Add more power to your golf swing by practicing this key move

Hitting the ball longer is all about learning how to swing the club efficiently. You can be beefy as they come, but if you don’t know how to effectively swing the club, you’ll always be leaving distance on the table.

One such way to become more efficient is by using the ground to your advantage. If you watch the longest hitters in the game, you’ll notice that they all do a tremendous job of pushing up off the ground during the downswing. This phenomenon — commonly called ground reaction forces — is essential to learn for anyone looking to bomb it off the tee.

The problem for many recreational golfers is that they don’t know how to create this force effectively. Lucky for you, the folks at the Titleist Performance Institute have a great series of exercises you can do to ingrain this move. Check it out below.

How to practice ground reaction forces

When you are trying to jump vertically, you’ll squat down to start and then thrust your arms up as you explode off the ground. But when you do this jump in the golf swing, your arms work in the opposite direction. When you get to the top of the swing, you squat to start transition while simultaneously dropping your arms in transition. It’s a counterintuitive move to what you feel when jumping otherwise.

“They don’t go down and up,” says TPI co-founder Dr. Greg Rose. “As they go down, their arms go up, and as they jump their arms go down. I call it the golf vertical jump.”

To teach yourself the correct feeling of the “golf vertical jump,” Rose recommends breaking it down into a few key exercises.

For the first one, you want to start in a standing position and then squat in preparation to jump. As you do this, raise your arms above your head. Then, once you jump, throw your arms down toward the ground.

When you get the hang of this move, get into your golf posture and practice a similar move. Take your arms to the top of the swing and squat, then as you jump up pull your arms down like you would in the swing.

“As you jump, I want you to feel like you’re throwing your arms,” Rose says.

Now, it’s time to put it all together. Take a club and place is diagonally along your feet line with your trail foot behind the shaft and your lead foot in front of it. Once again make a swing to the top, but this time as you jump when beginning the downswing, think about “surfing” along the diagonal line you’ve draw with the shaft.

“As I jump, I’m going to jump down that line,”Rose says.

By combining the jump and surf motions at the same time, you’ll teach yourself to feel not only the vertical forces but also the rotational ones. And if you combine those, you’ll be well on your way to an efficient — and powerful — swing. Give it a shot.

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