I spent most of last Tuesday afternoon going back-and-forth on the PGA National range, and for a big chunk of that time I saw PGA Tour player Harry Hall doing the same thing: making a three-quarter-length backswing, pausing for a moment, then finishing his backswing and swinging through.
It was a drill assigned to him as homework by Hall’s coach, the legendary Butch Harmon, and one the rest of us can learn from.
“It was the first thing Butch had me do when I saw him for the first time last summer,” Hall says. “I spent more than an hour doing it yesterday.”
What the drill fixes
Hall has the same tendency that lots of golfers have: he tends to cheat his backswing turn. The club gets long at the top of his backswing – past where his current flexibility ends – so his right arm begins bending, or collapsing to compensate.
Butch has an especially keen eye for this swing flaw, and he’s helped lots of top golfers fix it. Phil Mickelson, most notably.
“He swung his arms back too far relative to his shoulder turn, creating a long but narrow arc with the club across the line at the top,” Harmon wrote for Golf Digest in 2010. “His swing was long but narrow, with his hands too close to his head.”
That’s why Hall is doing the pause drill.
“I tend to get a little long and a little narrow, and when I get to the top there and I just hit it from a pause position, I’m in the right spot,” Hall says. “I want to feel my right hand as far away from my body as possible. The more width you have, the better it is for a draw golfer.”
Stretching his right arm wide has helped Hall enjoy a good run of form, with two top 10s and another top 25 in six starts this PGA Tour season.
4 TLDR takeaways
- When you turn past your natural range of motion, your arms collapse.
- This can create timing and consistency issues, says Butch Harmon.
- Keep your right arm wide at the top of the backswing.
- Hall’s pause-then-go drill can prevent your right arm from collapsing.
