INSTRUCTION: Stop Collapsing the Trail Knee With This Cheap Training Aid

What’s up Goficity Fam?! It’s Mike Midgette, PGA Professional here at St. Lucie Trail Golf Club in Florida! If you follow me on Instagram, you would know that I am a big fan of the alignment stick and noodle combination to help you work on your golf swing.

I am going to show you three examples of how to use this awesome, inexpensive tool, to improve your swing. When we are working on our golf swing on a grass range, I encourage you to tee the ball up. If you are working on a mat, you can almost get away without teeing it up.

A popular swing flaw that I see is the right knee collapsing towards the golf ball, we don’t want that.

In order to combat this, we will be placing the alignment stick into the ground at a 45° angle, so that the noodle is two-three inches in front of your trail knee. What this is going to do is provide a visual and physical distraction when we are making golf swings. When taking your swings, you want to try and keep your trail knee from touching the noodle.

Why keep our trail knee out of the way?

When our trail knee goes toward the golf ball, the right side of our body tends to collapse, which is going to force us to chicken wing, to avoid hitting the ball fat, or if we are twisting, it can cause us to be too steep and over the top.

When starting out on this drill, take nice and easy swings. Practice swings first to make sure you know what you need to do for this drill.

If you are guilty of the trail knee collapse, it is going to feel like your trail knee is staying back, or straightening and causing separation in our lower body. This will increase power, speed and acceleration in the golf swing.

Instead of trying to swing our hands and arms faster, what this is going to do is encourage a little more lag and rotational speed through the swing, as opposed to your hands and arms going all over the place.

Start by hitting at 30-40%. You are not going to be flushing it right away. Don’t worry about contact at first, focus on keeping your trail knee off of the noodle. Once you are able to make swings without hitting the noodle, you can begin to increase the power.

We can use the alignment stick for two other drills that focus on hip motion and weight transfers.

Place the stick two or three inches outside of your trail hip, so that it does not affect your backswing. The objective is to avoid your hip moving too far back during your swing.

Your trail knee and hip will go back and your trail leg will straighten, we don’t want it to lock, but we want it to release some of that initial flex you have created.

Before taking powerful swings, rehearse the motion over and over. The motion is almost like starting a lawnmower.

After progressing from 40-50 yard pitches, you can start to make more fuller swings. My number one goal is to avoid the noodle.

For the final drill, place the noodle in the same position, but in front of your lead hip. Remember to make sure that the noodle will not affect your swing.

The objective is to avoid the noodle and to make sure that we don’t slide our hips too far forward. Keep the trail hip and knee back and lead hip will lift and open. You can see that my trail knee is not going toward the ball, but towards the target.

So try these combinations of using the alignment stick and the pool noodle, they will help you improve your golf swing.

Feel free to DM me @mikey.golf on Instagram, or you can send me an email at [email protected].