3 exercises to improve weight transfer in the golf swing

When you always find yourself hitting fat or small shots, one of the main reasons why weight transfer (or lack thereof).

For example, if you rely on the shot to try to help the ball go into the air, you’re not giving yourself nearly as much opportunity to get the club down. If you don’t get the low point on the ground, you won’t make the first contact with the ball which increases each shot.

The goal is to rotate all the way back and forth, finishing with your weight shifting to your front foot at impact.

Naturally, every beginner golfer struggles with this – yes, even low golfers – so you have to learn (or hone) your fundamentals to achieve the contact you want.

To help, I contacted Top 100 GOLF Instructor Tony Ruggiero, who described a situation with three of his students who just couldn’t transfer their weight correctly. So he gave them three exercises to improve their posture and weight shift, leading to better shots in the process. Check out Ruggiero’s tips below.

3 ways to improve your weight transfer

“Recently, I’ve had a few students struggle with getting to their front side on turns,” Ruggiero tells me. “Each of them was just trying to get their front leg out of the way, and all three of them were having trouble getting off their lead leg, and instead they were going back to their lead leg.”

Here’s how Ruggiero cleaned up their swing and helped them get on their lead foot and rotate the ball very well.

1. End like a baseball pitcher

Golf is a swing game, so you need to feel like you’re rolling like a pitcher on your foot, and push off to land on the lead foot. By doing this correctly, the trail side releases the ball.

So, how can you hear this?

First, you must enter the foot of the route – but do not confuse the twist, because they are not the same. As you turn, you need to create pressure on the ground, which gives you more power to push off if you keep pressure on the inside of that foot.

Students who experience twisting pressure on the outside of the foot have less push off, which often results in them leaning to the front side rather than driving into it.

In the video above, we use a half-foam roller resistance band to help demonstrate how to properly load every foot of the track, providing more power from the top.

By pushing the trail foot into your backswing, the weight will then transfer to the lead foot as you come down through impact. As a result, the lead hip will begin to rotate out of the way and clear.

In the video above, we use half of a foam roller as a wedge, which gives the player the power to push off – again, similar to how a pitcher in baseball pushes the rubber. This will help create a sense of how to change the pressure on your back.

In addition to the half foam roller, we also used a resistance band and incorporated a hitting motion to help feel the drive from the lane leg to rotate through the ball. By combining these two exercises, it can help you experience new movements as your brain learns.

3. Maintain contact with the ground while falling onto your lead side

Many beginner golfers land on their lead side with a slip or lean, which, as a result, causes them to go too far into the ball and outside of their lead foot.

But here’s a simple drill to fix that.

After cutting the tennis ball in half, we place one half under the big toe of the leading foot and the other half under the leading foot. The goal here is to feel the big toe push the tennis ball as long as possible while pushing off the lead foot, resulting in more force to help drive the lead hip up and out of the way of the lead side.

Then we added the exercises I learned from Dr. Scott Lynn, where we use a resistance band and a pivot drill — simple and easy to do.

Just get into your golf position, grab the strap behind your upper legs, tie the strap around the shaft and wrap the other side around the cart or anchor on the wall (check it out here), and now just turn to the finish line. It’s easy to do and it creates a good feeling and sensation, it teaches your body new movements.

“If you’re trying to get into your lead leg or feel like you’re losing speed because of the ball, these drills and exercises can help you,” adds Ruggiero. “They can give you a sense of play, and give you a way to learn new moves very quickly.”

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