Golf Swing Fix: When, How & Why to Use Pre-Tilt (Data-Driven Breakdown)

⛳ Proper tilting of shoulders and hips at setup is crucial for achieving a consistent and effective golf swing.

📏 The best golfers set their shoulders about 8° to the right and hips about 1° to the right at address, which helps optimize club path and contact.

🎥 Using a video camera or mirror can help golfers visually check and correct their shoulder and hip tilt during setup.

🤲 A simple drill to achieve correct tilt is to take your trail hand off the club and touch the back of your trail leg before gripping again.

🔄 Over-exaggerating the tilt is not a major issue for those who currently have little or no tilt, and can actually help improve swing direction and contact.

00:00:00 - We are here today to talk about tilting and why it is important in your golf swing. We're going to mainly talk about in the setup why tilting matters. So, uh stay tuned if you think this is part of your problem.

00:00:17 - So, when we're talking about tilting, what that essentially means is it's the direction either your shoulders or your hips are tilting either to the right or to the left. So, when my right shoulder gets below my left shoulder, that's tilting to the right. When my left shoulder gets below my right shoulder, that's tilting to the left. The same thing happens with your hips. The best golfers in the world at setup have their shoulders tilted about 8° to the right

00:00:40 - and their hips about one degree to the right. So, that's going to help them do three things, which I'm going to talk about here in just a second. I want to look at it on the screen over here because it'll be really easy to explain that way. So, come over to the touch screen. All right. So, I have two swings here. the one on the left. This is what you typically see with a lot of amateur golfers who struggle with a slice. So, you can see how my shoulders are extremely level. I'm basically at 0

00:01:04 - degrees of shoulder tilt. My hips are actually tilted slightly to the left at this point in time. And so, what it's going to do is it's going to have three contributing factors as to some of the problems that it creates. So, number one, it's going to make it a lot harder for this golfer to swing into out. So, their swing direction is generally going to be more out to in or more to the left. You can see that here on this shot, it was 3.2°. 2° out to in. The second piece to this is contributing to

00:01:28 - the club path as well. When you tilt your shoulders the wrong way at a dress, it's generally also going to make it harder to get your hips and your shoulders to close. So, the best golfers in the world have their shoulders 8° open at a dress and their hips 4° open. Golfers who have very little tilt in both their shoulders and their hips generally set up more open. So, that's going to shift the path out to in as well. So, both of those kind of relate to the club path. The final piece here,

00:01:53 - and this is this is super important if you struggle with contact. You can see with this golfer over here, how the shaft and the handle are basically standing straight up and down. So, when you have your shoulders extremely level and your hips even tilting slightly to the left, what tends to happen is the shaft or the handle lean more away from the target. So, that can lead to fat and thin strikes. It can lead to inconsistent contact. This is just a really bad way to set up. So, if we

00:02:16 - switch views over here to the right side, this is me setting up very close to like what a tour average uh setup would look like. So, you can see my shoulders have that slight angle to the right. We're right on the tour average of 8° and my hips are also slightly tilted to the right. That's going to help my club path. You can see on this swing it was almost 4° into out. It's exactly our average. That's where you'd want it to be for a 7 iron. You can also notice here how the shaft and the handle

00:02:40 - are leaning slightly more towards the target than they are on the left hand side. Both of those are going to be big contributing factors to better contact, a better club path, and ultimately make it easier for you to hit those really straight shots. So, if you think this is part of your problem, let's take a look at how you can fix that. So, to fix this problem, a couple ways you can do this. First and foremost, I would grab a video camera. So, grab your cell phone, put it

00:03:03 - on the video, stand in front of a mirror, use your shadow on the ground, something so that you can see a visual reference. That would be the first thing. So, take your current setup position, whatever it is, and if you notice that your shoulders are extremely level, what you basically want to do is take your trail hand. So, for me, since I'm a right-handed golfer, I take my right hand off the club. I would go ahead and touch like the back of my leg, sort of right above my knee, almost

00:03:25 - score sort of on my hamstring back here. And you can see as I do that, it's essentially going to cause me to tilt my shoulder slightly to the right. Okay? The same thing will start to happen with your hips. They're not going to move as much, but that's totally cool. So, moving your hand off of the grip, kind of touching the back of your leg, and then maintaining that same position with your shoulders and your hips as you go to take your grip. That'd be a really

00:03:45 - good place to get started. Another way that you could do this is you could just simply pick up a club shaft or a golf club, grab your 7 iron, a 6iron, whatever you want, put it across your shoulders, take your address position, and make sure that in this example, the club head would be lower than the grip. That's going to make sure that you ensure that correct amount of rightward tilt. For those of you who who this is a problem for, doing too much of it isn't

00:04:07 - necessarily a bad thing. Obviously, down the road, this can lead to other problems. But if you're super super flat or basically zero with your shoulder and your hip tilt at at a dress, going too far isn't going to be that big of an issue right now. It's just going to make your swing direction more into out potentially make it easier for you to lean the handle more towards the target. So, those are both good things. Don't worry about over-exaggerating it. Okay,

00:04:27 - so like I said, really easy way to do this. Just take your normal address position. Take your trail hand off. Touch the back of your trail leg. Put your hand back on. That would help you get the tilt. If you're still struggling with this, take the club, put it across your shoulders, club head lower than the grip. Now, go ahead and put the club down to the ground. That would be a really, really good way to make sure that you get your shoulders and your hips tilted the right amount. And that's

00:04:47 - going to help you with not only your club path, but also your consistency of strike.

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