Use Your Knees Correctly In Your Golf Swing

For any golfer looking to improve their swing power and consistency, learning the proper way to use your knees in your swing is critical to your success on the course. Many golfers don't realize this, but your lower body (hips, legs, knees and feet) are your foundation or support to your swing. 

When you swing at up to 80+ mph, you need something stable connected to the ground to maintain balance. This would be your legs, including how your knees respond throughout our swing.

One issue high handicap and older golfers have is excessive knee movement both from a flexion (bending) and extension (straightening), as well as lateral (side-to-side) motion.

Your weight transfer in your backswing is control by your knee action. If they move around too much, you will not be turning into the inside of your right knee in the backswing, and this will cause swaying and too much lateral motion, which in golf is "wasted motion", that causes a timing issue in your swing.

In the backswing your right knee must remain flexed and stable, with NO lateral movement at all. So the thought in your backswing is to turn into your right hip, with your knee being rock solid. When you do this, you have loaded your swing fool of power, so when you start your downswing, you will be compressing your golf ball for maximum distance and accuracy.

The left knee at this point just responds to what the right one is doing. It never moves independently, which the most common fault is to kick in towards the right one prematurely, which then can promote a reverse pivot, where the entire left side caves in at the top, and you are in a poor position to come down into the golf ball.

To start your downswing, the weight transfers back to the left side, with the right knee starting to push hard towards the left, with the left knee slowly starting to straighten, to become the solid brace it needs to be at impact, when you have high swing speeds. 

As you come into impact, the right knee has kicked in more, and the left one has straightened. You are now putting more and more weight onto the left side from the weight transfer happening in the downswing. This lower body action is prevalent with all the tour players, as well as low handicap, tournament players. 

What is really important to learn from this is the the right knee in your backswing, is critical to how you both transfer your weight, and keep the club on plane. If you can keep it flexed, and stable you are on your way to solid ball striking. 

If you take anything from this article, it's that the knees in your golf swing must perform a certain way if you want to hit consistent golf shots.