Most Great Players Lower During Their Swings: So Wouldn’t You Figure It To Be a Good Thing?

If you think about how many different ways great players have gone about being great you might surmise that finding common ground wouldn’t be easy. How can anyone agree on what the best method is when all sorts of crazy combinations can be made to work? Certainly that is a legitimate question, and it can only be answered by saying that if I am teaching and I want to help someone to improve I have to identify what I think is hindering them and then offer specific things to remedy the situation. Through a combination of playing, practicing, studying golf swings (both great and not so great), and teaching every teacher comes up with their own “method”, which is really just a compilation of preferences about every element of the swing. One thing I have observed over and over is the fact that a great majority of great players lower during their swings. Some only lower going back, some only lower coming down, and some lower both back and down. Finding a player who stays perfectly level or who raises up in the backswing and doesn’t lower below their starting point in the forward swing is exceedingly rare, so rare in fact that it would seem obvious that the old standby adage that you must “maintain your posture” during the swing is simply wrong, but in a way you would not expect. The odd thing is that while it is not OK to rise up, what you actually should be doing (if you want to be like most of the best players) is trying to lower. I call it compressing into the ground, and I see it to be both athletic and powerful. It is evident in almost all high level acts of throwing and hitting, and if you buy my contention that the swing motion is most like side-arm throwing it becomes obvious why lowering is almost always present.
 
The only way anyone can deny that lowering exists is to do what Michael Breed does in this snippet from the Golf Fix, ignore it even when staring straight at it. Listening to Mike talk about Scott’s head staying up while it is going down right on the screen would be funny if it weren’t for the fact that a lot of people watch this show to get information about the golf swing. All of the announcers who pound on the so-called “dipping” epidemic on Tour are doing a disservice to their viewers. It would be nice if any of them did a little homework. I can’t believe that I’m the only one that can draw a line on top of a golfer’s head to see what it does during the swing.