground. So if your posture is up like this, or if you stand too far away from the ball, that's going to affect your swing plane. That's going to

affect then the way that you come back down. So the simplest way to work on your down swing is, first of all, get a better grip. Okay. So in what I do is I just have people hang their left arm just by their left side. And when young the left arm just by the left side, you'll see that the thumb wants to curl in more to the right. The thumb does not want to go down the middle.

If you relax it, and if you then take your grip from that position, it'll allow your wrist to hinge and it'll allow your face to be in the proper position up at the top. And so the most common grip that comes in in my lessons is the thumb right down the middle, which you know Hogan did, because that allows a face to be open. But it's not very good for the high handicap. They're coming out to

the end with an open club face. And a lot of times that can be fixed just by getting the grip in what I call a closed face grip instead of an open face grip. Just to have it let your left arm hang and it'll go just to the right side, and then you'll see a couple of knuckles on your left side and the upside down b will point to your right shoulder. Now some people will call

this a strong grip. I call this a natural grip because this is how your joints want to line if you put it down the if you just put it in the middle, it'll want to go right like that and that'll open the face. And so now you've got all this extra work. So the simplest thing is to just start with a grip that'll get the club pace to come back more square and all of us can do this by just hanging the left arm by your left side. Anybody I've done this, you know for a

long time as a teacher. There's nobody that's come to me down the middle. If anybody's down the middle because they're hooking the ball, they're a plus handicap and their problem isn't coming over the top and slicing. Okay, that's a different whole issue, which which we can address too. But I'm talking the ninety percent of golfers who come over the top hit fat and thin shots. If you could get a better grip, and Tony's idea of staying more as well as mine, I say stay more on

your left side. Those two simple things is going to get the face more where your weight transferred. And it's already simplified the golf swing. So getting the grip in the right position with the left hand just letting it hang, and then your right hand, you want to make sure that it gets just behind the shaft to slightly under it,

and you want it more in the fingers. Okay. So often I see the grip where it's in the palm of the hand, and the reason they have in the palm is it feels more comfortable, it feels like you got really like, you know, you could really club somebody with that. But I always say, listen, if you held a baseball in the palm of your hand, how far could you throw that versus if you had it in

the fingers. So if you want to get a lot of clubheadspeed, just start with the right hand, making sure that it's more in the fingers, a little bit more behind the shaft. It will feel like you can't hold the club, and that's because those little muscles need to be trained as well as they need to be strengthened. But the minute that you hit the ball, you don't believe how much more clubhead speed that you're going to get because you can't throw it as fast in the

palm as in the fingers. So then the right hand, you want to make sure that it's in the fingers and don't put that thumb down the middle again, that thumb goes to the left side, and that's going to help you with impact and triggerers and all kinds of other good things. But that also helps you up at the top of the golf swing, support the club in the right position. That thumb being down the middle I find has just hurt so many golf swing and forces the golf swing to come over the top as well.

So just a simple lesson of the left hand in the right hand will allow the club to do the things that it needs to do and the hands to do what it needs to do. And then of course, after we have a good grip, we have to get into the right posture.

called hot dog in a bun. And you also provided a secret tip with the right hand. If you didn't cover those already, please share that with us.

would be the bun. And so this is what I get for the junior kids when we do our programs, we say hot dog and a bun, and they never forget to cover that thumb up with that right hand, which is going to be very big in the golf swing as we make our transition and so forth.

And the reason why is in the golf swing, when we take the back swing, we want to get this club to stay on plane. And in order to stay on plane, it's a very heavy club. And so the more that you can get your right hand on the club, the better control you have to take this club up and in get it on a better swing plane. And so I don't mind that. As matter of fact, I did you know that I mentioned earlier about one of my students. He's off playing college with a ten finger grip.

So it does work. It just it's not very popular with a lot of people, but I love it for golfers to start high handicap golfers. It gets you better control of the right arm. And that is so important in the golf swing is the right arm, and the right arm controls the whole swing plane as you take

it back and fold. The swing plane needs to be going back, it needs to be going up, and it needs to be going in, and your right arm is the magic of the right arm is taking it back up and in just by folding your right arm, and when you're folding your right arm, you can get on the perfect swingplane. And then on the downswing you just go ahead and unfold your arm, and that's what provides that downswing. Now, what happens is if you start an

unwined too quickly, you can unfold. And if you're not unfolding, that's like I can't unwine my throat. And that's why you want to go ahead and just think about folding it up there and unfolding and getting those arms and hands to come back down and out towards the ball, and that's how you'll get your increased club headspe But the ten finger grip works and it's great for a lot of beginners. So I'm a big fan of it.

Can you explain what happens if you are too far from the ball or even too close, what's the impact.

We're not getting into a posture to get comfortable. We're not getting into a posture to have some and tackle us. So there's none of this sitting in a bar stool. We're basically taking a golf swing that close around our body and the balls on the ground. So what we need to do is to tilt forward from our hips and make the whole swing circle angle down at a forty five so now we can go ahead and hit that. So the best way to work on your posture is making sure that you don't sit like you're in a

bar stool. What you want to do is you want to bend from the hips, and you want to bend forward until the club touches the ground. And so now what I've done is I've taken my shoulder plane, I've taken my hip plane, and I've put I've got a much better chance of getting the swing on plane. A lot of golfers are working on early extension and trying to fix that. Next from the hips, not tilting into

the correct posture. When the hips don't tilt and they stay level, they're just going to slide around, and there's where you're going to end up hitting behind the golf ball. So the best way to get in the perfect posture is again, I'm getting your grip, hanging it out there. Then get the shaft to be just parallel to the ground and standing straight up, and then just bow down, bending from the hips until the club touches the ground. And you'll see how much more over the golf ball

you're going to feel instead of sitting. And if you want to know how to do that, just find a wall, get to a wall, and then just go ahead and bend forward. I'm trying to get away from the wall. So often what happens to golfers is they just sit down and they put their rear too far back, and what ends up pushing all of the mass and the swing into a wrong position, which is going to force you to stand up, early, extension, all kinds of other things. So it's not going to feel great getting into a

golf posture. It shouldn't feel natural. There's nothing natural about that. We're going to work on that until you get that, and just going forward, you'll feel how much more bent Now we can hit down and compress the ball instead of just sitting down. But we just sit Now our backswing gets too flat heard and now we've got to come over the top, and some people are going to skip that and they're just going to pick the club

up and then come back down. All of that came from the inability to pivot, and that pivot comes from posture. And so what we want to do is bend forward and then walk into the golf ball. And how far our arms should be is they should be just hanging under the shoulder someone. Now they're not going to be you know, they're going to be a little bit here or there, just depending on if you've got a driver or if you're standing closer to the ball with a wedge.

But for the most part, they're going to be hanging underneath your shoulders. If you have to reach out for the golf ball, more than likely you're going to yank the club underneath the plane and come back over the top as well. So work on your posture and that's the first step to getting a good swing plane to get up on top.

to get those things buttoned up now. To put it all together, I have a special drill in there that I put and allows the golfers to put all of the things that I just talked about together, and within three swings, I promise you they fix their over the top and they learn how to swing from into out. It's too simple, it's too easy. The book is like you'll probably if you read it, you'll probably put it down.

But if you take the time and you try it, these are the same principles that my kids are hitting with. So they're not ideas. And unless you can hit better than them, we want to try it. And they are only one thirty to one and wait, you know, under six feet and hit the ball three hundred yards. So the point and they're very well, the young and supple, of course, but I'm not that's not the real reason. The real reason is physics and science. You know they're

utilizing taking advantage of all of that. But the extra in there will be a great way to fix you. So if you get the book, you're going to I guarantee to fix your slice.

needed was a wedge and putter. So I designed that along with my father in law, and obviously it was a family project. But that and then we had the driving range and the driving range we were open year round.

biggest accomplishment is a year round. And then I put in a building with infrared heat so that you could just be in a light sweatshirt and see the full length of your shot dead winner awesome. And then of course we built I built the golf course, and so that to me is probably my biggest highlight. And of course my boys watching them.