“Start the downswing with your hips.”
Few pieces of golf instruction have been repeated as often. Look at photographs of the world’s best players and the idea seems obvious: while the club is still travelling down towards the ball, the pelvis is already rotating towards the target. By impact, the hips can appear considerably more open than they were at address.
Years ago, I photographed this movement while covering professional golf at the Open de France. I then tried to reproduce it in my own swing. I spoke to teaching professionals, filmed myself and used TrackMan to compare different approaches.
Several years later, advances in golf biomechanics allow us to revisit the question with much better evidence. And the conclusion is more nuanced than the original piece of advice.
Yes, the lower body plays an important role in the downswing. But telling an amateur golfer to “rotate the hips faster” does not necessarily mean that golfer will swing better.
What actually happens in a professional golf swing?
In my original article, I described the downswing as a sequence in which movement and speed are transferred from the hips through the torso and shoulders, then into the arms, hands and finally the club.
That basic idea remains relevant, although modern research suggests we should be careful about presenting it as one universal sequence that every golfer must reproduce.
A 2022 systematic review examined 92 studies dealing with golf-swing kinematics. The proximal-to-distal sequence — broadly speaking, movement progressing from body segments closer to the centre towards those farther away — remains an important model for understanding how golfers generate clubhead speed. However, the researchers also highlighted differences in measurement methods and findings between studies. There is no single, universally agreed sequence that every golfer must reproduce identically.
That distinction matters.
There probably isn’t one perfect hip movement that every amateur should try to copy. Professional golfers themselves display considerable variation.
What is clear, however, is that the pelvis generally does not remain square to the ball until impact.
One study involving 25 PGA Tour players and 25 LPGA Tour players measured average pelvis rotation at impact at approximately 42 degrees open for the men and 52 degrees for the women, with standard deviations of around 12 and 11 degrees respectively.
Those variations are almost as interesting as the averages themselves. Elite golfers tend to arrive at impact with a significantly open pelvis, but they do not all arrive at exactly the same angle.
There is no magic number.
The downswing happens in roughly three-tenths of a second
There is another problem with the apparently simple instruction to “turn your hips”.
The downswing is incredibly fast.
Research into golf-swing kinematics commonly reports downswing durations around 0.3 seconds, depending on the player, club and methodology used.
Think about what that means.
In less time than it takes to consciously say “turn the hips”, the golfer has to coordinate the pelvis and torso, move the arms, hands and club, interact with the ground and deliver the clubface back to the ball.
This helps explain why a technically reasonable instruction can become extremely difficult to implement.
When I filmed my own swing for the original experiment, after more than 20 years of playing golf, I discovered that my pelvis remained much more square at impact than those of the professionals I had photographed. Yet that movement had not prevented me from playing reasonable golf or, at the time, hitting a 7-iron as far as 150 metres.
The interesting question therefore wasn’t whether my body was physically capable of rotating.
It was why consciously trying to rotate did not automatically produce the sequence I was looking for.
The hips don’t actually “stop” at impact
There is one important part of my original article that I would describe differently today.
I wrote that the hips rotated and then effectively “stopped”, allowing the arms and club to accelerate through the ball.
The analogy was useful, but the wording was misleading.
It is more accurate to describe an acceleration and subsequent deceleration of the different body segments. The pelvis can reach peak rotational velocity relatively early and then begin to decelerate while other segments farther along the kinetic chain continue to accelerate.
So what may look like the hips “stopping” is better understood as pelvic deceleration rather than an actual stop.
That is more than a semantic distinction.
A golfer trying deliberately to stop the hips could interpret the original instruction in completely the wrong way. The objective is not to put the brakes on the pelvis. It is to organise a dynamic transfer of movement and speed through the body and eventually into the club.
What if the downswing really starts from the ground?
This is where more recent research makes the discussion particularly interesting.
A 2026 systematic review examined research into ground reaction forces and centre-of-pressure behaviour during the golf swing. It retained 24 studies that met the researchers’ inclusion criteria. Across the literature, several measures involving forces against the ground and centre-of-pressure behaviour have been associated with clubhead speed, although the researchers also emphasised methodological differences between studies.
This gives us a more complete way of thinking about the downswing.
The hips do not simply rotate in empty space.
A golfer interacts with the ground through the feet, produces forces through the legs and changes pressure patterns during the swing. Those interactions contribute to the movement of the rest of the body.
This also explains why simply talking about “weight transfer” can be misleading. Body mass, centre of pressure and ground reaction forces describe related but different phenomena. Modern biomechanical analysis gives us a much richer picture than simply saying that the golfer “moves his weight onto the left foot”.
And that takes me back to one of the exercises I tested in the original article.
What happened when I tried it myself?
American golf instructor Eric Cogorno suggested applying pressure towards the lead foot during the transition. When I discussed the idea with French teaching professional Guillaume Sauzet, he compared it with the traditional concept of reprise d’appui — re-establishing pressure towards the lead side — while drawing my attention more specifically to the role of the left heel for a right-handed golfer.
At the time, my question was simple: would doing this make my hips rotate earlier?
I tested it using TrackMan.
When I applied pressure towards the lead side earlier, I recorded more clubhead speed. But when I looked at the video, I did not see the dramatic change in pelvic rotation that I had expected. My arms still appeared to play a major role in producing the movement.
It would be very easy, years later, to turn those numbers into a dramatic claim: I gained clubhead speed by using my hips.
But that would not be scientifically justified.
A few sets of shots hit by one golfer are not a controlled experiment. Clubhead speed can change because of intent, warm-up, strike quality and many other variables.
What the experiment demonstrated was something more useful.
A better TrackMan number does not prove that you successfully made the biomechanical change you intended to make.
The ball and the radar tell you what happened. They do not necessarily tell you why.
More hip rotation isn’t necessarily better
This is probably the biggest change I would make to my original analysis.
At the time, I wanted more hip rotation because the best golfers appeared to have more hip rotation.
That reasoning contains an obvious trap.
Observing a characteristic in elite players does not automatically mean that deliberately increasing that characteristic will make an amateur better.
An amateur golfer’s problem could be related to timing, balance, mobility, pressure patterns, the relationship between pelvis and torso, or a compensation elsewhere in the swing. For some golfers, aggressively trying to rotate the pelvis earlier could even disrupt an otherwise functional movement.
This is where biomechanics becomes both fascinating and frustrating.
Science is becoming increasingly good at describing what happens during a golf swing. Turning those observations into one universal instruction is much harder.
The 2022 systematic review of golf-swing kinematics found considerable differences between studies and methodologies. Research into ground reaction forces reaches a similarly nuanced conclusion: there are clear relationships between the way golfers interact with the ground and performance, but those relationships do not produce one simple movement pattern that everybody should copy.
The golf swing is a chain, not a collection of isolated positions.
The real issue may be sequencing
This is also where my original article has aged rather well.
When I discussed hip rotation with French teaching professionals Rina Rajao, Guillaume Sauzet and Xavier Bretin, none of them presented hip rotation as the single key to the golf swing.
Xavier Bretin, in particular, encouraged me to create better overall body movement rather than trying simply to activate the pelvis in isolation.
Several years later, that caution still makes sense.
An amateur who pulls the club down predominantly with the arms may not simply need to “turn the hips harder”. The golfer may need to improve the transition between backswing and downswing and better coordinate pressure against the ground, pelvis movement, torso rotation, arms and club.
Modern technology can measure these movements with extraordinary precision.
But measurement has also shown us how complicated the movement actually is.
A three-word instruction can hide an enormous amount of biomechanics.
So, should you start the downswing with your hips?
If “start with the hips” means that an effective golf swing uses the lower body and transfers movement progressively towards the club, then it remains a useful description of an important biomechanical principle.
If it means that every amateur golfer should consciously and aggressively spin the hips from the top of the backswing, the answer becomes much less straightforward.
More rotation is not automatically better rotation. Earlier rotation is not automatically better sequencing. And reproducing a still image of a Tour professional at impact does not mean you have reproduced the movement that allowed that player to arrive there.
That may ultimately be what my original experiment showed, even though I did not yet have all the scientific evidence to explain it.
I understood the instruction. I tried different methods. I measured my shots. I sometimes produced more speed.
But my pelvis did not suddenly start behaving like that of a Tour professional.
And there was nothing particularly surprising about that. A movement repeated thousands of times over many years does not fundamentally change after a few dozen golf balls simply because we now understand the position we would like to achieve.
The advice “start the downswing with your hips” isn’t necessarily wrong. It is incomplete.
The more useful question is not simply which part of the body moves first. It is how a golfer uses the ground and coordinates the pelvis, torso, arms and club during the roughly three-tenths of a second available to return the club to the ball.
That is less spectacular than discovering the “secret of the downswing” in five minutes.
But it is probably much closer to how the golf swing really works.
