In part 2 of his series on generating swing power, award-winning instructor Mel Sole demonstrates how your lower body, and how it interacts with the ground beneath your feet, generates greater distance.

Last month I spoke about generating speed, and power, and flexibility in your golf swing using this item here called the Orange Whip. For those of you that didn’t see that tip, go back to last month’s tip and watch that. It’ll definitely help your game.

The second part in this series of generating more power is: power comes from the ground up. Without that, if I sat in a chair and took my feet off the ground and tried to swing and hit a ball I’d have absolutely no power whatsoever. The power comes from the ground up. If you watch a little child, if you give a little child a golf ball, or any type of ball for that matter, and you say, “All right now throw the ball to me.” They’ll stand, they’ll go like that, they’ll do a little thing with their knees. They’re already, at that age, understanding that they’re going to use the ground in order to exert some force. You want to use the ground, and I want you to practice getting the feel.

Most golfers when I teach tend to swing with their arms, and they’re trying to generate power with arms, thinking that the faster they swing their arms the further they’re going to hit the ball. This is not true at all. The power comes from the legs, and the weight shift, and I want you to feel that you’re actually going to push off with that inside of the right foot. If you’re going to push off with the inside of the right foot you’ve got to make sure when you get in the top of the back swing that your weight is on the inside of the back foot. If you allow that weight to go to the outside you’re going to have nothing to push off with.

Be aware that you want to stabilize this right knee when you go back, feel the weight on the inside. When you come down you want to feel like you’re getting that weight, you can see my weight’s going to go forward. Here’s a great little drill to understand the feeling of that. Take a club, put it across your hips, make sure that the club face, the leading edge is at 90 degrees to the ground, right here. If I imagine that ball is being down there, it’s up here. If I had a long tee and the ball was up here, and I wanted to hit that ball off the tee. I wouldn’t do this, it wouldn’t generate much power. If I took my hips and I did that, that’s about the most powerful motion I can have to hit that ball off the tee.

At home in your living room, take a club, put it across your waist, and feel that. You’ll feel yourself pushing with the inside of that foot. After you’ve done that five, six, seven, maybe ten times, drop the club down, go to the top of your back swing, and feel the same thing. Just do little swings like this. If you’re doing it in your living room you’re not going to do a full swing and take the chandelier out. I want you to do little swings.

When you go out onto the range start your practice session the same way. First like this, feel the push, then take the club, feel it pushing. When I go to the ball now I’m going to feel like I’m going to push off with that right foot. That move is going to help you hit the ball further in 2016.