A long way back: Daniel Berger is healthy and contending again thanks to big swing changes.
When Daniel Berger decided to shut things down after the 2022 US Open, he and his team spent a lot of time looking at 3-D motion capture hoping to pinpoint what was leading to severe lower-back pain. It didn’t take long to find the answers.
“Some things are very obvious when it comes to causing back pain in golf and he had three of them,” says his swing coach, Golf Digest Teaching Professional Mark Blackburn. “The combination was murder on his back.”
His problems started at address. Instead of hinging from his pelvis, Berger would arch his lower back, which put undue stress on the facet joints in his lower lumbar spine. Then, because his shoulders turned too flat and he struggled to get his arms up on the backswing, “he would end up in a massive reverse spine angle to elevate the club,” Blackburn says. The reverse pivot led to the third and perhaps most destructive movement – an excessive lateral hip slide towards the target on the downswing, causing a lot of backward bend and way too much stress on the lumbar vertebrae.
For seven months while recovering, Berger didn’t hit a single ball. Then, with the help of Blackburn and his trainer, Golf Digest Chief Fitness Adviser Ben Shear, the four-time PGA Tour winner began attacking each of these flaws incrementally, starting with his posture. He returned to the PGA Tour full-time in January 2024.
“It’s a very long process when you’re used to swinging the club the same way for 20-plus years,” says Berger, whose runner-up finish at the RSM Classic in November was his best since winning the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am in February 2021. “I had to rewire my brain from all that muscle memory I had built up since I was 11.”
Step one was to neutralise the arch in his back at address. Then they significantly reduced the amount of torso extension and arm lift in his backswing by steepening his shoulder turn [above, fourth image]. This helped bring the club up more, so he didn’t overswing and fall into a reverse pivot.
The final piece was to reduce the amount of lateral movement, which they did by placing a knee-high obstacle outside his lead leg. That encouraged him to post up instead of sliding. Berger now rotates more aggressively around to the left [above, sixth and seventh images] and that move frees him up to hit a piercing cut off the tee. It’s a big reason why Berger ranked fifth in driving accuracy (70.4 percent) and 14th in total driving on the PGA Tour in 2024.
“A healthy Daniel Berger was top-12 in the world,” Blackburn says. “These adjustments will keep him healthy and allow him to be that player again.”
Photo by: Dom Furore
