Clinic - The Backswing

The perfect golf backswing awaits with two simple moves.

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I want you to have a big, big body turn and a tiny little arm swing.

If that's your mantra for the entire backswing, golf is going to be way easier for you.

And I don't mean it just as saying it and chanting it in your head.

I want you to actually do it.

I don't want you just to watch the videos.

I want you to actually do it.

If you focus on making a big turn and barely move your arms, what you're going to feel is barely moving your arms, which from what I saw yesterday from a lot of us is going to be a big change, then the whole backswing becomes insanely simple.

And I'm going to show you in just a minute.

We're going to get up and we're going to start moving around and doing this stuff.

But before I do that, I want to give you a couple of different examples and a big picture idea of what's really going on in the backswing.

And I use this acronym here of REF, rotation, elevation, flexion.

You've probably seen that on the site.

It's really what you're trying to do in the swing.

You're trying to rotate.

Very simple.

Let your body rotate.

Yes, your arms are rotating.

There's a lot of stuff rotating, but this is really dealing with your body.

Your arms are going to elevate.

And then the last thing I do is let that right arm flex.

If you can put those three things together, that is kind of the whole backswing in a nutshell.

Yes, weight shift is in there, but this is really focusing on your upper body stuff.

And as I just discussed, everybody can make a full shoulder turn.

It's not your flexibility, no matter what anybody tells you.

If you can make a 45 degree shoulder turn, which all of you sitting in your chair right now can turn at least 45 degrees, many of you much, much more than that, and turn your hips 45 degrees, which all of you can turn your hips 45 degrees, because some of you can turn probably 80, then why couldn't you make a full shoulder turn?

What keeps you from making a full shoulder turn?

Okay.

Why would pushing stop you from making a full shoulder turn?

That's right.

That's right.

You're not making a full shoulder turn because you're not trying to turn your shoulders.

You're not making a full shoulder turn because you're swinging your arms in golf club.

You can make a full shoulder turn if you prioritize turning your shoulders.

If you want to get your back to the target, turn your back.

It's simple.

It's all doing with moving from the wrong place at the wrong time.

That's going to keep you from making a full shoulder turn.

There should be so little tension in your upper body that this should be a no brainer.

It's just like turning and talking to your neighbor.

It's like, Hey, what's up?

My shoulders are totally chilled out.

The only thing you've got to do is help that club go up to the top, But you're going to use the momentum that your body rotation is generating to help you swing that club to the top.

It's not like you got to lift it up there all by yourself.

There's a lot of momentum there.

Use it.

That way your arms can stay relaxed.

Your shoulders can stay relaxed the whole time.

I want to point out a couple of examples here.

I'm going to give anybody a free hat if they can guess who this is.

I saw everybody's eyes like, Oh, who's that?

Oh, it's not.

Oh, I'm insulted.

It's a trick question.

But this is a PGA Tour player who now is in the booth or on the golf channel because he couldn't make it as a tour pro anymore.

He's a very, very talented athlete and he's from Kentucky.

That's all I can give you.

No, no.

This is really testing you.

Oh, that's a good one.

It's not Tripp, but that is a good guess.

No, not Faldo.

Faldo would look more like the other two guys.

He struggled with hooks his whole career and you should probably be able to figure out why.

He's on the golf channel.

He's bald.

Man, I'm throwing everything at you.

No guesses?

All right.

It's Steve Flesch.

That's why it's a trick.

It's easier to compare the two if I flip him around to be a righty.

But yeah, he's a lefty.

That's why nobody ever gets it.

I think I might have had one person ever guess it.

But anyway, Steve Flesch, his whole career struggled with hooking it.

And he's a phenomenal athlete.

If you look at his dynamics of his body movement, they're the best in the business.

His weight shift, his post -up move, his impact position, as good as it ever got.

But he struggled with hooks mightily his whole career.

Why do you think he hooked Okay.

So you've got to.

When you combine something, a deep position with your arms, which you can see his right arm, in his case his left arm technically, is buried way out here behind his body.

It's, you know, basically 180 degrees to his chest.

And these guys both have green jackets and have their arms in front of their body.

When you combine that with a really good transition and weight shift, what's going to happen to your arms?

My arms are buried way back here, and then I shift my weight really well.

They're stuck.

That's all there is to it.

There's no way that if you shift your weight really well, that you're going to get your arms back in front of your body from there.

So what would you do to get his arms back there?

Just stop freaking moving your arms across your chest.

If you took his arms and had him turn and just allow this little bit of flexion, why would his arms be back here?

They would never get there.

So this guy did everything right with his body, but because he mucked up this one thing, he spent his whole career chasing this.

He went to Butch Harmon to try and fix it because he was losing his tour card.

Didn't fix the problem.

Started putting some band-aids on it.

What do you see with his left wrist here?

Cupped.

Why is he cupping his wrist?

All right, if you're hooking it, what would you do?

Let's keep that club face open, right?

Let's not fix the problem.

Let's fix the symptom and start opening that club face.

Look how open that club face is.

It's completely vertical, toed down.

Look at these guys.

These club faces match their forearms.

His is wide open.

He didn't fix the problem.

The problem is so blatantly obvious, but instead of trying to fix that, he's just trying to put band-aids on it, open the club face off, hold the club face off, et cetera.

And that ended his career.

You guys in the next five minutes are going to be able to fix this problem because you're going to understand what's really causing it and how to fix it.

So how do we get to look like these two guys and get our green jackets on?

Really simple.

Take your arms, put them right in front of your chest.

Straight, okay?

I want you to elevate your arms from your shoulders to where your hands are about the base of your chest.

You've just done 90% of the backswing.

Now, take your right arm and fold it while allowing your left arm to rotate while staying straight.

Your hands should be about the height of your forehead.

And notice that my hands, I'll do it straight on facing you, I can barely see you through my right eye because my forearm is blocking it and my hands are right in line with my shoulders.

You guys see that?

See how you can't see my right eye through my left forearm?

If I can see your right eye, there's a problem.

This arm is vertical, 90 degrees to my chest and right in front of my shoulder.

My left hand is at about 45 degrees to the ground.

It's not bowed.

It's not cupped.

It's just about 45 degrees to the ground.

And it's perfectly straight.

Keep this arm straight.

If it's not straight, you're probably bending this arm too much.

Now, as you're doing this, you should feel no tension in your arms really.

If you feel tension, yes, I know.

You guys all feel a lot of tension.

I can stand here for the rest of the day and talk to you and I have no tension in my shoulders.

If there's tension here, you're trying to force something.

This is not that hard of a move.

This is something you get a third grader to do.

Take your arm, fold it up here, swing your left arm up here to grab it.

You shouldn't be tight here.

Okay, so relax your shoulders.

Your muscles are going to move a lot easier if you relax.

You may feel a little bit.

It shouldn't be tension.

You're going to notice muscular activation because your arms are having to work to do a little bit to hold them up there, right?

But definitely not tension, okay?

All right, so we've all just put our arms.

I'm going to walk you back through this now.

So if Tiger turned his head and looked at us, you'd kind of be in the exact same spot, right?

His elbow is a little bit back behind his shoulder, which is okay because there's a little momentum swinging the hands back there.

If you look at Trevor's, his elbow is right in front of his shoulder, right?

You guys see that?

Okay, now the amount of elevation that these guys have is a variable in rotary swing.

You can have more elevation or less elevation.

Which would you want to have in which case?

Does it matter?

Okay, so if you want to be like Davis Love III, he has a lot of elevation, right?

That's the only difference.

You look at Tiger, his elbow is below the base of his pec.

His pec is right about here and his is down here.

So he's elevated his elbow only to about here.

It's perfectly okay.

I like to use a little more elevation to have a little bit more width, but it's a preference.

It's not a fundamental of rotary swing.

It's a variable.

It's okay to be somewhere in that range and the choice is yours, okay?

So now all we do is once we get our arms in this position, all we've got to do is get in our setup position.

So I'm going to put my arms right here.

I'm going to turn so you guys can see me.

So I'm just going to stand here.

Make sure my arms are just right.

You always do this from standing straight up.

The reason being is you can easily check if this is in the right spot, if your eye is blocked, if your hand is 45 degrees to the ground.

So always start standing straight up with your arms perfectly in front of your chest.

Then all I'm going to do is hinge forward.

Now notice as I hinge forward, I don't let my arms drop.

So wherever I elevated to, if it's the base of my chest, they're going to stay at the base of my chest as I hinge forward and get in my axis tilt.

And now all I'm going to do is just make a big turn to the top.

Now what do my arms look like?

Does it look like I'm in the same spot as Tiger there?

It's the same move.

This is how you get there.

The trick is, The reason this is hard for you guys is because instead of moving your arms straight up and down in front of your body, you do what with your arms?

You swing them around your body.

Your arms don't swing around your body in the golf swing.

They move up and down and that's it.

Your arms move vertically while your body rotates.

In one of the videos, Clay, it says cover your right eye.

I kept trying to cover it from back.

Shit, I couldn't figure it out.

Struggling, struggling.

Yeah, you always start from straight up and down so that we can check and make sure it's perfect.

It's really easy to get it right when you're standing straight up.

And then you're like, oh, okay, look in a mirror.

Oh, that's exactly what it's supposed to look like.

You then get in your posture and go to the top and then look at it in a mirror and be like, oh, that's how easy it is to get there.

So the reason this is difficult for you is because you're trying to follow the momentum of the golf club.

The golf swing, if you think about it from a down the line perspective, so if I was hitting the ball that way, from this view has kind of two dimensions.

It's got vertical movement, right?

Because the club's starting on the deck and it's going to move up here.

So there's vertical movement.

We agree with that.

What other dimension does it have?

Depth, right?

Around.

Because the club's not going to stay in front of my body.

This would just be a vertical.

This would be a chopping motion.

I can't hit the ball from here very far, so I've got to move into the depth dimension.

The way that you move the club into the depth dimension is not the way that you're doing it.

You're doing it with your arms.

If I swing my arms into the depth dimension, what's going to happen to my rotation?

I'm not going to have any.

And what are my arms going to look like?

They're going to be buried.

That's how I get stuck.

If I want to hit a bunch of snap hooks, that's how I'll do it.

So instead of swinging my arms into this depth dimension, I let my arms be moved by my body to move them into the depth dimension.

Big body turn, tiny little arm swing.

My arms get moved by my body rotation.

Does that make sense?

So once I put my arms in this little package, I do not change them when I'm drilling.

So I just leave them exactly where they are.

They've only changed because I've hinged forward and got some axis tilt, and now I'm just rotating to the top to move my arms to the top.

I did not move my arms.

If I stand up out of it, they're exactly where I started.

Does it make sense?

All right, let's give that a shot.

Look at Tiger's.

His is kind of like midway up his gut here.

Trevor's kind of in a similar position, but either one of these guys could have their hands a little bit higher.

The variable that they would tend to change in is going to be spine angle.

So if you start adding more elevation to your arms, you need to take some spine angle out.

So it's it's a variable, but it's also kind of not a variable.

So I'm speaking a little facetiously here, but the reason being is our posture is going to be determined by the length of the club, right?

So if I have a driver, I'm not going to have to bend down as far to get that driver grounded versus my pitching wedge.

So now as I go to the top, if I added elevation, well, this is going to be a really steep, awkward swing plane, right?

So my arms are going to kind of go where they go.

It is going to be kind of a specific point for everybody.

But again, we'll allow for minor variations here, you know, a couple inches either way, but it's not like you're going to dramatically change the elevation in your arms.

If you swung like Davis Love III and you wanted that much elevation, you've got to stand a lot more upright, which you can, but it's adding some variables in there.

Does your grip have anything to do with like, I feel like sometimes like your points, the elbow starts to flare out like here?

Generally not.

No, it's generally just activating this right delt and bicep that's making this want to do something.

If it's sitting here, it shouldn't, it doesn't matter like what your grip's doing.

That brings up the point that we've never discussed with the grip.

Yeah.

There's a video on the side on the grip.

I think a couple of them.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I don't talk about it in here.

I generally prefer what's considered like a slightly stronger than neutral grip, just because there's less face rotation that's required to square the face.

I won't monkey with somebody's grip in the clinic unless it's way off.

Usually, I see grips that are too strong and then you can't release the club face because the club face, if you release it with a really strong grip, it's going to be dead shut at impact.

So there is actually a video where I go in depth on the grip on the site, but you know, in this stuff, I don't really talk about it too much.

If I see that your grip's really wonky today, because now that we're going to have both hands back on the club, I will start to talk to you about it.

But in general, I hate changing something like that because it takes so long to get comfortable with.

So the whole backswing can be summed up pretty simply.

One slide.

Your shoulder blade, it glides towards center.

Why do we do that?

Rotate what?

Our upper body.

And how, yep, we're rotating our upper body.

And how are we trying to rotate it?

On the axis.

Yeah, we're trying to stay centered, right?

On our axis.

So if we pull that right shoulder blade in towards our spine, that helps us stay centered.

That's our goal.

So remember when I grabbed him and I moved him around with that club in there?

That's all I was demonstrating is that if I push, the tendency is for me to be to move off center.

And then because the push is going to move you in what direction?

Away from center in what direction?

Any direction.

That's right.

You can go anywhere, right?

If you saw when I was moving around, his head kind of would move this way sometimes, sometimes it'd move this way.

Just depending on how I moved that force from is going to determine that.

That's a really hard way to play golf when you don't know where in space, 3D space you're oriented.

Center is extremely specific because center is one point, right?

So if I think about just taking my right shoulder blade and pulling it in towards my spine, well, I've only got one spine.

It's in the same spot.

It's a fixed point.

It's fixed reference point.

So helps us stay centered, helps us keep us moving from all over the place.

Shoulder elevation.

I just talked about it.

during the backswing, right?

But technically the shoulder elevation begins during the takeaway, but there's so little of it that you generally don't need to think about it.

Because again, you're not going to do this and keep your hands extremely low.

This is going to feel really wonky.

Everybody's wanting to lift their hands up anyway to get the club up.

So you're going to add a little bit of shoulder elevation, but it's only going to be a couple of inches.

It's not going to be that much.

Everybody can make a full shoulder turn.

Everybody.

45 degree shoulder turn, 45 degree hip turn, done deal.

If you can't, for some reason, make a 45 degree shoulder turn, which most everybody can, no matter how old or how limited in flexibility, if you can only make a 35 degree shoulder turn, well, guess what you do here?

You add a little hip turn.

It's not going to be that much.

Most everybody can make, honestly, I mean, I have guys in their seventies who can make 70, 65 degree shoulder turns, because they're still really flexible.

You really don't need that much flexibility to play golf using rotary swing.

Our arms mantra, shoulder elevation, right elbow flexion.

And that's also the left arm is doing that work as well.

I just kind of use the right elbow flexion as a simple way to think about it, but shoulder elevation or arm elevation from your shoulders, and then let that right arm bend and the left arm swing up.

And notice that my elbow starting out pointing at you guys, but where is it pointing at the top?

Out.

It's got to rotate.

If you don't, your arm's going to bend.

This is going to feel really tight and really weird.

Let your arm rotate and come out away from you.

So it's easy to get it in position because that's really a big part of what's helped set the club on plane.

Your backswing mantra, big body turn, tiny little arm swing.

You'll hear me say that 50 more times today.

I want you to think about from the second you get over that ball, the first move you're going to do is what?

It's the first thing you're going to do.

Weight shift and start turning, right?

Turn your core, turn your body.

Like you're going to hand a pail of water to somebody.

You're going to turn and talk to somebody.

If you can weight shift and turn, this becomes a lot simpler.

If you don't turn a lot, it's way more than you think.

This is again, why you need a mirror.

If you start turning right away, your arms don't have that much to do.

If you don't turn, your arms have got to do all kinds of stuff to move that golf club.

So write this on the bill of your cap so that you think about it every time you make a golf swing, big body turn, tiny little arm swing.

When you do it right, you're going to feel like your arms basically didn't move.

Transcription by ESO.

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