Last week I started the conversation on the crucial importance of a sound posture and setup. Very simply, quality golf shots and consistent performance absolutely require it.

As you watch golf on TV, or when you page through the golf magazines, pay particularly close attention to the setup posture of the players, especially when the cameraman is directly behind the golfer, looking down the target line. While you will see some degree of “personalization” of address posture, it’s not nearly as much as you notice even in your own group of golf buddies. The basic fundamentals of a good starting position are not really all that flexible.

To get your body in position to execute a powerful and repeating golf swing, certain things are just not negotiable:

1. Your legs have to be flexed at the knees so that you are in an athletic position, which allows your body to move properly.
2. Your upper torso should be bent over at the hips, not the waist so that your spine is relatively straight. That allows your shoulders and hips to turn on the same plane, back and through.
3. Your head should be up so that your left shoulder can turn under your chin without getting trapped.
4. And most importantly, your left arm should be in an almost vertical position, hanging naturally from your shoulders. This positions your hands almost directly under your shoulders and creates a definite angle formed by the left arm and the shaft of the club.

While you can see all sorts of contortions from this set of fundamentals, I believe the most common error I see in golfers at address is that their hands are too far from their body, reaching toward the ball so that their left arm and the shaft form almost a straight line. That is not a power position at all as it severely restricts the proper motion of the clubhead through the impact zone.

With the hands starting in a much more natural “low & close” position at address, they can more easily “find” that position as they pass through the impact zone. And only from this position can you accurately achieve the powerful and proper rotational release of the club through impact.

I’m convinced one of the real “secrets” to playing good golf is the understanding that the release through impact is not as much an unhinging of the wrists as it is a rotation of the arms and hands that produces a tremendous magnification of clubhead speed as a multiple of arm speed. And that’s what we are all after.

What you are trying to achieve in your setup is to get in the right athletic position to execute a sound and powerful golf swing. And what your routine is designed to do is to get you in exactly that same position each and every time you take a shot.

I hope you are enjoying this deep dive into the basics of good golf that happen before the club even moves away from the ball.

Next week, I’ll wrap this up with a detailed examination of just how to build a proper and repeating setup that anyone can learn and use to improve their golf almost immediately.