Easy Drills to Improve Your Golf Swing Hip Turn and Rotation

The average golfer underestimates the importance of hip rotation in the golf swing.

It’s hard to produce speed and consistent ball striking without using your hips correctly, yet most players focus their practice efforts elsewhere.

In this article, we’d like to give hip rotation the attention it deserves. By using the drills outlined below, you may be able to make significant improvements to your ball striking in a relatively short period of time.

So What’s the Big Deal about Hip Turn?

Before diving into the drills, let’s quickly highlight some of the key benefits of using your hips correctly in the golf swing:

#1 Create Speed

This is the main purpose of using a good hip turn in your swing.

If you want to generate club head speed and carry that speed all the way through impact, your hip turn is going to play an important role. If you ever watch a slow-motion replay of a professional golfer hitting a tee shot with a driver, you are sure to see a powerful hip turn throughout the downswing and into the finish.

#2 Get Your Body Into Position

Without making a proper hip turn, it’s likely that your body will hang too far back in the downswing. As a result, you will struggle to make solid contact at the moment of impact.

Your hip turn, when working nicely, will get you into the right spot to make a clean strike time after time.

#3 Improve Your Tempo

Every good golf swing needs a repeatable tempo, and a good hip turn can help here as well. Using your hips the same way in each swing will build in a timing mechanism that you can use to keep your swing firing on time throughout your rounds.

As you can see, there is a lot to gain from making a proper hip turn – so how do you make it happen? Let’s discuss a couple of helpful drills.

Drill #1 – Dry Practice Swings

We feel like this drill is one of the best ways to learn how it feels to use your hips effectively – and you don’t even need a club to use it, which makes it great for getting in a little practice when you have a few minutes available in your day.

So, as long as you have somewhere to stand and move your body around a bit, you are ready to get started with this drill.

Simply follow the steps below:

1. As a starting point for this drill, you are going to settle into a stance that you would use to hit any of your long clubs (although you are not holding a club).
2. Before starting this practice swing, you are going to place your arms across your chest. So, your right hand should be touching your left shoulder, and your left hand should be touching your right shoulder.
3. It’s now time to start this modified swing. The backswing portion of the drill is going to be controlled by your shoulder turn. Do your best to turn your shoulders away from the (imaginary) target while keeping your lower body pretty quiet.
4. When you finish the backswing, use your hips to initiate the downswing action. This is really the key to the whole drill. Without the feeling of your arms swinging around your body like in a normal swing, you should have an easier time feeling the sensation of your lower body leading the downswing move.
5. Turn your hips aggressively all the way into the finish and do your best to hold a balanced pose as you look out toward the (still imaginary) target.

Even without using a club, this drill can go a long way toward helping you feel how your hips should perform in the swing. If you have been making an arms-only swing in your game, the feeling of using your hips to control the downswing is going to be foreign.

Don’t give up just because it feels odd at first. Stick with it and you may make meaningful progress with your ball striking in the near future.

Drill #2 – Half Swings at the Range

For this drill, you are going to go back to using a club, and you are going to need to be at the driving range to hit some balls.

The idea here is to learn just how much power you can create by using your hips effectively, even if the rest of your swing doesn’t add much to the equation.

1. While you can use a variety of different clubs for this drill, we think a 7-iron will work best.
2. The setup here is pretty simple – you’ll need a few balls to hit, and you will also want to pick out a target that you can use to align your stance.
3. When you are ready to hit the first shot, choke down on the club an inch or two and take a standard stance. There might not be as much lateral motion in this swing as your normal full swing, so try playing the ball just slightly further back in your stance.
4. To hit the shot, turn your shoulders away from the target and rotate until your left arm is roughly parallel with the ground. At that point, instead of completing the backswing, you are going to start the downswing by turning your hips. Make sure it is the rotation of your hips that starts the motion toward the target.
5. Swing through impact and send the ball on its way. Despite the short backswing, you may be surprised to find just how hard you can hit the ball if you fire your hips aggressively through to the finish.

Give each of these hip turn drills a try if you would like to work on this part of your technique. As with anything else in golf, you should expect your progress to be slow and steady – it probably won’t be like you flipped a light switch and suddenly your game was transformed.

Stick with it and strive to consistently improve your hip rotation until you are a significantly better ball striker.