Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Center of Balance.


Do you pay attention to your center of balance when you are Golfing? Are you even aware of your center of balance?

About a million years ago, back when I was doing college theater, I had to do some physical theater. That's the artsy way of saying I had to run and jump and prance and not break my neck in the process. Being that I was not naturally coordinated or talented in that respect, this proved to be a major challenge. The director showed me an exercise to find my center of balance.

It goes like this:
Stand with your feet about shoulder width apart, sway left to right until it feels like the weight is exactly distributed between the two feet. Imagine a sheet coming down from the sky through your head and body to the point on the ground exactly halfway between your feet, dividing your body in two vertical halves (left and right). Now sway back and forth until you feel the weight evenly distributed between your toes and heels. If you are standing perfectly straight, with reasonably good posture, your shoulders should be over your hips. Imagine that there's a sheet coming down from the sky, going through your head, shoulders and body to the point on the ground exactly halfway between your toes and heels, dividing your body in two more halves (front and back.) Your center of balance is along the line where the two sheets intersect. Finding the exact center is tricky at first, but once you've done this several times, you'll find it quickly. The trick is to rotate your torso about the intersecting line, forward (like you're going to touch your toes) and backwards and rotate it around as much as you can until you get a feel for where your exact center is. (Note: For men it's going to be at or around the navel, for women it's going to be below the navel, almost down in the hips.)

Now you've found it, build a mental picture of a glowing orb around your center of balance.

Now imagine every movement you make starts from that orb. Start with simple stuff, like reaching one arm out to point directly to  your side, then directly in front of you. Take a small jump in place, always starting from the orb. The movements should feel fluid and centered, the jump should start straight up and land softly without having to think about it. [If we were in theater, the would be a number of jumps and twists here. If you start every movement from the center of balance you will end up landing every one of them gracefully, but I'll fast forward to how this applies to Golf.]

There's a tendency, when wanting to clobber the ball a mile to sway completely off-balance in the backswing and to either faceplant or fall back on our butt in the foreswing. Needless to say that doesn't help with ball control and robs the swing of a lot of energy. The energy of the swing is completely wasted on the balance corrections and never actually translates to powerful, square-on contact.

Try doing the centering exercise before every shot. Then imagine your swing starting from your center of balance, the glowing orb, and continuing back and through all the way to finish, keeping the center of balance firmly in mind. The swing should feel fluid, centered, firm. Replicate that feeling as  you address the ball, and go for it. For drives and long irons, it's obvious how this is beneficial: you don't fall off your shot and send it about a mile. But it helps with the short game and putting too because it minimizes all extraneous movement....

Try it. Let me know what you think.

Posted via email from Kinetic Golfer

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