How to Stop Body Movement in a Golf Swing

Feeling like your body is moving all over the place during your golf swing? It’s one of the most common and frustrating issues in golf, leading to a maddening mix of fat shots, thin shots, slices, and then hooks. This guide will walk you through exactly why excessive body movement kills your consistency and provide you with a clear, step-by-step framework and practical drills to build a stable, powerful, and repeatable golf swing.

Why Too Much Body Movement Kills Your Swing

In golf, we often hear that power comes from the body. That’s absolutely true. But there's a huge difference between controlled, powerful rotation and uncontrolled, power-sapping movement. Think of your golf swing as a rotation around a fixed point - your spine. The big idea is to turn your shoulders and hips around this central axis, storing up energy like a coiled spring and then releasing it through the ball.

When you introduce excessive lateral movement (swaying side-to-side) or vertical movement (lifting up and down), that central point shifts. When your center moves, the bottom of your swing arc moves with it. Here’s what happens next:

• Inconsistent Contact: If you sway away from the ball on the backswing, you have to perfectly sway back to the exact starting position to hit the ball solidly... a nearly impossible task to repeat. This leads to hitting the ground behind the ball (fat shots) or catching the very top of the ball on an upswing (thin shots).
• Loss of Power: A sway is a "power leak." Instead of coiling your muscles for an explosive release, you're just sliding your weight around. All that stored energy dissipates before it can ever get to the golf club.
• Poor Direction Control: When your body is out of position, your arms and hands are forced to compensate to try and "save" the shot. This brings wild timing into play and leads to nasty hooks and slices because you're relying entirely on touch instead of a stable, repeatable motion.

Top golfers look smooth and effortless because they eliminate this unnecessary movement. They rotate powerfully, not sway inefficiently. Let's dig into how you can build that same stability.

The Foundation: Locking In a Stable Setup

Nearly all problems with excess body movement can be traced back to an unstable setup. If you start in an unbalanced or weak position, your body will naturally try to find stability during the swing. This is a losing battle. The purpose of your setup is to create a strong, athletic, and balanced foundation that promotes rotation and resists sway.

Step-by-Step Stable Setup:

1. Stance Width: For mid-irons, a great starting point is to have your feet shoulder-width apart, measuring from the insides of your heels to the outsides of your shoulders. A stance that's too narrow makes it easy to lose balance, while a stance that's too wide restricts a proper hip turn and actually encourages a sway.
2. Proper Posture: Hinge forward from your hips, not your waist. Feel like you are pushing your butt backwards as you tilt your chest over the ball, keeping your back fairly straight. Then, just let your arms hang naturally down from your shoulders. Many golfers stand up too tall and have to reach for the ball, which encourages lifting and swaying. Getting into a good athletic posture from the start primes the right muscles for the job.
3. Light Knee Flex: Your knees should have a soft, athletic flex, just enough to feel springy. They shouldn't be deeply bent like you're sitting in a chair. A deep bend actually locks up your hips, making it much harder to turn. Think of the flex in your knees as a supporter of the hip turn, not a source of movement itself.
4. Balanced Weight: Your weight should be distributed 50/50 between your left and right foot and centered over the balls of your feet. You should feel grounded and stable, ready to react. Rock back and forth gently to find that perfect center of balance before you start your swing.

Taking just 10 seconds to really dial in your setup can solve a huge number of swing issues before they even begin.

The Backswing: Turn, Don't Sway

This is where the most common mistake happens: the dreaded lateral sway. So many players have been told they need a "weight shift," so they start their swing by sliding their hips sideways, moving their entire body off the ball. A powerful backswing is a turn, a wind-up of your torso.

The "Stay in a Barrel" Analogy

Imagine you're standing inside a large barrel, snug against the outside of both of your hips. During your backswing, your goal is to turn your shoulders and hips without bumping into the sides of that barrel. This mental image does a fantastic job of promoting a proper rotational motion instead of a lazy, sideways slide.

As you are making your backswing, feel your trail hip turn back and deep, as if it’s moving away from the ball to make room. At the same time, your lead shoulder should turn down and across your chest. This creates the feeling of coiling your upper body against the stability of your lower body. That feeling of tension and separation is the true source of effortless power.

The Downswing: Sequence From the Ground Up

Once you’ve made a great, coiled turn, the downswing is all about proper sequencing. An out-of-control downswing is often a lunge - where the shoulders and upper body throw themselves at the ball from the top of the swing. All that move accomplishes is sending the club over the top, leading to weak slices or sharp pulls to the left.

A powerful downswing starts from the ground up. Here is a simple look at the sequence:

1. The "Bump": The very first move from the top is a slight shift, or "bump," of your hips toward the target. It’s a small lateral move that transfers pressure to your lead foot and makes space for your club to drop onto the correct path from the inside.
2. The Unwind: As soon as that hip "bump" happens, your torso and shoulders begin to unwind explosively toward the target. Because you stayed centered on the backswing, all that coiled energy has nowhere to go but straight through the ball.
3. The Arms Follow: Your arms and the club are just along for the ride during this powerful unwind. You aren't trying to swing the club with your arms, you are letting the rotation of your body sling them through impact.

This sequence naturally creates a downward angle of attack with your irons, allowing you to compress the golf ball for that pure, flush feeling every golfer craves.

Drills to Tame Unwanted Swing Movement

Talking about these feelings is one thing, but ingraining them is another. Here are three simple but incredibly effective drills to help you feel the stability of a great golf swing.

1. The Feet-Together Drill

This one is the ultimate test of balance. If you sway or lunge with your feet touching each other, you will lose your balance immediately.

• How to do it: Address the ball with a mid-iron, but place your feet so they are completely touching. Make smooth, half-to-three-quarter swings. You'll instantly notice that the only way to stay balanced is to rotate your torso around a single axis. Any bit of sway will cause you to stumble. Hit short shots this way until the feeling of pure rotation becomes second nature.

2. The Alignment Stick "Gates" Drill

This drill gives you instant visual and physical feedback if you sway off the ball.

• How to do it: Take two alignment sticks and push them into the ground a few inches outside of each of your feet, creating "gates." From your setup, your hips should be inside these gates. Your goal is simple: make practice swings without letting your hips touch either stick. If you sway back, you'll hit the trail stick. If you slide too far forward on the downswing, you'll hit the lead stick.

3. The Head-Against-the-Wall Drill

This is a classic for a reason. It stops both lateral sway and any vertical "lifting" in your posture.

• How to do it (No-Club Zone): Find a wall and get into your golf posture so the side of your head is just lightly touching it. Make slow backswings. If your head presses harder into the wall or comes off of it, you're swaying or lifting up out of the shot. The feeling of keeping your head in one place while your shoulders and body turn underneath it is a breakthrough sensation for most players.

4. The Balanced Finish Drill

This is not so much a drill as it is a goal after every swing. A balanced and perfect finish tells us that we did everything right in the middle of the swing, as opposed to what a lot of other amateurs will show you when swinging out of their shoes, falling back, falling left, and still wondering why their shot went wrong.

• How to do it: Hit a shot, but after you've hit the ball, your number one priority is to hold the finish for three or four solid seconds.

If you can do that with your belt buckle pointing to the target, with 90% of your weight on the lead side of your body, and the trail foot balanced on its toe, you've executed a stable, powerful swing.

Controlling your body movement isn't about restricting yourself, it's about being more efficient with your body. By building a solid, functional foundation in your setup and focusing on a pure turn over a weak sway, you'll find a reservoir of consistency and power you may not have known you had.

Practicing these drills is a great way to build muscle memory, but getting specific feedback during a round is how you truly improve. For that, we developed Caddie AI to be both a swing coach and an on-course Caddie, helping you diagnose your swing and make smarter decisions right from your pocket. Instead of wondering why a shot went wrong or what the right play is from a tricky lie, you can get an expert-level answer in seconds. The whole point is to take the guesswork out of your game so you can stand over every shot with more clarity and confidence.