A few days ago, I introduced Mathieu to golf. A genuine beginner. Tall, around 1.85 metres, slim, a former basketball player — certainly not someone unfamiliar with coordinating athletic movements. Yet, faced with a perfectly stationary golf ball, he encountered a problem I had rarely seen to such an extent.
There was nothing particularly alarming in his backswing. His pelvis rotated. Not enormously, but enough for someone picking up a golf club for the first time. By eye, I would estimate perhaps 25 to 30 degrees of rotation away from the target. The problem appeared on the way down. During the downswing, the rotation of his pelvis lost its continuity. Mathieu could turn before reaching the ball and he could turn after the ball. It was precisely around impact that his body temporarily stopped doing what it was otherwise perfectly capable of doing.
His body then found another way to bring the club back towards the ground: his entire upper body dropped. And I am not talking about the few centimetres of vertical movement that can be observed in some elite golfers during transition. In the pictures taken during the session, the movement is much more pronounced: his knees flex further, his torso drops and his head comes down with it. By eye, I estimated the drop at around ten centimetres. That is not a biomechanical measurement, of course, but the movement was large enough to be obvious. Mathieu almost looked as though he was trying to reach down and collect the ball with his body.
The session reminded me of an important principle in golf instruction: the visible fault is not necessarily the problem that should be corrected directly. Simply telling him to “keep your head still” would probably have been a very poor answer.
Why is a stationary ball so difficult to find?
The paradox interested me even more because Mathieu used to play basketball. He learned to run, change direction, jump, coordinate his arms and legs and throw a ball towards a target several metres away, sometimes while moving and with an opponent trying to stop him. His brain already knows how to organise complex athletic movements. Golf should almost appear simpler because nobody moves the ball.
Before the swing even begins, the golfer has established an address position. The length of the club is known and the distance between the body and the ball has already been set. In theory, the system therefore has everything it needs to return the club towards the ground.
But a beginner does not necessarily experience it that way. The ball is tiny, sits close to the ground and is a long way from the eyes. When the player does not trust the geometry established at address, a fairly intuitive response can emerge: if something has to be reached on the ground, move down towards it.
That was what Mathieu was doing. The dramatic lowering of his head was the most obvious symptom, but it was primarily a visible indication that his movement was no longer organised in a way that allowed the club to return naturally to the impact area.
No, moving your head is not the problem
An important distinction needs to be made immediately. I am not an advocate of a golf swing in which the head is artificially held over the ball until the movement is almost finished. Once the downswing is underway, the pelvis has moved through and the club has been delivered through impact, allowing the head to accompany the movement towards the target can help the upper body continue rotating. For some golfers, thinking about the head moving towards the target can even be a simple way to prevent the upper body from becoming trapped behind the ball.
Annika Sörenstam provides a spectacular example. She has explained how her coach Henri Reis had her practise hitting shots while turning her head towards the target before impact to help her move onto her left side. The exercise worked so well that it eventually became part of her normal swing. That alone makes it difficult to defend the universal instruction that a golfer’s head must remain fixed on the ball.
Adam Young has also shown how Tiger Woods, Rory McIlroy and Jordan Spieth can maintain or reduce the height of their heads during parts of the backswing and transition before subsequently pushing upwards. Those movements form part of the way they use forces against the ground.
Mathieu’s movement was different. This was neither his head rotating naturally with his body nor a small, organised vertical change during transition. His knees, pelvis, torso and head were dropping significantly at the very moment his downswing appeared to lose its continuity. That “elevator” movement was what needed to be understood.
Good golfers move too
A 1992 study by Sanders and Owens, published in the International Journal of Sport Biomechanics, provides an interesting perspective. The researchers compared six elite golfers, with handicaps ranging from 0 to 5, with six novices. Each player performed ten swings with a 3-wood. Among other things, the researchers examined the “hub”, the theoretical centre around which the club appears to move.
One of the most interesting findings was that this hub was not stationary in the elite golfers. Good players moved too. Their pattern of movement, however, was considerably more consistent than that of the novices. The radius between the hub and the clubhead also reached its maximum close to impact in the elite group, whereas the novices tended to reach their maximum radius after impact.
The sample was obviously tiny — just twelve golfers — so it would be unreasonable to turn the findings into a universal law of the golf swing. Nevertheless, the study highlights an interesting principle: performing well does not necessarily mean eliminating movement. It means organising and reproducing movement more effectively.
Adam Young uses a particularly effective analogy to explain the same idea. Give a hammer to someone who has never driven a nail. They may stiffen the shoulder, elbow and wrist in an attempt to become more accurate — and still miss the nail. Watch someone who has mastered the task and more joints may be involved, yet all of them are coordinated towards the same outcome. Golf is similar. Reducing the number of moving parts is not necessarily the answer. Those parts need to work together.
When slippers become a teaching tool
Before working more specifically on Mathieu’s pelvis, another detail caught my attention: his shoes. He was wearing extremely soft footwear, closer to slippers, offering virtually no lateral support. For someone already trying to understand how to rotate around his feet and maintain balance, that was hardly insignificant.
So I asked him to take them off. In the photographs from the session, he eventually hits shots in his socks on the practice mat, with his shoes sitting beside him. I had first demonstrated a few movements without shoes myself so that the exercise did not seem particularly strange.
This obviously does not mean golfers should learn the game barefoot. The purpose was simply to remove an unstable shoe for a few minutes and allow him to feel his contact with the ground more directly. Before asking somebody to rotate quickly or powerfully, it helps if they can first feel where their body is.
His pelvis did not really stop — it lost continuity
Looking back at the photographs and video from the session also made me refine my original diagnosis. Saying that “his hips stopped” would be too absolute. Mathieu could rotate during the backswing and was also capable of finishing with his torso clearly facing the target. He was not someone physically incapable of rotating.
The problem appeared between those two positions. As the club travelled back towards the ball, the rotation of his pelvis seemed to lose continuity. At precisely that point, his knees flexed further and his upper body dropped considerably.
From a single practice session and a handful of images, I cannot demonstrate that the loss of continuity in his pelvis directly caused the downward movement. A genuine biomechanical analysis would require considerably more sophisticated equipment. What I could observe was that the two occurred together, and that changing the way Mathieu used his body immediately changed the way he returned towards the ball.
That is what makes the observation interesting. The body finds a solution to the task it has been given. Sometimes that solution works. Sometimes it becomes a compensation that creates another problem.
This was not early extension
It would be tempting to place what Mathieu was doing into one of the most familiar categories in golf instruction: early extension. But that would mean confusing two different movements.
The Titleist Performance Institute defines early extension as forward movement of the pelvis towards the golf ball during the backswing or downswing. According to TPI’s own screening database of more than 90,000 golfers, 67% demonstrate the characteristic, compared with just 1% of a group of more than 100 PGA Tour, European Tour and LPGA players assessed by the organisation. It is important to note that these are TPI’s internal screening figures rather than the results of an independent academic study.
With early extension, the pelvis moves closer to the ball and, among other consequences, the golfer loses space around impact. Mathieu’s dominant movement was different: his body was dropping substantially.
The distinction illustrates one of the difficulties of golf instruction. We see a movement, give it the name of a familiar swing fault and then apply the prescribed cure. Sometimes the body deserves to be observed before it is labelled.
“Everything through the hips”: useful advice, but not a magic formula
For years, when helping beginners, I have placed considerable emphasis on the pelvis: rotate rather than trying to manufacture the entire golf swing with the arms, feel the hips participate in the backswing, then feel them return and continue rotating towards the target. I have often condensed that idea into one deliberately simple phrase: everything through the hips.
I still believe that can be an extremely useful instruction. For someone trying to play golf almost entirely with their hands and arms, discovering the role of the pelvis can change the movement almost immediately.
But Mathieu reminded me that no single instruction contains the whole golf swing. Telling somebody to “turn your hips” does not explain when they should turn, how that movement should blend with the rotation of the torso or how it should coordinate with the arms and club.
Research into attentional focus adds an interesting nuance. In 2007, Gabriele Wulf and Jiang Su observed greater accuracy when golfers used an external focus — directing attention towards the effect of the movement rather than the body itself. More recent research by Jongseong An and Gabriele Wulf on learning a golf pitch also found better results in delayed tests using this type of instruction.
The literature is not completely uniform, however. In 2003, Natalie Perkins-Ceccato, Steve Passmore and Timothy Lee compared golfers with an average handicap of 4 with another group averaging 26. Their results suggested that the more accomplished players benefited more from an external focus, while the less-skilled group performed better with an internal instruction.
A 26-handicap golfer is clearly not a complete beginner like Mathieu, so directly extrapolating those findings to his situation would go too far. The study nevertheless reminds us that skill level may matter and that reducing golf instruction to “external cues good, internal cues bad” would be far too simplistic.
My instruction about the hips was therefore not necessarily wrong. It simply was not sufficient to solve the particular problem Mathieu was experiencing.
Feel it rather than explain it
At that point, I used a much more physical exercise. I held Mathieu’s club and applied resistance while he tried to move the whole system using his body. The purpose was to help him feel how the pelvis and torso could participate in the movement rather than allowing the arms to do everything before throwing the upper body down towards the ground in an attempt to find the ball.
The photographs from the session illustrate the idea quite well: the club almost becomes a physical link between the two of us.
There is an important difference between this and a purely verbal instruction. “Turn your pelvis” requires the golfer to interpret a sentence and somehow manufacture the appropriate sensation. Resistance provides immediate physical information. The golfer can feel whether the body is genuinely contributing to the movement.
The drill is obviously not intended to reproduce the golf swing itself. It simply creates a sensation the player has not yet discovered.
Make the ball disappear before putting it back
A second exercise goes directly to the heart of the problem: temporarily remove the ball from the equation.
Draw a line on the ground, with no ball, and make several swings with an iron while trying to make the club contact the ground just beyond the line, on the target side. There is nothing to hit. The only objective is to swing the club through a defined area and control where it meets the ground.
Then place a ball on the line and keep exactly the same intention. The task has not changed. The club should travel through the same area and contact the ground in the same place. The ball is no longer something the body has to go down and find. It simply happens to be sitting in the path of the club.
For a golfer who collapses towards the ball because they are desperately trying to reach it, changing the intention in this way may be far more effective than adding another collection of instructions about the head, knees, hips and shoulders.
Stop trying to find the ball
For decades, how many golfers have heard the same verdict after a poor shot: “You lifted your head”? Adam Young has pointed out that golfers frequently attribute poor contact to the head when the club’s interaction with the ground tells a different story. In a discussion about impact, he refers to amateurs who strike the ground too early and nevertheless conclude that they must have lifted their heads.
The intuitive diagnosis is not necessarily the mechanical diagnosis.
Mathieu almost provides the opposite paradox. Golfers are normally accused of lifting their heads; he was dropping his dramatically. But I would have made essentially the same mistake had I treated only the symptom and told him to maintain his head at a constant height. His head was primarily a highly visible indicator of what the rest of his body was doing during a fraction of the downswing.
This introduction to golf ultimately reminded me why teaching the game is far more complicated than distributing a collection of ideal positions. Mathieu has obvious physical qualities, an athletic background and enough mobility to make a reasonable backswing and eventually finish facing the target. Yet around impact his body had invented another solution: move down towards the ball.
With all the limitations of their small sample, Sanders and Owens were already suggesting more than three decades ago that elite golfers differed from novices not because the theoretical hub of their swing remained motionless, but partly because its movement was more consistently organised.
For a beginner, therefore, the first major step may not be learning to hit harder or memorising more positions. It may begin with a much simpler idea:
The club does not need to go looking for the ball. It needs to travel through a zone in which the ball has been placed.
The first real improvement may simply be learning to organise the movement well enough that the body no longer feels the need to go down and find it.
Sources
- Sanders, R. & Owens, P. C. (1992), Hub Movement during the Swing of Elite and Novice Golfers, International Journal of Sport Biomechanics, 8(4), 320–330. DOI: 10.1123/ijsb.8.4.320.
Sanders & Owens study - Wulf, G. & Su, J. (2007), An External Focus of Attention Enhances Golf Shot Accuracy in Beginners and Experts, Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport, 78(4), 384–389.
Wulf & Su study - Perkins-Ceccato, N., Passmore, S. R. & Lee, T. D. (2003), Effects of focus of attention depend on golfers’ skill, Journal of Sports Sciences, 21(8), 593–600.
Perkins-Ceccato, Passmore & Lee study - An, J. & Wulf, G. (2024), Golf skill learning: An external focus of attention enhances performance and motivation, Psychology of Sport and Exercise, 70, 102563.
An & Wulf study - Titleist Performance Institute, Early Extension Swing Characteristic. The percentages quoted above are from TPI’s own screening database.
TPI — Early Extension Swing Characteristic - Adam Young, Does your Golf Swing Have Too Many Moving Parts?
Adam Young’s article - Adam Young, Golf, Ground Force, COP and COM.
Adam Young on ground forces, COP and COM - Mark Immelman, Adam Young on His “7 Laws of Good (Golf) Impact”.
Mark Immelman’s interview with Adam Young - Annika Sörenstam, explanation of her work with Henri Reis on turning her head towards the target.
Annika Sörenstam’s explanation