Mel Sole celebrates 50 years as a teaching professional this month! To celebrate, Mel offers his wisdom on proper body rotation and how it helps generate longer distance.

Hi, this is Mel Sole and welcome to 2016. Well, time really goes, today is February 1, 2016, and today is my 50th anniversary as a golf professional. I turned pro on the 1st of February 1966, so I have been teaching now for 50 years. I want to personally thank everybody that has been a part of my life over the 50 years, made a difference to my teaching. Phil Ritson my mentor, Phil thank you very much, always appreciated, and then those people that have just helped me along the way. I’m certainly looking forward to the future as well.

This month’s golf tip and next month’s golf tip is talking about something that every golfer wants. No, not a million bucks, power. Everybody wants to hit the ball farther. Even the longest hitters on the PGA Tour are looking for ways of hitting the ball farther. Power in the golf swing comes from body rotation – weight shift and body rotation. We’re going to talk about the weight shift in next month’s golf tip, but this month, body rotation. This is what is going to help you.

What I do with this is, I swing it backwards and forwards, and you want to start slowly. You can see I’m just swinging it back and forth. There are, I think, five models here. There is … This is a Regular Men’s, there’s a Senior Men’s, there’s a Regular Ladies, there’s a Senior Ladies, and then there is a Junior. You want to get the one that’s right for you. If you go online and type in Orange Whip, W-H-I-P, you’ll see this.

I start off fairly heavy, and slowly I start increasing. Watch what happens here. See how this is pulling my body all the way through, so I’m finishing right through in a full finish. To improve that even further, what I do is, I’ll take a towel, put it down on the ground, get on my knees, and I want to hold it in front of me, and I’m going to swing it this way. What it’s doing is, it’s keeping my lower body fairly steady, and I’m turning my upper body. This is helping my body rotation, improving my flexibility, improving my strength in my hands and forearms. Whatever amount of, you do it this way, make sure that you also do it that way, equal time both ways. You want to keep your body flexible both forward and back.

The same thing would apply this way. When I’m swinging, I’m going to do 10 times left handed, 10 times right handed so that my muscles are working both sides of my body equally. This is your first tip to gaining power in 2016. Tune in next month and I’ll show you the next one!