re: reverse pivot

Hi John,

Try GregJWillis's 'walking drill' - http://members.cox.net/gregjwillis/LESSON2.htm - this will help you get the feeling of when you need to transfer your weight.

What is most likely creating your 'reverse C' is an incorrect turn. Many recreational golfers are guilty of what is know as a 'fake turn'. This may fee like a real turn, but is really only a dip of the left shoulder. Dipping your left shoulder puts your weight over your left leg and you now have nowhere to shift your weight on your throughswing except away from the target.

If the left shoulder dip is what is causing your 'reverse C', you need to practice a full and level turn of the shoulders. At the top of your backswing, your shoulders should be 90* to the target line.

__________________
Gord

Quote of the month:
"It's easy to see golf not as a game at all but as some whey-faced, nineteenth-century Presbyterian minister's fever dream of exorcism achieved through ritual and self-mortification." ~Bruce McCall

Just so folks don't get confoosed,

Lets keep our reverse C's and reverse pivots straight...

http://www.pgaprofessional.com/glossary/r.html

Thank you drbob. There is a difference between the reverse C and reverse pivot. But you can't do reverse C without a reverse pivot - the cause all stems from incorrect weight transfer from the front foot to the back foot instead of back foot to the front foot.

I suffered from a reverse pivot earlier in the year (trying to get my club to parallel, aka make a full swing), causing a leading shoulder dip, and all my weight being on my target side.

Here's how I got rid of it. (instructions for a right handed golfer) Without a club,reach across your chest with your left arm. Then turn your shoulders away from your target, rotating around your spine, turning as close to 90* as you can (don't worry about your hips - they'll follow). Feel where your weight is in your feet - it will certainly be more towards your right foot. You'll also start to feel 'tight' in your right leg. This is your backswing at its fullest extent - any more and you start a reverse pivot.

Unless of course his hips were turning to far on the backswing and, as a result, caused the right leg to lock thus tilting the whole body towards the target.

True - but to lock the leg, you've gotta stand up, too.

Usually when your over rotate your hips in the backswing you are compensating for rotating the shoulders. What usually happens is the player over rotates the hips because he/she dips the left shoulder and causes a reverse weight shift. If a correct shoulder turn was made initially, the over rotation of the hips probably wouldn't occur. If you try to make a full shoulder turn AND over rotate your hips, you can not longer even see the ball.

I'm glad to see a thread devoted to the reverse pivot. I have been cursed with this problem for some time. I took lessons for the first time about a year and a half ago and discovered I had this problem and have probably been playing golf with it all of my life. Needless to say I have to be very diligent about it and if I don't think about it for a while, it creeps back into the swing in some fashion. I am pretty athletic and use to hit the ball pretty well in my younger years but as time went on and I did not play regularly I could no longer overcome the problem. People do not realize that there are good golfers out there with some fundamental problems with their swings that they overcome by unorthodox body movements, grips and other things that must compensate for the flaw. But it is hard to be consistent this way. Take some lessons folks so you don't have so much to overcome in your swings. This past year has been a struggle but it is fun to learn and makes practicing more enjoyable when you have some idea of a correct swing.

The easiest way to cure is reverse pivot is to practice with overly flexed knees and get the student to turn their left knee WAY behind the ball ... it forces them to transfer their weight from left to right.

I tell them they should feel like the right knee is the axis of the turn ... which it is.

Jose Maria Olazabal has had a reverse pivot on his long irons and fairway woods his entire career and he did ok ...