Golf Digest’s No. 1-ranked teacher Mark Blackburn came on the Golf IQ podcast recently and dropped some serious knowledge. Knowledge about what many golfers consider the ugliest part of their golf swing:
Early Extension
According to stats from the AI-driven Mustard Golf App (which you can download right here), about 17 percent of all golfers measured suffer from early extension as their primary swing thought.
Early extension, if you’re not familiar, is when your hips move towards the ball during your downswing, making timing and consistency tough.
Lots of golfers key in on this as a problem, and they’re right to. But as Mark explains, it may not be the thing they should rush to fix first:
“Often what we call early extension can be more of an effect rather than a cause,” Blackburn says. “Something else is happening which is causing the things we don’t like later on.”
It’s fixing the root cause that will land your golf swing in a better spot, and fix that ugly early extension problem along the way.
What are those root causes? Glad you asked!
You can listen to our two-part podcast with No. 1-ranked coach Mark Blackburn right here, or below:
1. You can’t move your upper and lower bodies independently
Every good golf swing requires some separation between the upper and lower body. As you start your downswing, your lower body shifts and turns while your upper body hangs back. This is called an “X-factor stretch,” and it creates power along with lots of other good stuff.
But many golfers struggle to dissociate their lower and upper bodies—turn their hips without also turning their upper body. That means that as your hips start turning, your upper body does, too. It drags the club over the top, and early extension is what you’re forced to do to hit the ball.
“Most golfers get flagged because their upper body is outracing their lower body because they may not have the mobility to move each segment independently,” he says. “As we age, especially for males, I would encourage them to do Yoga, Pilates, Stretching, that kind of stuff, because that’s going to increase their range of motion. That’s going to give them a more propensity to be able to move better. So they have a chance of disassociating.”
Here’s a good exercise to help with this.
2. Trying to chop down on the golf ball
It’s difficult for golfers to resist the natural urge to chop down on the golf ball when it’s on the ground—it makes sense, after all. But chopping down often requires a severe upper body movement which, again, drags the club over the top. And over the top moves are very often a precursor to early extension.
“Remember golf is kind of a diagonal strike,” Blackburn explains. “The feeling of hitting the back and side of the golf ball, not directly down on top of it.”
Here’s a good fix for it.
3. Ignoring your golf swing’s moment of truth
Ultimately it’s what happens earlier in your downswing that causes (or prevents) your early extension move. In the Mustard app, Blackburn and student Justin Rose call this the “moment of truth.” If you don’t like what’s happening later in your swing, look there first.
“The moment of truth really refers to that point just before the last parallel where the club is kind of slotted,” he says. “It’s actually something Justin Rose coined the moment of truth because it’s where in his mind it’s the last part where you can really affect what the club is doing. So you need to get that right.
How do you get that part right?
4. Bad downswing sequence
Having a good moment of truth requires having a good golf swing sequence. That means moving your body in this order:
- Shift
- Rotate
- Rise
Many golfers either don’t shift enough or ignore it altogether. Because they skipped a step, now they’re rotating too soon (as we described above) and then, rising too soon (hence it being called “early” extension).
“If I get to the top of my backswing and I want to imagine that my back is facing the target, and then my lower body or my pelvis starts moving first. That creates this chain of events, that kinematic sequence we call it, where the club starts to shallow lines up in the moment of truth.”
5. Too much extension, too soon
The dirty truth about early extension is that it can, for some golfers, be useful. Especially if you’re trying to hit a draw.
When you early extend, your body moves towards the ball, which means by default your arms move more behind your body, which can help golfers swing more from the inside. It’s why players who hit draws tend to early extend. Not a bad thing, Blackburn says, as long as you don’t overdo it.
“Many golfers use extension to help them shallow the club and hit draws,” Blackburn says. “The problem is the early part. Too early and it can cause a comedy of errors in your golf swing.”
6. Bad clubface awareness
Often, early extension begins to happen when golfers lose a sense of where the clubface is as they swing. The more aware they are of their club and clubface, the better their body will move. This can be as simple as making half swings, or practicing swinging the club in slow motion.
“I think most of the time people can swing in a direction, but they can’t control the clubface,” Blackburn says. “So club golfers, let’s say they don’t do a great job understanding how to control the club face, they may inherently swing left to try and make the ball go straight.”
Jesse Rieser
7. Fake backswing turn
We’ve talked a lot about the downswing here, but it’s true that a good backswing can set up a good downswing. And the problem is a lot of golfers fake their backswing turn. Their arms collapse, making their backswing look longer than it actually is. It puts them in an unbalanced, unathletic position which they need to compensate to get out of. Early extension is one of those compensations.
8. Pelvis spins instead of loading
Turning your hips on the backswing is not the same thing as loading on the backswing. Loading means you’re leveraging; getting your body in a good position to push and turn against the ground using the stronger muscles in your legs. When you simply turn, you’re not only costing yourself power, you’re preventing yourself from being able to turn through powerfully—making it easy to early extend.
This article was originally published on golfdigest.com
