Polo Swing Technique Tips: The Swing Plane Exercise

fitness for polo polo swing technique & stickwork Nov 21, 2020
 

This is a brilliant little exercise to make sure that your swing plane is correct.

You will also find some great tips on the correct polo swing technique.

Enjoy and let me know your thoughts or questions through a comment below.


Polo Swing Technique Tips: The Swing Plane Exercise

Transcription:

Another really good exercise that will help you to get your swing planes, right? Is if you can find A doorway or the corner Of a house, if this was a corner that would work quite well or in a doorway like this, okay? Then if you stand with your foot in the doorway like this, if the ball was here, you would want your head over the top of it.

Now get your mallet in the correct position to approach the ball. And you can now see that as you turn to come back, The wall itself helps you. And now you can look back and see if you're in fact on plane to come through. What I don't want you to do is to look back, to check your mallet as you take it back,

because that causes an over rotation of your body. As you take the mallet back, which is not what you want to do on the horse and would also make that whole swing plane not work for you. So keep yourself anchored, take it back and then just check you, see that outside. If you took it back there, now that's inside. So this is a very good indicator and that's perfect.

And then you come down. So that is what you would try and do. If your swing plane is such that it comes back inside and that's your problem. Because as you come back wrong here, that corner will Hook you all the time. If Your problem is more that you go out and you find that you aren't all the time, then stand next to the wall like this.

And again, get into that hitting position. And as you rotate back, you will see that that also helps you create the plane that you talking about.

So the big thing for me is that you've got to be really careful that you understand that when you rotate backwards, it's as if this part of your body was frozen in a block of ice, you've got your reins here, but as you rotate your shoulders back, that takes the mallet back.

You don't take them back independently of your shoulders. You don't take your hand back independently of your shoulders, because otherwise you never ever able to get it back behind you.

What you would do is rotate your shoulder and then extend. And then that mallet works really well in the plane that I'm talking about.

So rotate shoulder extend and swing, and you can see here how your body is not overturning because your foot is quiet. And on the horse itself, you don't want to turn and get that foot out like that, because again, it over rotates you and it gets that swing plane really bad. The lower half of you stays very quiet. You rotate there.

There's the coil of the hips. The coil goes from lift hip to shoulder and in the downswing that shoulder pulling forward is what pulls the mallet down. So there's the start of the swing and you can see how everything then works on plane. But the biggest thing, just to check yourself, as I say, come stand in a doorway there there's the swing plane working and come stand next to a war.

And here again, if you try and turn your hand only, you will see that it hits the wall. So it encourages you to make the shoulder turn, to take the mallet back and then extend and swing.