Position Number 5

  

The Transition Zone  

The transition occurs at the top of your swing when the club changes directions – where it was moving away from the ball it now stops and begins to arc back toward the ball. It is here that golf’s smallest but most important movement takes place, i.e. the hip switch where pressure is transferred from the back hip to the front hip without actually rotating the hips – basically you simply step to the front leg. If there is one move that distinguishes a good player from a bad one it is this change of pressure applied to the front hip without any premature hip turn.

 2:1

Your goal here is to increase body coil by a lateral bump or shuttle of the hips. Studies of the transition show that to create coil you should rotate your shoulders twice as much as your hips, a ratio known as the X Factor. However the most powerful hitters take advantage of a technique that ratchets up their power factor even more called the Stretch Factor.

The Stretch Factor

Most low handicaps start the bump as the clubhead reaches the end of the backswing arc, but to take advantage of the Stretch Factor like the pros do, you must start your hips moving before you complete your backswing i.e. while the club is still moving up on the backswing arc. It’s just physics not magic but you will think its magic when you see how far the ball goes using the Stretch Factor. It’s the technique used by those tiny bombers on the LPGA Tour – there is one, 4’ 11” (although she claims to be 5’1”) Japanese player, Ai Miyazato that hits it 260 using a driver that looks bigger than she is – such is the power of the stretch factor.

Power is one half of the game [the other is direction] and the transition zone is where the sequencing of power begins. Here is the key concept that escapes the less fortunate observer over-blessed with common sense. You would think that hitting a ball hard is simply a matter of speeding up the club by speeding up your body, but that is only half the story– and you can’t play good golf with only half a story. Not only do you speed up your hips but then they slow down to pass the power on to the shoulders which speed up then slow and so on until at impact the power is dumped into the ball. But we are getting too far ahead of ourselves by talking about impact, a topic that will be reviewed subsequently.  

                                        The X Factor: twice as much shoulder coil as hip coil

                    The Stretch Factor: the coil is now more than 2:1 by virtue of the hip bump.