How Do You Stack Up?
The Golf Swing Stack is Your Kinematic Chain.
You may have heard the phrase kinematic chain as you have cruised though golf related content on the internet. But what is it actually?
It’s the coordinated sequencing of your body parts to move in a specific way to produce your golf swing.
Kinetic energy is movement energy. But you also have Potential energy in your body muscles.
Potential energy is stored energy and is just as it sounds. It’s the ‘potential’ for energy to obe released, or the yet to be tapped into energy.
In the case of your body and golf swing it’s the energy stored up in the elastic nature of your muscles (and to a lesser degree in tendons and ligaments). Just like is a stretched elastic band.
Once stretched there is stored energy waiting to be released e.g. just like at the top of your backswing.
We use movement energy to tap into the stored energy of muscles to unleash the best and most powerfully controlled swing we can.
Ideally, we use movement energy to coil the body and produce a whip like effect so that there is maximum velocity at the end of the whip -your club head – in the position you want it to be –square at the point of contact with the ball. It’s a similar action to skipping a stone on water.
When skipping a stone, you pull your arm back and externally rotate you shoulder as much as you can. And like a golf swing the first part of the movement is a weight shift toward the lead foot. You begin by driving with your legs as you rotate you hips toward the target.
In fact, the last thing to move is your shoulder and arm. They stay cocked until the last possible moment and are released as all the other parts get into full movement. The shoulder then releases the arm toward the target and the cocked wrist releases to the target last of all.
This whip like action imparts maximum speed into the stone at release.
Our golf swing is very similar to this action of skipping a stone across the top of still water. It is a similar whip like action, except you are a bit more still around your central axis in the golf swing.
What we are doing as we coil into a backswing and release into a downswing is to use movement energy to tap into the stored energy of our muscles around our joints and use them to our advantage. You release the stored energy to produce a whip like motion.
This is your kinematic chain.
One of Newton’s laws states that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. So, for movement energy to tap into stored energy it needs to have something to push against. The ground and gravity are the foundation. But within your swing chain there is a coordination of stability and movement.
Your Golf Swing Stack, or kinematic chain, is made up of 5 stable segments and 5 mobile segments.
Note that they are stable segments, not immobile segments. They act as a platform or a foundation for the mobile segments to release the potential and kinetic energy from.
A good golf swing arises out of a functional coupling of stable joints with mobile platforms that coordinate together to produce the fluid motion that should be your golf swing.
When you add good mobility to strength, you get speed and power, importantly without much effort. It feels easy, almost graceful, yet the ball rockets off the face of your club miles down the fairway, exactly where you want it.
Sounds simple doesn’t it. Well, it is. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy. Sadly, whatever simple steps you need to do well in any endeavour in life, those same steps are always easier not to do. But mindset and motivation are for another discussion.
So a golf swing is the interaction between these mobile and stable couplings that delivers the dynamic forces producing a whip-like motion around a central axis, so that the highest speed is at the ‘whip tip’, the club head, and the crack of the ‘whip’ is about 1-2 feet past the ball.
That might seem like a conundrum but in reality the maximum amount of club speed happens past/after contact with the ball.
Take my word for the moment. It’s physics and not for discussion in this blog post.
Your golf swing begins at the foundation. No matter what you do in life; build a house, start a business, undertake a hobby, or compete in a sport or game, they all need a good foundation to start with.
Without a good foundation, or a good base of support, eventually the ‘walls’ will start to lean, the ‘floor’ begins to tilt, the ‘ceiling’ starts to crack, the roof ends up off kilter, and your ‘house’ is a mess.
That’s why you need some form of strength training to improve your golf swing. You need a level of strength to keep your stable segments stable throughout the motion. And you need mobility, which is strength throughout the full range of motion of your mobile segments, also.
If there is a restriction, blockage, lack of mobility in any of the mobile segments it will dramatically affect your swing. The research is pretty clear on that.
