Hey Performance Golfers, Matt Walter here at the wonderful Vanderbilt Legends Club, and we’re going to drop some knowledge on you today, and we’re going to do a flamingo drill to get you in the right place in the downswing. Flamingo drill is a great drill if you have an issue with upper body tilting too much side to side or if you struggle with balance.

It’s a great way to, one, learn how you can best create speed, because depending on which leg you stand on, you can learn how to generate a little bit more club head speed with better balance. Some players are better at it with their lead foot in front, and some players are better with their back foot in front. It just kind of depends on who you are as a golfer, and so you’re going to have to dabble with that a little bit on your own. But, for today’s purposes, I’m going to show you how to do the lead leg and I’ll follow up with a couple hits on the trail leg, and you can also do some with your feet together. It’s not a flamingo, it’s more like a post. But, the point of this drill is, I see a lot of players who maybe have too much lateral slide in the downswing. Instead of generating enough rotational velocity, they take and do a lot of lateral motion. And so, once you create a lot of that lateral motion, your pelvis slips out in front of your torso, and you can fall backwards behind the shot.

The issue with this is, it creates a lot of inconsistency in the strike at the bottom, leading to tons of chunks and push-hooks, and it makes it really difficult to create a lot of snapping force with your lower body to create club head speed.

So, effectively, this drill can be done two different ways. You want to put the ball right in line with your toe and stand with your lead foot in front, your right foot barely touching the top of the ground, so you’re on the tip of your tiptoes, and your knees are touching together. So, we don’t want out and we don’t want up in the way. We don’t want way back. Have them touching. Let that toe rest gently. You might want to stand just a little further away if you need to. So, you don’t want to crowd up on the ball, and try and swing up, and have all those issues there. So, we get set up on our lead foot, on our tiptoe, and all we’re going to try and do is make a golf-sized swing that we feel like we can do in balance.

As soon as you start to swing the club around your body, you’re going to feel if you have too much slip and slide in your golf swing.

As you gain balance, push your speed limit. So, what I tell a lot of my players is, your balance dictates the speed limit of your golf swing. You can swing a golf club, in my opinion, as fast as you want, provided you have great balance. So, that’s where we want to take this drill to. Start where you can have a good balanced position through the swing, increase size of swing, increase speed of swing until you can start making some really aggressive moves at it, and then you’ll know you’re a master of your golf swing. If you’ve liked this video, please subscribe, leave a comment. I’ll get up there and answer it for you, answer any question you’ve got, see how I can help you on the YouTube page, and we’ll get you some more videos here, coming shortly. So, enjoy. Practice hard.