AXIOM Refine Your Takeaway
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Simplify your takeaway with a simple 2" movement that moves the club 6 feet!
Fortunately with the Axiom, you don't have to have a picture. Perfect takeaway to have a great golf swing because the Axiom teaches you how to move your body in unison, like the pros in order to get great results. Without having to try to group together a bunch of different positions that you don't understand what they are or what they're really there for. But as you seek to boost your consistency and get rid of those, where did that shot come from? For me, each of your rounds, you'll want to start understanding how to refine these movements so that you can get more consistency by making your swing simpler, the fewer moving parts, the more consistent you're going to be. And the number one most common mistake that people set their swing off on the wrong foot with the takeaway is when the takeaway goes to inside.
What do I mean by that? Imagine during the club is parallel to the ground. This is typically considered when the takeaway is done. So just imagine here, the club's parallel to the ground from down the line. You want to see that club more or less pointing down the target line. What we see all the time is the club pointing way inside. So now the butt of the club is pointing out to the right of the target. The club had his way inside and behind my hands. And this is what is called an inside takeaway. When the club head goes inside like this, we've added a tremendous amount of variability to your swing, and there are several causes for it that we've covered in the faults and fixes section. But let me tell, talk about the two most common ones. The first one, and this is just a good way to think about this, to remember it in your head, to get yourself on track.
Is that what you want during the takeaway is your hands to go in, to keep the club out. So just remember in your head, hands in club out, that's how you think about the takeaway. The hands go inside the club head will stay outside my hands. If my hands go out away from my body, the club will go inside. And this is the second common fault is that you will see that my hand will rotate. This tends to happen for lead arms swingers, especially is that they'll take their lead arm and they'll get really tight before they take the club back. And they'll roll this wrist in and that'll cause the hands to go out away from the body and bring the club way inside. This also works in conjunction. If you're taking your trail hand my right hand and hindering that risk too soon.
And now I've got the club buried inside and remember every single extra piece of movement, every millimeter of extra movement you put in, in the takeaway you have to take out during the day. So all you're trying to do in the takeaway is make it incredibly simple. The more moving parts I have, the harder it's going to be to consistent be consistent. So I'm just making one simple movement here and you can see the club staying outside of my hands. It's never going inside. My hands are going inside the clubs, staying out. What's cool about rotary swing is more than two decades ago. I figured out a simple two inch movement that will move the club. Six feet, figure this like Bruce, Lee's famous two inch punch, where he put his hand right here and then punch you and knock you off your balance. That's how powerful this movement is because this simple two inch movement will move the club all the way through the takeaway.
Without you having any extra moving parts, you move two inches. The club moves six feet. That's quite a return on your investment. And that's the key to consistency. The less I move the better I'm going to be. The more consistent I'm going to be. This simple two inch movement takes all the thinking out of the takeaway. When I'm doing this move, I'm not thinking about anything, but you can see that the club is going perfectly up on plane. It's staying in line with my hands. There's no extra movement here at all, but what I'm doing, I'm not trying to move the club to this takeaway position. That's happening back behind me and the real swing it's happening fast. I can't monitor all this stuff going on. It's happening too quickly. So what I need to do is have a really simple movement that allows me to get the club to do the same thing every time.
And all I'm doing is moving one part of my body, two inches. Do you wanna know what that two inch movement is? Do you have any ideas who clearly it's not my hands. I can't think about moving my hands. They're moving much more than two inches. They're moving several feet at this point, at least a couple of feet. So it's not my hands, which is where most people focus on and their takeaway. They get fixated on what they're feeling in their hands and where that club's going. What the club feels like. That's very, very difficult to monitor and manage. I only want to move something very small and get a big payoff with it, moving something else. Very big. So what part of my body do I have that I could do that? Well, it's really simple. And it's the back of your body here.
Your trail, shoulder blade, this bony things sticking back here is all you have to move in order to get that club to move perfectly on plane, perfectly on path and staying on perfect position all the way through the takeaway. All I have to do is take that shoulder blade and move it in towards center. You remember when we first started talking about the body movements in the backswing, I said, just take that right shoulder and pull it behind your head. Well, guess what you were initiating that movement with your shoulder blade. If I take that shoulder blade and just pull it back towards center, guess what else happens? My head stays center. How come? Because I'm moving towards center. It makes sense, right? If I wanted to stay centered, didn't want my head moving all off all over the place. I would simply try and move towards center, which in the golf swing is our spine.
So if I pull that shoulder blade in towards my spine and I keep my arms nice and relaxed and neutral, they get moved by my shoulder blade. Now, of course, it's too simple to think just your shoulder blade, lots of other stuff is happening as well. The shoulder blade glide is not a workout. It's not something you're trying to wrench your shoulder back. It's just a very subtle gradual glide that continues all the way to the top of your swing, which we'll talk about more in just a moment. But what you're really trying to feel is just taking that right shoulder blade trail, shoulder blade, and pulling it back towards center while also initiating your Axiom movement. The Axiom movement, that pressure shift with your foot starts immediately off the ball. So as soon as you start moving your shoulder blade, you're also pressure shifting around to get your whole body moving and rhythm and tempo and sync.
And we'll see this in just a moment. We look at some other tour pros to see how simple they make this movement. You can see how much body movement is happening during that takeaway. So at the end of the day, I move my shoulder blade two inches that starts moving my whole rib cage, which moves my shoulder, which moves my arms, which moves my hands, which moves the club. You get it. Rotary swing teaches you to move from the inside out. It's the hub that moves the spokes and the wheel. Not the other way around the hub is where the all the action is when the golf swing. When you look at it without the arms, it's really simple. So if you can move your body correctly, then guess what? You can move your arms correctly. Stop trying to move your arms so much. Focus on getting your body movement down.
And the club goes exactly where it's supposed to. As I mentioned a moment ago, this shoulder blade glide is not something that's probably new to you. You just never thought about it this way. If you were to throw a ball, guess what would happen to that shoulder blade? As I rared back to load up my arm, and I want you to feel this while you're watching this video right now, take your arm back. And what is happening to your shoulder blade, guess where it's going. It's wedging up against my spine right here. I can feel that little two inch movement is what's actually getting my arm loaded up an order for my body rotation and pivot to move my arms and see right now my arm, once I pull that shoulder blade back, my arm is wedged against my spine, my shoulder blades wedge against my spine.
And as I turn, guess what? My arm gets moved by my body. So again, your arms are always getting moved. They're not a primary mover. The swing they're happening in the periphery. You need to focus ones happening in the center. So if you feel this motion of throwing a ball, guess what very similar to the golf swing. That's how you get that feeling initiated during the takeaway is pretending that you're gonna go up to throw a ball and you're going to get that same motion in action in your trail, shoulder blades. So now the golf swing takeaway is not so complicated. It's not so confusing. I'm just getting ready to throw. And that's getting me all the way up to the top to get loaded up. We'll talk about that later. So to get this simple feeling a little to it, shoulder blade glide, two inches of movement. It gets you six feet of club movement. Now let's take a look at how the tour pros do this exact same motion to keep their takeaways incredibly simple. And that is a huge key to consistency.
Let's take a look at the takeaway from down the line and give you a couple simple checkpoints to make sure that your takeaway is simple and repeatable as humanly possible. So let's take a look at tiger here on the right. And I've drawn a couple lines that are really helpful for you to kind of start to visualize what's going on during the takeaway. So the first one that you'll see is that on his forms, I've drawn a little line here and I just kind of call this the form plain line. It's really nothing special. A Hogan actually talked about a similar concept in his book, although definitely not exactly the same and definitely talking about something different. But the idea of looking at breaking a plaintiff glass is Hogan referred to he was looking at it completely different than what I'm going to, but this concept is still the same because what a lot of golfers do is during the takeaway, they start to push their arms out away from their body and you will see that that's the old hand out club head.
So if you draw a line when you're looking at your swing from down the line on your form, and just imagine that that is a plane of glass that you couldn't break as you take the club back, you can see that Tiger's hand stay inside that line. Now, of course, the form breaks over a little bit here. That's not really the point. What we want is what we want to avoid is the hands going way out this way, which is super, super common. And again, that leads to the club head going inside. You can see in titers cases, hands travel inside as it begins to rotate his body and keep the club head outside his hands because his hands are just being super, super quiet was risks of barely than anything. And now he's got the club in a really great position going back. You'll also notice I drew a line on his left knee, and this is just showing that there's movement in the lower body.
During the takeaway, you can see how much that knee is move forward. Even by the end of the takeaway is club. When it's parallel to the ground, his knee has moved several inches forward that's rotation. And because of the angle of his pelvis, can I have a little bit of a tilt to it? It's going to move that knee forward, but long story short, what you don't want to see is that your lower body is just totally frozen and static. You can see that his right knee has moved away from that line. The left knee has moved cross across it. That's that Axiom movement giving that lower body woken up at the beginning of a takeaway. In my takeaway, you're going to see a lot of the same things. So I've drawn a line on my form line. So you can kind of imagine that plane of glass on my forum.
I'm trying not to break that, but the reason I want to show you this is that a lot of your angles that people get caught up on in the takeaway are a lot of it's dependent on your height. So I'm five nine with really long arms and short legs titers over six foot. And it's really about six one longer legs. And so the angles that he's going to be at, if his takeaway and the angle I'm going to be into my takeaway are going to be a bit different because he's obviously taller has a more bent over spine angle. And so that all affects what you're looking at. So don't get caught up in, oh well Tiger's arm is angled in more than mine or, or, you know, maybe my arms are out more than yours or whatever. Don't get caught up in that kind of stuff.
Get the basic idea that what you're trying to do with your club during the takeaway is very little. You're trying to get your body moving. And so if you do that and keep your hands and arms very quiet, you're going to have a simple takeaway. So you can see if you make a mistake, if at all, you want to make a mistake of that club. Traveling just slightly outside your hands. Because if you're going to make a mistake going to the inside, it starts adding a lot of extra movement in your wrists and your hands. And so you just start having a lot of extra stuff that you're trying to time. So this is about where you want to be at the end of the takeaway. You don't want your arms breaking out that plane of glass. You want to make sure your lower body's starting to move.
You can see that while my knees haven't moved as much as tigers my lower body is still woken up and starting to move during that takeaway. All right, let's take a quick look at a couple of amateur golfers who tend to make these mistakes that I was referring to. And so I've drawn a line on the forms of this golfer here on the left. And I want to show you moves over a very, very good golfer. Very good young golfer, watch how his lead arm starts to break that plane line. So now you can see his entire form is now outside that plane line. And so now you start to see that the hands are moving away from the body and the club head is then going to go inside. So now at the end of the takeaway, you can see that his club's way inside his hands.
And so guess what's going to happen as a result of this, even though he gets into a great position, as he comes back down, he's just always going to be a little bit under the plane. So of course, this golfer struggles with hooks, his body movement. All these things are really, really wonderful, but this little takeaway mistake sets him on a path and the simple fixes, again, you don't need to do much with your arms. You definitely don't want to push and rotate that lean arm internally like this, to get that club working inside, it's going to lead to all kinds of mistakes, even though he shallows it out and comes too far from the inside. What typically happens in the higher handicap, you are, the more that this is going to be the case is that you're going to roll that club inside. Nice, got faces wide open. Look at the look, how wide this open this club faces is pointing at the sky, and then he's going to do the old very, very severe over the top move. And that's what happens is the higher handicap capper will take the club inside, roll it inside, roll that lead form, and then get the club buried and then feel that, and then swing right over the top. And then if you're a better player, you still make the same mistake. You break that plane line, get the club inside. And then you're a little stuck coming underneath.
When you look at the takeaway from the face on you have one goal and that's to be as boring as humanly possible. What I mean by that, a good takeaway is a boring takeaway. It's simple, there's so little happening and tiger personifies that as well as anybody. So let's take a look watch as he goes back, how little movement there are, there is in his arms and his hands at the end of the takeaway, his right arm is still almost completely straight just as it was at address. His risks have barely cocked or hinged at all. And all he's really done is make that right shoulder disappear. Watch how much that right shoulder is getting pulled back behind his head. He's really just rotating his body and keeping his arms as wide as possible. There's a little bit of pressure shift to the right, as you know, and he's world tating getting that clockwise movement going. But at the end of the day, what you're really trying to do is nothing you're trying to make this takeaway have as few moving parts as possible, and the simpler you make it, the wider you keep your arms, the simpler, your takeaway is going to be the less you rotate your arms and hinge and your wrist or in the back swing. The more consistent golfer you're going to become.
Asle
Craig (Certified RST Instructor)
Asle
Craig (Certified RST Instructor)