Golf Stance – Positioning Your Shoulders

We have to find a fixing for the shoulders, to control their position and direction of movement. How should they be held at the address and what is their movement?

You have to incline them forward slightly as you address the ball, but see that it is only slightly, only as little as your build makes necessary. And keep them both up; especially keep the left shoulder up as you go back and the right shoulder up as you come through.

Just as an imaginary barrel can made your hips turn horizontally, with no sway, so should your shoulders feel that they turn horizontally. You can if you wish imagine a hoop from the barrel holding them in place. They will swing freely in this without touching it, but in a slightly inclined plane because of the forward bend of the body.

But my own method of fixing the shoulders is different. It is to feel that there is a direct connection between the left heel and the right shoulder, a diagonal tie that keeps them connected and at an unvarying distance one from the other, as we go up, as we come down, and as we follow through.

This is a difficult connection to describe, but once you have grasped its full meaning you will realize its value. As we lift our left heel—going back—we will (if the tie is properly realized) feel our right shoulder move back in response. The shoulder and heel keep their distance, never getting closer or farther away; so when the left heel comes down, we will feel the right shoulder moving forward in a straight line against the ball—neither dipping under it nor rising over it. This is right.

The right shoulder should never feel to dip under the ball, though it should be felt to go down to it. As we can see when we look at the "flickers” it is true that the right shoulder is lower than the left as we strike the ball, but so it is at the address—and there must be no more feel of it being lower at the moment of impact than there is at the address.

In fact the feel of the shoulder movement in a correctly braced swing is that the shoulders move round parallel to the ground.

Now when you have got this diagonal tie working and can give a peep at it and at your hip brace at the same time, you will feel properly compact and centered as you swing. And it is only when you feel yourself to be centered that you can hope to feel the club head as you should.

The Force-Center

For, please remember that all this discussion of brace and connections is relative to the feel of the club head. As I told you, you can only get this feel reliably at your force-center, and unless you build up a force-center by brace and connections, you will not feel it properly at all. For in the uncontrolled natural swing there is no force-center; that primarily is what is the matter with such a swing: too many separate forces are working independently in it.

So I have told you how to build up a force-center, and that when you have built it up, you should be able to feel the club head in it. You will be able to do this only if there is no break in the connections between the club head and the force-center, but one of these connections — the arms — is the most liable to disconnection of any in the whole swing.

At first glance this would seem easy enough to control, because the arms should work in exact relation to the shoulders and chest. The thorax and biceps should become one in movement. But things do not work out this way, because we do inherently—and in spite of ourselves—consider golf as being played with the arms. So we use our arms, ever so little it may be but enough to make us disconnected. Now this is a fine and most delicate point in which lies most of the difference between a good, a very good, and a superlative golfer. It is by the management of the arms that championships are won and lost.