Week 10: How to make your posture more powerful

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Good posture is extremely important to the golf swing as it allows for balance throughout the whole motion.

All good golf swings start with the setup. Good posture is extremely important to the golf swing as it allows for balance throughout the whole motion. It also has a positive influence on power production. Functional posture makes a world of difference in your swinging action and lets you impart far more force in your ball strike. TOUR players know this and spend countless hours working on their setups. But it's not just professionals and low-handicappers who would benefit from this practice. All players should work to achieve a good, balanced and powerful posture in their pre-shot routines. As with everything else in golf, repetition is the key to consistency.

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All players should work to achieve a good, balanced and powerful posture in their pre-shot routines.

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The following five steps are key to creating good golf posture:

1. Make sure your weight is evenly distributed on the balls of the feet and not too much toward the toes or the heels.

2. Bend from the waist, allowing the spine to remain relatively straight.

3. Do not touch your chin to your chest; doing so will not allow a proper turn during the swing and coincidentally cause the spine to curve too much.

4. Slightly flex your knees. The knees should be flexed at a point so that if you plumb-bobbed a club down from the knee-cap, it would rest over the center of your foot.

5. Let your arms hang naturally straight down. This will place the butt-end of the handle about a fist away from the body, allowing you to swing your arms easily and freely back and through.

Posture Check

It takes time to get used to any change in your golf swing, and the same is true here. If your game goes awry during the round, go back to basics and remember your posture drills. The end of the grip should be parallel with the bottom of your pants zipper. There should also be about the distance of one hand between the end of your club and your pants.

Perfecting the golf swing posture is quite easy to do and will make a huge difference in your swing. But if you ignore the importance of good posture in your game, you're likely to remain inconsistent and overall improvement will continue to elude you.

If you find that your knees are bothering you as you work on your posture, you might be suffering from osteoarthritis (OA) of the knee. If you are living with OA, various treatments do exist, such as ORTHOVISC®, which provides up to 6 months of knee pain relief. Made from ultra-pure natural hyaluronan, which is found in healthy joints, ORTHOVISC® is injected into the knee joint where it acts to replace your natural joint fluid, to help cushion, protect, and lubricate your knee.

Talk to your doctor to see if ORTHOVISC® is right for you.

Or visit our website at www.orthovisc.com for more information on how to maintain your knee health to help you keep playing the game you love.

IMPORTANT SAFETY INFORMATION

ORTHOVISC® is for patients who do not get adequate pain relief from simple pain relievers like acetaminophen or from exercise and physical therapy. ORTHOVISC® is not for use in people with known allergy to hyaluronate preparations, to gram bacterial proteins, with infections or skin diseases in the area of the injection site or joint. Common side effects include joint pain, back pain, headaches and pain or redness at the injection site.

This is a paid placement by DePuy Mitek, Inc. The opinions expressed below are those of DePuy Mitek, Inc. and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the PGA TOUR.