4 Hip Mobility Exercises for Increased Power in Your Golf Swing

Hip mobility could be one of the most important driving forces for power in the golf swing!

The ability for the hips to get a smooth seesaw action allows the hips to load and transfer power from right to left or left to right. Often we see golfers whose hips don’t move well and are stuck in a position that doesn’t allow them to achieve optimal power transfer! Our goal is to help with this!

With many of the golfers we see their primary move is to sway or early extend. With this compensation they lose power and increase their risk of injury! One of the first things we address are these compensations and work on creating better loading positions and movement patterns.

In order to transfer load from one side to the other a golfer needs their hips to be able to get into the proper positions so that the pelvis is able to do what it needs to do without compensating. When compensation occurs often we see some sort of rotation through the lumbar spine putting unnecessary forces on the disks that can lead to injury.

This is an important change that needs to take place! Less compressive stresses on the low back and more power generation from the hips!

When the hips move well a golfer is able to take advantage of loading them through a long range of motion with full power! For instance, let’s say we have two right handed golfers, golfer A only has 5 degrees of internal rotation on his right side and golfer B has 35 degrees of internal rotation on his right side. When golfer A goes to load into his right, he runs out of room pretty quickly. Two things happen, either he has a short back swing and doesn’t create that much power, or he ends up compensating somehow, typically through the lower back to get more load in his swing. Golfer B has a ton of range in which to load his right side due to the mobility he owns and is less likely to need to find a compensatory pattern to get the job done.

Two of the most important things a golfer can do.

Work on improving hip mobility.

Increased mobility gives the hips more see saw action, which is crucial for loading and exploding in the golf swing.

Build Better hip stability

Hip stability gives the hips a platform in which to generate power.

Every golfer should have a good blend of hip stability and mobility drills as a component of their training program. I have put together four drills geared at getting the hips moving better as well as learning to transfer power by loading the hips and then exploding just like a slingshot.