Before the PGA Show in Florida last week, I made a pit stop to see Golf Digest Top 50 Teacher Shaun Webb. Shaun, alongside Golf Digest Best in State Teacher Mike Granato, are the two men behind Athletic Motion Golf, which recently opened a high-tech facility in Orlando.
I’ve been spending time wanting to make some upgrades to my golf swing, and the problem I brought to Shaun was three-fold:
- The issue I run into is that my right arm tends to get “stuck” behind my body (left frame).
- In order to get my arms back out in front of me, I throw away all shape in my body (middle frame).
- On my release, you can see how my arms fling way out to the right (right frame).
It’s a common downswing problem which can often turn right-to-left draws into blocks and hooks. Shaun explained how the backswing was the root cause of my issue.
Are you ‘cheating’ your backswing?
Taking a closer look at my golf swing under the watchful eye of a second opinion, I was falling into the trap of cheating my backswing turn. This happens when golfers try making bigger backswings than their body’s range of motion allows. They turn, then hit the wall of what they’re physically capable of, which causes different parts of their swing to collapse.
Sometimes you’ll see golfers lose their grip on the club or lift out of their posture. For me, it was causing my right arm to collapse slightly, drawing it too close to my body, leading to the stuck issue.
In essence, I was cheating my backswing turn – making my swing look long, but lacking the good, powerful stretch golfers need in their body to generate power. Like the way the golfer below gets his club close to parallel at the top of his backswing, but without much stretch. You can tell he’s not generating much power from there.
My goal, basically, became to feel more width and stretch in my arms – especially my right arm. I worked on keeping my right arm stretched wide away from my body on the backswing. Just as PGA Tour player Michael Kim explains in the example below, it made my golf swing look slightly shorter, but it forced me to turn more. As Kim’s coach and Golf Digest’s No.3-ranked Teacher Sean Foley later explained to me:
“When you get yourself in that position, with that wide arm structure at the top of your backswing, your muscles are organised in a way which forces you to use your body for power.”
Most of you that have “too long” of a backswing, turn less to keep it near parallel.
In actuality, you have too long of a swing mostly because of ur wrist cock NOT from turning too much. If you think you have too long of a swing, try to really limit ur wrist cock and keep your… pic.twitter.com/C5D4M7ZaU3— Michael S. Kim (@Mike_kim714) November 26, 2023
Nicolai Hojgaard is particularly good at this, as you can see here. Super wide with his arms and wrists, but super turned with his shoulders:
Nicolai Hojgaard at the top.
A lot of golfers judge a backswing’s length by the club, which isn’t even at parallel.
A better way is to look at the shoulder of turn, which is absolutely enormous. pic.twitter.com/BVz10pMJPu
— LKD (@LukeKerrDineen) September 28, 2023
Anyway, more stretch, width and organisation on my backswing landed my downswing in a much better spot.
Time to get to work, and for the rest of us, learn the lesson some good coaches taught me: don’t cheat your backswing turn and collapse your arm. Feel the width and stretch – that’s where power is.
