I’ve got a tip for you today that’s going to make you squeeze your glutes like Tiger Woods.

We’re going to talk about why most amateur golfers struggle using their butt correctly. And so, there’s an infamous quote by Tiger Woods saying his glutes were on fire.

He said, “It’s just my glutes are shutting off.”

“Then they don’t activate and then, hence, it goes into my lower back. So, I tried to activate my glutes as best I could, in between, but they never stayed activated.”

Today, we’re going to talk about what that meant.

When we’re going through our golf swing, we want to make sure we’re using our glute muscles appropriately. So, what happens is, most players will do the proverbial ‘butt off the wall’, and most of the time, what happens is, we’re not activating the right muscles in our body to stabilize ourselves in the golf swing.

So, I found a drill that works pretty well at keeping your glutes activated, but also helping increase rotation in your turn, because if your knee gets trapped inside your hip, you’re limiting how much you can turn your body, and then we result to slides and thrusts, and we’re just in trouble. So, what we want to do is, we want to feel like… We get set up in our normal stance, and we want to push our knees out just a little bit, and preferably, we don’t want to see our right knee go out.

We want to see our front foot, my left leg, go out a little bit and apply a little pressure. Now, we can flare our left foot out a little bit, so we can turn it from here to there, get a little extra pressure out there, and keep that band nice and tight. So, what we want to feel is, when we go to the top of our backswing, we want to feel that band stay nice and tight, and you’ll feel this in the back of your butt and down the outside of your legs as you squeeze to activate the right muscles in your lower body to get it to the top. Then, we start the downswing. We want to keep that wide.

We’ll feel our butt stay back as we start that downswing. We’re turning this from a good forward bend, a good squat-like, deadlift-like motion. Get to here, and then we let them touch together to the finish, but we have to maintain the width in our knees all the way until we get our hands ready for delivery.

So, we go up to the top, keep the band nice and wide, we start our downswing, we get our arm set, ready to go for the hit, squeeze the bands together, or our knees together, and release down to our target. If you do this drill enough…

This is one that you can do in the house as well. If you do this drill enough, your glute muscles will become a little bit stronger, but you’ll also learn how to maintain stability through the hit in the downswing. A lot of lower-body instability is what creates the inconsistency in your strike. So, by keeping this band just above your knees, so I’ve got my kneecaps here, just a little bit above, you’re going to try and keep the flex as you go to the top, keep the flex as you start down, and then squeeze together to the finish. If you do it all correctly, it’ll look a little something like this.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how you really put both cheeks into the hit. Take this band, do the drills. Knees apart, flare the front foot out. Try and keep that left knee to put a little tension on that band. Turn to the top; keep the width. Start your downswing until your hips get parallel. Keep the knees wide until your hips are parallel. Squeeze the knees together, go to your finish, and you’ll be on your way to activating those glutes.