The swing, position by position
What moves first in the golf transition
By the end you will know which frames to look at in your down-the-line video, and why the one measured difference between skilled and less skilled golfers showed up after the change of direction.
The frame where two things move at once
Scrub your down-the-line video to the frame where the clubhead stops going back. Look at your belt buckle there, then in the frame before it. Coaches who teach the transition say the buckle has already started turning toward the target while the clubhead is still travelling away from it.
Whether your phone can show you that depends on the frame rate. Cheetham recommends at least 120 frames per second for measuring a swing from video, because at 100 mph the clubhead covers about five feet between frames at 30. On a 30fps clip the two frames either side of the top may not settle it.
That overlap is the transition. It is not a position you can pose for. It is two moves sharing a frame or two.
The number that separated the good players
19% skilled, 13% less skilledIncrease in shoulder-to-hip separation at the start of the downswing
The golf biomechanist Phil Cheetham measured the gap between shoulder turn and hip turn in skilled and less skilled golfers, at the top and again just after the downswing started. At the top the two groups were not significantly different. That gap is called X-factor and has its own guide.
After the change of direction, the skilled group had increased that gap by 19 percent against 13 percent for the less skilled, and that difference was significant. What separated the two groups was in the change of direction, not in the position they reached.
Hear it
Three clicks: takeaway, top, impact. Start at the tour beat and move to whichever one you can actually swing to.
Seven to nine frames, and that is all
7 to 9 framesTour downswing at 30fps
A tour downswing runs 233 to 296 milliseconds in Cheetham's TPI ranges. At 30 frames per second that is seven to nine frames from the top to the ball. The overlap you are hunting sits at the front of those.
Two things to check in the frames you do have. The trail elbow should be dropping in front of the trail hip while the shaft still points behind you. The lead hip should be moving toward the target rather than up. If the shoulders open first instead, you are looking at the over-the-top move, which has its own guide.
The first move is pressure, and the cue is the hard part
Coaches using pressure mats, the boards that read how hard each foot presses into the ground, describe pressure moving toward the lead foot before the club reaches the top. Nick Foy of Foy Golf Academy puts it as a shift you feel inside the feet before anything shows in the hips. Swing Catalyst adds that pressure and body mass are separate measurements and do not have to move together: a golfer pushing down through the trail foot can read heavy on that foot while their mass already favours the lead side.
The order is measured. The instruction is not. Told to start with the hips, an amateur can end up sliding them or pushing them toward the ball, which is early extension and has a guide of its own.
Foy's pump drill is the common one. Get to the top, start down and stop when the hands reach waist height, do that two or three times, then hit the ball. His step drill is simpler. Make your backswing, then step toward the target as it finishes.
Questions
- Should I feel my hips start the downswing?
- Some players feel it, many do not. Chasing the feeling often turns into sliding the hips or pushing them toward the ball. Holding the arms back at the start of the downswing is the safer thing to work on.
- Does the transition start in the feet or the hips?
- Coaches who measure it describe pressure moving toward the lead foot first, before the hips show anything on video. Foy describes it as something you feel inside the feet. Pressure and where your body mass sits are separate measurements, so a video does not show you either one directly.
Sources
Every number on this page comes from one of these.