One of the biggest challenges recreational golfers face is maintaining their posture throughout the swing. Standing up out of the shot — also known as “losing your incline to the ground” — leads to thin shots, inconsistent contact and all sorts of compensations.
According to GOLFTEC Director of Teaching Quality Josh Troyer, the fix starts with understanding one simple relationship: the connection between your forward bend at address and your shoulder tilt at the top of the backswing.
Every golfer begins the swing by establishing an incline to the ground at setup — essentially your posture, spine angle and forward bend. On the PGA Tour, players average about 40 degrees of forward shoulder bend at address. Keeping that posture intact throughout the backswing is crucial.
What elite players do exceptionally well is maintain that incline to the ground by matching their shoulder tilt to their original posture as they turn. They don’t hold their body static, but they do coordinate their movement.
Tour pros typically tilt their shoulders to the left about three degrees less than their original forward bend at address. So, if a player begins with 40 degrees of bend at address, they’ll arrive at the top with around 37 degrees shoulder tilt. That close relationship is what keeps their head steady and their posture intact.
Most amateurs, however, don’t tilt nearly enough. They might start at 40 degrees forward but reach only 20–22 degrees of shoulder tilt by the top of the backswing. That creates a much flatter turn, and on camera you’ll see their head rise out of posture.
“They start to stand up,” Troyer says. “They come out of their posture, and that creates inconsistent low points and a lot of compensations in the downswing.
The key point: the actual numbers matter less than the relationship between them. If a golfer sets up with 30 degrees of forward bend, maintaining posture means reaching about 27 degrees of shoulder tilt at the top of the backswing. Trying to force a 30-degree setup into a 37-degree shoulder tilt would actually cause the head to dip toward the ball and disrupt posture in the opposite direction.
Understanding that relationship between your incline to the ground and your shoulder tilt is essential. Get those two elements in sync, Troyer says, and you’ve solved one of the foundational pieces of a consistent golf swing.
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