Forget Ball Position, It's Body Position to the Ball

You must understand this first: An athletic, unwinding downswing is just like throwing a ball. It is continuous and uninterrupted, and nothing happens halfway through. It unwinds around a dynamic axis that is just about where your front hip is. This is where the downswing rotation pivots.

It is important that you understand what was just said because this post is about ball position—or, as I teach it, Body Position to the Ball. Everything up to this point was mentioned so we can answer this question: “Where is the bottom of the golf swing?”

Is it in the middle of your stance? No! Does the bottom of the golf swing move around for different clubs? No! The bottom of the golf swing is just inside the front foot, where our dynamic axis always rotates. It is always there for every club, which makes this method more repeatable.

“Okay, Ross, so what about ball position?”

Well, there is no ball position—only an athletic setup and its position with respect to the ball. Essentially, we want to use our feet to move our “setup” around until the clubface is right behind the ball and aligned at 90 degrees to our target line.

The concept is this: We have focused on certain setup essentials, and once they are in place, we want to maintain their relationship. We want to use only our feet to move the body as a whole to align the face in the direction we want to hit. This keeps us athletic, connected, square to ourselves, and ready to just unwind and trap the golf ball with our turn.

We do this by using our arm template as a guide. The arm template hangs down, and without reaching out or changing its natural position, we use only our feet to move over to the ball and then just sit down athletically. Everything is already set up and connected, and our body is now right where it needs to be, so we can just unwind our golf swing and trap the ball with our body rotation.

This routine keeps the hands from subconsciously having to fix the downswing due to bad ball position and setup issues. This routine does not take much time to learn. It takes more time to trust because you think you need to take more time to set up than you do. This builds confidence very fast.

FYI: With traditional setups that key off the ball, golfers try to build a setup, adjust body parts, change the clubface, readjust the feet, then bend over and reach out, etc. The body loses all sense of natural athleticism and ends up disconnected. No other athletes that I can think of contort their bodies prior to making an athletic movement like golfers do.

The body knows what to do and how to set up athletically in a ready position. We just want to get that natural setup behind the ball—then forget about the ball and just turn!