Why do golfers wear spikes? If you said it’s to keep your feet from slipping, as most students in our golf lessons said, you’d be right. You can’t hit a ball with authority or accuracy without solid footing. The spikes help your feet grip the ground, assuring good footing when hitting the ball.
This observation ignores a key point about the ground itself—one even scratch golfers sometimes forget. The ground is an integral part of your golf swing—a point we try to drive home to students in our golf instruction sessions. In fact, the ground is the swing’s foundation—a stable platform from which to drive a ball with power, accuracy, and consistency.
But if you’re like most golfers, you’ve probably never thought about the ground’s role in your swing. Nevertheless, it has a major impact on your swing and your ballstriking. Put another way, great golf swings work from the bottom up—not from the top down. The trick is to learn how to leverage the ground to add power and improve consistency.
Below are three golf tips to help you leverage the ground:
1. Load Your Back Leg
One key to leveraging the ground is to load your weight onto the inner side of your back leg during the backswing. If you do it correctly, it should feel like your back foot is pressing into the ground when at the top of the swing. You should be able to feel the resistance.
Don’t lift the weight off your leg as you start down, as students in our golf lessons often do. Instead, shift it to your front leg and plug your front foot into the ground. Keep the leg firm as you move through your downswing.
2. Drive The Back Foot Into The Turf
Another key to leveraging the ground is to drive your back foot into the turf as you start down. This enables you to engage your lower body and push off the ground with your back foot. You should feel as if your body is driving down and into your front foot as you execute your downswing.
This move is similar to stepping forward to throw a ball. If you throw a ball using only your upper body, you can’t get much on the throw. But if you get your lower body engaged by stepping forward, you’ll get a lot more on the ball. To ingrain the proper feeling, drive your back knee toward the target as you swing.
3. Minimize Foot Movement
If you’re like most golfers your feet move quite a bit during your swing. You need to minimize all unnecessary foot movement when swinging. To do that, place more weight on the heel and balls of your feet at address.
Then shift your weight toward the heel and ball of your back foot as you swing back. And let your weight move to the ball of your front foot as you swing down and through. Keep your weight off your toes. They’re the weakest and most unstable part of your feet.
Great golf swings start from the ground up—not the top down. That’s because the ground is an integral part of your swing. It serves as the stable platform from which you can launch powerful shots with pinpoint accuracy.
But this can only happen if you know how to leverage the ground when swinging. Leveraging the ground boosts ballstriking. And good ball striking, as we tell students in our golf lessons, helps chop strokes off your golf handicap.