Skill Drills with Meredith Kirk: Swinging & Bending

Today’s drill is called swinging and bending and it is a great pre-round warmup drill. The first thing that you want to do is stand with your feet about shoulder width across, and we’re just going to reach down and try to touch our toes. What you can do is relax your arms and just let them hang and then come back up and we’re going to repeat that about five times. Second thing that we’re going to do is we’re going to do that traditional side stretch. We’re going to get our arm here and we’re going to reach all the way across as far as you can go and you’re going to hold a few seconds. You’re going to repeat that to the other side. Hold, feel that stretch. We’re stretching out our core and then come back to center. Now you want to grab a club for this next step. You can grab the club, hold it out horizontally. You can put it over your head and we’re going to take it all the way back, okay. So it’s going to look like this and what we’re going to do now is we’re going to bend at the waist, back down, hold the stretch, but when you do that, I want you to raise the bar as high as you can take it and feel the stretch with your arms. Now we’re going to come back up and now we’re going to move to the side. We’re going to bend at the waist a little bit here. Turn to the side here, a little rotation with those shoulders, and if you feel up to it, you can bend down, come back up to center and we’re going to repeat that on the other side. Turn and then we can bend here and hold. You want to repeat that about five times. I love this drill because there’s a lot of bending. You’re getting ready for that rotation in your golf swing. So now our last step is we’re going to do some continuous swings with both hands to start out with. You want to go back and forth about five to 10 times. Then what I want you to do is take your trail hand off and just swing with your lead arm and really get into it. Feel that rotation. Okay, so this drill takes about six to seven minutes. It’s a great warmup drill. It really prepares you for rotation of the golf swing. Remember, golf is a rotation around the spine, so swinging and bending is that drill to help really warm up those muscles that help give us the rotation in the golf swing.