THE PELVIC PISTOL PART 2

THE PELVIC PISTOL PART 2

THE PELVIC PISTOL PART 2
by Dr. T. J. Tomasi
Keiser University College of Golf Senior Faculty and Director of Research

Read part one of The Pelvic Pistol.

Your Eye is Fooled: As we learned in my previous article, in a powerful swing, the pelvic curve created at the start of the downswing releases to the target while maintaining the spine angle. This “forward force” raises the front hip. To the naked eye, it looks as if golf experts are doing nothing but rotating their hips, but that’s because the eye doesn’t work fast enough to see the pelvis release to the target. Once it has fired at the target, the arm and shoulder rotation carry the pelvis around with them, giving the false appearance that the pelvis was continuously rotating around or clearing. The core isn’t clearing (a passive move designed to get the hips out of the way), it’s leading in the same way a six-footer dunks the basketball – he squats, cocking his pelvis, then explodes out of the squat with his pelvis adding ‘snap power’ to the motion– something the concept of clearing doesn’t include. The jumper converts pelvic thrust into elevation while the golfer converts pelvic thrust into clubhead speed. To me, the firing of the pelvis is the key element in the Kinematic Sequence, where linear and rotational motion combine for the big bang at impact.  And the pelvic thrust is what’s missing in short hitters and long hitters grown old. Gary Player has finally caught up to Jack Nicklaus off the tee because he retained his suppleness through exercise while Jack ate ice cream.

I have seen instructors demonstrate what is supposed to be the correct hip motion by placing a shaft over their hips and simply rotating them around in a level arc to the ground – this I believe is incorrect and plants the wrong concept in the student’s mind. Simply rotating the hips in a passive ‘clearing motion’ is a major cause of swing error, including a steep shaft that is trapped behind the hips, never to catch up. This combo causes the right-to-right or push slice. It can also cause over-the-top pulls/pull slices when the player becomes fed-up with the blocks.

How I teach the Pistol:

I tug on the elastic tether to trigger the tiny lateral bump that is key to releasing the pelvic pistol. The student is instructed to move against the tension while keeping his pelvis cocked in the direction of my tension on the tether.

He fires his core at the target against the tension. After a few reps, his feel system becomes sensitized, making it much easier to fire the core in the correct direction with the correct magnitude. In this case, talking and showing are inferior to feeling the force vector, and I have found that exerting force against the vector is highly tutorial — surpassing both talking and demonstrating.

The Takeaway: Proprioceptive and tactile motor learning is activated and accelerated by exposure to the proper staging of force vectors.

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