Downswing Drills: Out vs Down

🏌️‍♂️ Exaggerating movements during golf practice helps break old patterns and adopt new, more effective techniques.

🔬 Tour players often rehearse extreme motions before their swings to ingrain the desired feel, not to replicate them during actual play.

📉 Practicing exaggerated shoulder drops can quickly shift your swing path and improve club delivery, even if it feels unnatural.

🧩 Using simple tools like a noodle as a physical reference can make it easier to practice and internalize new golf movements.

⚡ Rapid improvement in swing mechanics is possible by making extreme changes in practice, even if the results feel exaggerated.

🎯 The fastest way to change a golf habit is to exaggerate the movement, as small changes often aren't enough to shift ingrained patterns.

00:00:00 - Lexi, have you ever told a story where you have grossly exaggerated something? >> Of course. >> Okay, perfect. So, we're going to talk about exaggeration today in golf and why it's super important if you're trying to change a pattern or a movement that you're making, why exaggeration is is really valuable. So, let's dive into the numbers and talk about why it's important. >> Sounds good. Let's do it. Often times you're going to see tour players, if you're watching golf on TV, doing

00:00:30 - some crazy rehearsals before their swings. Have you seen any of those? >> Okay. So, I know Justin Rose is super popular for like trying to get his hands way down here in the down swing. You've seen probably Tiger at some point doing some crazy things where he like contorts his body into these different positions. Obviously, tour players aren't swinging and doing those things. Okay. Um, but where it becomes very valuable for all of you at home and Lexi for you is when

00:00:53 - you're trying to change something, those exaggerated movements can make it much easier to actually adopt the pattern that you're trying to achieve. >> Okay. >> So, Lexi, I've got Color Orao up here. He's pretty good at golf. Would you agree? I've heard. Yeah. >> Okay. He's You've heard his name once or twice. >> All right. So, I've got a really cool feature here that we're going to highlight and then we're going to talk about why exaggerating is really important. So, you can see Colin, I

00:01:15 - actually have a circle around his shoulder and just tracking how his shoulder moves. So this yellow line is what it does in the back swing and then this pink line is what happens in the down swing. Wow. >> So you can see how his right shoulder moves basically straight down towards the ground. >> So that allows him to tilt his shoulders to the right which helps him get closer to the tour average of 12 degrees to the right whereas you are actually still 12° to the left. So you can see your

00:01:37 - shoulder not really worried about the back swing movement. But do you see how in the down swing it doesn't really drop down to >> it doesn't move at all. >> Yeah. Stay super high and if anything starts to move more out towards the ball. It kind of mirrors what Collins does right at the beginning. Yeah. Just lacks the downward piece. Okay. So, this is a big reason for you why not only you struggle getting your club path into out enough. Okay. But it can also contribute

00:01:57 - to some issues with contact because it'll change your inclination to the ground and make it harder for you to hit the ground in the same place. Okay. So, using this and using OPTIMOTION and some of the cool tech we have. Now, let's talk about a way that you can exaggerate this when you practice to help get your shoulder to move more downs like Collins so that we can eliminate that. Okay. Here we are. Here we are. >> We have a noodle. Here's what we're going to do. We're going to use this as

00:02:19 - a way to help you tilt your shoulders more to the right and everything. So, I want you to take your address position. Okay. Um, if you don't have somebody to hold the noodle, it's totally fine. I'll give you a way that you can do this without uh without a partner. So, I'm going to put this noodle right off of your shoulder. And what this is going to represent is essentially how I want your shoulders to start looking in the followvthrough. We're going to use this as

00:02:38 - a way to work on this in the back swing and the down swing. So, take your back swing. You should stay under this. Don't touch it with your arms or anything. Then as you start down, what you're going to practice is really that right shoulder, your trail shoulder moving more down to the ground. Yep. Instead of out towards the noodle. If you were to do what you normally would do, you would run into this noodle in the down swing. You'd bump into it with your arms and

00:02:58 - your shoulder. So when you're doing that, you can't lean back towards the camera here. You can't lean away from the screen. You still have to do all the normal things, but this is going to help get your shoulder to go more down, okay, and behind you instead of out and towards me or the golf ball. Okay. Okay, if you don't have somebody to hold a noodle, the easy way you could do this, go ahead and set up again. Okay, basically put this noodle on the ground at about 45° off of your right foot. So,

00:03:24 - take your back swing. Your left arm at this point should be pretty much in line with that noodle. Yep, pretty close to it. As you move into your down swing, this club lowers and this arm should stay inside of that noodle for as long as you possibly can. >> That would be extremely exaggerated. Would you agree? Okay. Obviously, I'm not saying that that's how Lexi should hit a golf ball. That would be a really really bad way to do it. But this is a good way to sort of ingrain that feel.

00:03:47 - And then when you're ready to hit one, you're going to try to implement that same type of thing. Okay? Don't care where the ball goes. You might hit it way out to the right, way to the left. Not worried about it. >> I have a feeling. >> Just work on where your hands are. >> We'll see.

00:04:05 - Wow, that was good. I mean, where it ended up wasn't great, but I think it was good. So, here is why exaggerating is important. When you were practicing that, what were you saying to me? >> Wow, this feels so weird. This was a feel. >> Yeah. >> Dropping my hands and dropping my trail shoulder and then trying to come. >> Super crazy, right? Like, you would never actually hit a golf ball that way. That's the same thing you see a lot of tour players on TV rehearsing. This is

00:04:32 - why when you watch them practice, this is why they're really good at golf because they exaggerate this stuff. Okay. Um, so you did this maybe four or five times, but look at the difference that you got in just a short amount of practicing this. So you were 12 degrees to the left. You can see where the club is, how it kind of cuts through the middle of your elbows, and how far your hands are away from your body. And then we talked about that trace of your shoulder. Well, look at the difference

00:04:55 - over here. Like now, just by practicing this a few times, using the noodle on the ground as a reference, your hands are closer to your hips. The club's actually in here in line with your right thigh. And then you actually start moving that shoulder more down and behind you. >> Yeah. >> With that pink trace instead of out and towards the golf ball. So, did you get to the tour average of 12 degrees right? No, that's not the point. The point is you went from 12° left all the way back

00:05:18 - to where you needed to be, which helped you get the club in a better spot and obviously made it much easier for you to swing into out. >> Yeah. I mean, it's crazy if you look at the difference in the delivery of the club between these two. So much more inside here than this one's coming outside my hands already. Just exaggerating the movement is really what helps you change the pattern of what you've been basically struggling with. So that's why when you see tour players

00:05:41 - working on something crazy on the range, they're exaggerating it. They're not actually doing that when they hit a golf ball. But that's really the way that you get better and improve the fastest is by making that extreme change because it might feel like something to you like it really weird. You know, your head's dipping to the right, your shoulders going straight down to the ground. when you actually implement and hit a ball, it doesn't look anything like that. So,

00:06:03 - that's where the exaggeration piece comes into play. >> And it's crazy still because this felt so exaggerated to me. So, if I were to try to just do it normal without exaggerating it before, >> I would probably look closer to this one. >> Correct. Correct. So, that's like that's what I'm talking about. You made five swings this way and we changed your measurement by 13°. Probably felt like you changed it by 150°. It did. Okay. Um, so that's really the whole point of

00:06:28 - what we're talking about here in this video. Exaggerate whatever you're working on. That's going to help you improve the fastest. It's going to help you make the change the quickest. >> Mhm.

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