A golf downswing fundamental you will often hear from teaching pros is that you need to push your hips laterally towards the target to initiate the downswing. Why? It’s because the natural movement of the average amateur is to incorrectly begin the downswing without any forward shift of the hips.

This results in the over the top, reverse pivot or flat plane swing faults experience by the average weekend hacker. Then comes the hooks, slices, pulls, pushes, topped and fats shots.

But the root of the problem is the golf downswing back foot thrust Remember what I said the tip from the pros is? PUSH the hips laterally down the target line. So, the natural question that follows is what do you push with? The answer is with your back foot. It seems intellectually obvious, but in practice it is not obvious for most golfers.

Most beginners, high and mid handicappers and even the occasional single digit handicapper have problems doing one of the following:

• No Back Foot Thrust – This normally happens because your weight has not stayed inside your back foot on the backswing. It is even likely on the outside of the back foot. Thus, thrusting with the back foot would throw you off balance. So you don’t use the back foot. You throw your club over the top with your arms. And you wrongly pivot off you back leg instead of the front because you weight never shifted.

• Pushing Vertically Up – This too results from your weight not staying inside your back foot. Still, instinctively you know that you must push with your back foot. So you push vertically up. This pushes your right hip up and out. Plus, you still reverse pivot because of no weight shift. You have only managed a more powerful over the top reverse pivot swing.

• Pushing With Toes or Ball of Back Foot – This normally happens when the golfer has properly kept their weight inside the back foot. However, instead of pushing with the inside of the heel and mid foot, they use the toes and ball of the foot to push. You may produce a little hip bump, but causes hip turn too soon. Your results are inconsistent and lack maximum power.

Instead, you want to keep your weight on the inside of your back foot on the backswing. Then at the start of the golf downswing push your hips forward with the inside of the heel and mid foot. Keep your head fixed on this downswing movement. Now you are cleared and ready for a powerful hip, shoulder and knee turn into the ball.

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