How to Fix the 3 Most Common Backswing Faults

Learn how to fix the 3 most common backswing fatal flaws with one simple feel from the greatest golfers of all time!

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When you think of Bobby Jones, Ben Hogan, Jack Nicklaus, Tiger Woods, what's the first thing that comes to your mind?

Well they were obviously the greatest golfers of all time and that was for numerous reasons.

Great short games, great course management, but above and all else their ball striking was truly next level.

Remember Ben Hogan's one iron at Marion?

It's a famous picture you've probably seen in every clubhouse on the planet.

The way that these guys hit the ball has always been something truly special, and it's not just their swing mechanics per se, it's the way they look when they're doing it because they make it look so darn easy.

And when you look at the way that they've described the golf swing, of course Ben Hogan wrote a long book about it, Bobby Jones did a video series on it, Jack Nicklaus did a video series on it, that's actually how I learned how to play golf, Tiger Woods wrote a book on it.

It's wild when you go back and you look at this stuff contextually, how simple they looked at the golf swing.

Jack Nicklaus's golf my way videotape.

If you listen, The whole backswing is three and a half minutes long, and it's three minutes of that is just telling you what most golfers do wrong.

And then his whole answer to it is finish your backswing and use your arms, hands, legs and body together.

I think I need a little more info than that.

I know the average golfer does too, But is there something that we can learn from these greats?

Because there are certain things that they talk about that they all felt in their golf swings, that they all felt a similar way.

And so as I've been deep diving into my GOAT series, I want to share with you the first piece that I think is going to make a huge change in your game to simplify things for you.

Simplify the picture of your golf swing in your mind.

And that really has to do with getting the backswing started off and having a complete backswing.

That's truly simple and relieves tension in the right places.

Because most golfers suffer from the three most common problems in the backswing.

They usually do one, two or all three of these and a lot of it's tension related, but it's also not moving the correct way from the correct place.

So as I talked about in the introductory video, most golfers struggle with their head moving off the ball, which makes their shoulders go flat or your shoulders going flat, which makes your head move off the ball.

And both of these things make the club want to go inside.

And so instantly the first move off the ball, we've made golf 10 times harder than it should be.

Our heads need to stay relatively centered.

They can't move a foot off the ball.

It just makes it too hard.

Our shoulders need to rotate on a steeper plane than they typically do for most golfers.

Because the ball is down on the ground.

And the club needs to stay more in line with our hands.

Because what that's really showing is either incorrect movement of the body or overuse of the hands.

So what did the GOATs talk about?

What they felt in their backswings?

Again, perhaps it was an overly simplistic view, But I think there's a lot that we can learn from.

Both what they said they felt in their swings and what they actually did.

And start to understand how we can all be better golfers with a simpler golf swing and a simpler approach to the swing.

So one thing that is very consistent, And I did a video on this talking about Bobby Jones and Tiger Woods and how they both felt that they pushed the club back with the left side.

Jones talked about the left side of his body and his left hand or left arm, And Tiger talked about pushing the left hand as far away from his head at the top and feeling a stretch down the left side of his body.

But Tiger also talks about feeling his downswing is really all in his right hand, or at least what he associates hitting the ball with is in his right hand.

So how do we reconcile these?

Well, I'm going to talk about that more in a little bit.

But the first thing I want to do is give you a simple feeling to help you reconcile what the GOATs did, because we can certainly learn from the greatest players of all time, What they did and how to instantly fix all three problems and get rid of all this crazy tension that you're feeling in your swing if you can't get your swing to sequence correctly and you're firing hard from the top.

So the first thing you're going to do is stand up with me, but you don't need a club for this, and I'm going to have you focus on, if you're a right -handed golfer, your left hand, your lead arm, and what you're going to do at first is take your setup position nice and tall through your legs, but nice and relaxed.

Let your arms hang down freely and feel this left wrist, the cupping that you would naturally have it address if you had a, you know, neutral to slightly stronger than neutral grip.

Maintain this cupping until your hand passes your trail foot and feel that you're not moving your body at first at all.

We want to get the feeling of how everything's kind of moving, and all I want you to do at first is just push your left arm across your body, but by doing this I want you to use the left side of your body, even your left foot, to push off the ground to start moving this hand back.

So it's not just hand movement.

We can feel that, and we'll talk more about that in a moment, But what I want you to start to get the feeling of is using your left side of your body to push the hand back, maintaining this cupping.

Now what happens when I do this?

The first thing you're going to notice is that my lead shoulder, if I was in a normal setup position where I had a little bit of axis tilt, Watch what happens to my lead shoulder as I feel this little push from the left to give some momentum for my arm to swing.

Where does my shoulder go?

It goes down.

This is hugely important, and you can see this move in all the goats.

In a lot of amateur golfers, And in the intro video, I showed one of our students who had a typical very flat swing.

And it made his head move off the ball and made the club go away inside, this is what I gave him to start feeling his head staying centered.

If your head moves really far off the ball and you've got all these issues, Just by feeling a little left side push and a little momentum, and keeping this cupping in your wrist, staying straight, staying cupped until the hand passes your thigh or your your trail foot, my head stays centered, my shoulder goes down.

Now if we look at this from down the line, It's a little bump that gives my momentum for my arm, so the arm and shoulder can stay nice and relaxed, and you can see as soon as we put a club in here, my club is going to be in a perfect position, but all you need to do at first is just get this feeling of getting this to swing by itself.

You want to reduce tension in your shoulders.

When your shoulders get tight, They want to fire too soon in the downswing and then the sequencing is off and you lose all your power.

So if you can start the swing off.

Not by getting a lot of tension and pushing this left shoulder across your chest, or pulling this right arm back and trying to get your arms and shoulders loaded, instead you use your whole body like Jones talked about.

He felt like he's pushing that club back and you can see his hands when he does this, it looks like they're just kind of dragging that club back.

There's obviously no activation in his hands at this point, whereas most golfers as soon as they start the swing, that's the first thing to go.

The hands go, or they take the shoulder and push it across, or they pull the right arm back really hard and aggressive.

The goats looked effortless in their swing and that should be the feeling we're all striving for, but it starts immediately off the ball.

You've got to reduce tension and you've also got to keep this club from swinging around out of position.

That creates tension in your body when it's out of position.

So now once you've kind of got this basic feeling of just your body being nice and loose and relaxed.

And you're just pushing this left hand back with your shoulder, what I want you to start to notice is that as you're doing this, this lead shoulder should start to want to protract a little bit.

Now what is shoulder protraction?

It's a really simple thing to understand.

All you need to do to feel this is.

Take your lead arm and grab it with your trail arm and pull it deep across your body as much as you can to feel your shoulder pull.

Don't turn your body at first.

Just pull this arm across your body.

That's shoulder protraction and what you'll feel is that your rear shoulder, your trail shoulder is going to retract.

It's going to go back while this shoulder goes forward.

This is a critical thing that happens in the golf swing.

And if you start off the right way, you'll naturally start to do this.

Without creating a lot of tension in your body, that's going to make the swing hard to sequence.

So if I do this just by pushing back, I'm going to feel my arms start to want to extend and the shoulder starting to want to protract.

And this is a key to making a full shoulder turn.

If you're one of those golfers who's really, really struggled making a full shoulder turn, you're either not pulling behind, you're pushing too hard, or you're simply not understanding that.

Shoulder protraction and retraction are what create the look of a lot of shoulder turn.

Watch what happens if I do nothing but shoulder protractions.

I'm going to keep my body dead square, my chest square, my belly button square, my hip square.

And all I'm going to do is push my lead shoulder across as far as I can.

Now look at how much it looks like I've turned but I've really just moved my shoulder.

If I had the slightest amount of rotation to this, it's very easy for me to make a full shoulder turn.

And this is what you see in all the great players.

This is one of the things that has been very eye-opening for me when I look at the swing from different angles of the greatest players.

It's not that they're twisting their spine and torquing all the stuff up.

And even though it looks like that.

Because most of the time on TV, when we're looking at great players, we're looking at dead face on or down the line.

The more telling images are behind and actually up the line, but we rarely see those views.

So you really got to dig deep to find this stuff.

But as you do, you'll start to see that.

They're not just making this twisting, tight, turning motion where they're building up all this tension and pressure.

They're very fluid and relaxed, and soft and almost flowy, especially in Jones's case.

And what's crazy about this is that the greatest players all do this naturally.

In fact, I think the greatest ball striker of all time, at least the greatest long iron player of all time.

Tiger Woods, did this since he was five years old.

He's always swung this way.

And I found this amazing clip I want to share with you because it's going to help you illustrate.

And start to put in your mind like, Oh my gosh, they're not moving that much, their swings are actually much simpler than ours, they have fewer moving parts.

And once you see this little video, this video of Tiger when he was five years old, Your mind is going to be completely blown away by how simplistic his golf swing has always been and how consistent he's always done the same moves.

Let's take a look.

This is pretty awesome I'm so glad I found this video so take a look at this this is Tiger when he was five years old it's pretty wild so a couple things I want to draw your attention to first let's just focus on the lower body note that he starts to make a load into this right side and starts to turn but there's not a lot of turn you can kind of see this little crease in his pants stay pretty much the same from the time he's you know done with the end of his takeaway right here barely barely moves but then this is what's just mind-blowing to me because I've never seen anybody move their lower body like Tiger and check this out look how powerful that looks at five look at the old squat to square move look at how much power he looks like he's generating as a five-year -old kid his lower body movement's amazing and if you look at it today he's basically doing the exact same thing it's wild so he's been swinging this way for over 40 years but what's crazy is how did he figure this out obviously he didn't learn golf swing mechanics so let's take a look at a couple things at what he did here what you're going to notice first is that as he starts back you're going to see again this initial rotation in this part of his body that I spoke about but it's pretty much done here I want to draw your attention to this part of his shirt here watch as he continues to go back there's not a lot of movement here even though his swings not even halfway done maybe the lead arms parallel to the ground give or take a little bit but notice that he's done with his rotation so what's happening here is it's mostly shoulder protraction because the arms are obviously still swinging obviously the club's still moving but his body is pretty much chilled out at this point and then he's got the old Jack Nicklaus you know flying right elbow here but notice how much retraction there is in this trail short which we're going to talk about in just a moment but this is very very wild that a five-year-old and he gives his arms a little head start here as he starts down but there's no look at the lower body movement I'd kill to have this lower body movement today it's what obviously pushes a little hard this is you know this is probably 1980 81 and well he's wearing number 81 shirt maybe it was 81 but you know obviously a lot of lateral drive which is kind of the in vogue thing back then but it's just wild to me that a five-year-old could learn to swing this powerfully this dynamically this athletically with his lower body note the side bend that he gets into note how the right arm tucks into the body he's in such an amazing delivery position here it's truly amazing and if a five -year-old can figure this out then we can all start to move more and more like the goats that video is pretty wild tiger has literally swung the same way since he was at least five years old his lower body movement the way that he's powered the swing the way that he's moved his arms has been so incredibly similar since the moment he first picked up a club really and what's interesting about that is how little his body is really moving in the swing and that's what allows him to sequence his swing the way that he does most golfers because they're so tight nothing can sequence correctly nothing can stretch dynamically in the swing one of the biggest problems that most amateur golfers have in the downswing is everything kind of starts all together that happens because we're too tense if if i'm really tight through here how are my hips going to go first it's not going to feel natural it's not even going to be allowed to happen because the muscles are so tight and shortened that our movement becomes really constricted when you look at bobby jones swing granted he had a very kind of loosey-goosey backswing but his downswing movements were so similar to tigers and so incredibly efficient he looked like he was doing nothing but yet you can see the club just rip through the hitting area and a big part of that is understanding this protraction and retraction and so let's talk more about that as we add the trail arm into your drill so you've you've got the feeling of the drill if remember if you watched my video on how the pros start the swing how the goats start the swing with this little pressure shift and the four pressure shifts you'll start to make this a natural movement and this movement is so key to reducing tension because the goats didn't have that much tension in their swings it's the only way that the sequence was allowed to happen so you want to start getting the feeling of your backswing feeling way more relaxed no matter how you want to swing down you need to get some rhythm and some flow and freedom of movement so that these muscles if i'm relaxed here it's very easy for my left hip to start the downswing but if i'm tight everything's coming along together so let's feel how we can keep this a little bit more relaxed by allowing our shoulders to protract and retract a little bit more like the goats did and start to feel how this is going to feel with both hands on so now take your setup again arms and legs nice and relaxed we want to always be moving before we hit that ball so we don't want our feet to just get rigid and frozen this is a this is a way to create tension in the swing and the tension is the killer so start to keep getting this feeling of always moving like you saw hogan he's always moving before he hits the ball and now as you start going back use that little left side push of the body and the hip to get the arms some momentum to start going back and as you do this start feeling what happens to your trail shoulder it should naturally start to go back and you should feel this part of your body this is your shoulder blade moving back into your spine now you've heard me talk about this for years about my shoulder blade glide to initiate a centered takeaway this is the exact same motion it's simply a matter of letting that shoulder blade glide back and keeping tension to a minimum a healthy tension as you're loading up is a good thing but most golfers are a nine or a ten out of ten on tension and they need to be more like a two or a three or a one even with certain parts of the body so try and really relax so that your arms can be nice and fluid so that they can swing up to the top and remember it's called a golf swing and if you feel that flowy motion of getting everything to kind of float up here this part of your body will not be nearly as tight as it probably has been in the past and this part of your body which is usually where everything goes really off will not be as tight and so then you're going to be able to feel that you don't have to rush the downswing because tension is what causes all these muscles to fire out of sequence but if i can keep them nice and soft and let myself float them up to the top and letting these shoulders protract and retract now notice here my belly button's barely turned maybe it's turned 30 degrees or so but just by protraction and retraction i now look like i've made a full shoulder turn and i think this is one of those things that's a very common golf term that's been used forever that's very easy to misinterpret and it's hard to understand exactly what the instructor wants or what the greats did until you start to look at it in the entire context of the the backswing and the downswing as you're going back if you think just turn your shoulders this almost inevitably happens i'm going to reverse hip shift i'm going to my head's going to move off the ball and my club's going to go inside the goats i don't believe tried to turn their shoulders per se of course they will talk about it as shoulder turn because how else would you describe this protraction and retraction they don't think they thought about those terms back then but that's technically what's happening as you saw in in little baby goat tiger swing you can see that this part of his body once he made that initial shift into the trail side and created some momentum for his arms this was kind of done he didn't really keep turning because that would just create a lot of tension and load and get everything to where it's so twisted up it can't unload correctly what i believe that he was doing and bobby jones is doing the same thing is that their arms were super soft being moved by their body so that they could float to the top and this protraction and retraction is what got the arms all the way to the top and created a look of a full shoulder turn but without actually turning their rib cage very much and so that's what i want you to start to feel when you're doing this with both hands is use that little pressure shift keep my arms nice and soft and my arms should float to the top and i'm just going to feel that this arm is creating the structure and shape of the swing and this one's getting loaded up as if i was going to throw a ball that's the motion that's going to give you the speed if i was just doing this to throw a ball my right shoulder would go back my shoulder blade would go into my spine and naturally get into this position but i would do this in a very relaxed way i wouldn't throw a ball and get as tight as i could it wouldn't make sense it's not going to be able to move my arm very fast and in the golf swing we we often confuse power with speed we need quickness we need to be able to move fluid and fast not really powerful we're trying to move quickly and so if my arm stays soft and i help it float up to the top and the lead arm helps push it into a position to where it gets cocked and loaded like pulling the trigger on a gun or cocking a gun loading it then that's going to get this trail shoulder retracted help me make a full shoulder turn and my head is going to stay centered and my shoulders are going to turn on a much steeper plane and this is how you saw with the student i showed who was moving way off the ball and the club going inside this is all i had him feel he's just taking this left arm using his whole body to help push the club back to get the right arm loaded up in a relaxed way and then we're off to the races but so it's really important you don't try and lift your arms up and try and force the shoulder protraction you're going to create too much tension in the wrong place now let's see what this looks like with a golf club so the first two problems have been fixed if you do what i'm showing you of letting your shoulders protract and retract in a relaxed way using your body to give it some momentum your head's going to stay centered and your shoulders are going to go steep now let's take a look at the club if i maintain this little bit of cupping that i have at address until my hand gets past my foot that alone with this move will keep the club out in front of me the whole time now most golfers do this you can see i've turned my shoulders flat my head has also moved way off the ball the club's way inside this is really hard to recover from we make golf 10 times harder than it needs to be but if i'm nice and relaxed keeping my arms soft and then i use a little bit of lower body movement and upper body movement to push that club back i also feel the right shoulder pulling back but i'm trying to keep both of them relaxed so i'm trying to use momentum to move the club as much as i can now i can see the club's never going to go outside my hands because i'm not using my hands my arms and hands are staying relaxed my shoulders are now turning steep so i can feel hip deep shoulder steep if you feel that your shoulders will be on a proper plane which will give you a much better chance of coming down on plane because a lot of times what happens when golfers turn flat they lift up like this and then they swing straight over the top your shoulders have got to go down probably way more than you think if you're the type of golfer whose head moves way off the ball and you start to load up with your trail arm too much too soon and that's a really common problem what you're going to look like when you do this is you're going to stay what we call flexion at address you can see that my spine is either neutral or even in slight flexion as i let my shoulders kind of round forward so i can keep them nice and soft now in this position at the top of my back swing if i stayed in flexion what's going to happen to my head my shoulders are flat clubs going inside my head's moved a mile off the ball what do you need to do i need to move into extension so as i go back all the powerful ball strikers you see especially today as they go back you don't see this movement this is a very weak way to swing you can't generate a lot of speed but if i go back like this and i let my spine move into extension that makes it even easier for my head to stay centered my shoulders to stay steep and so if you're the type of person who's been really aggressive with this trail arm to take the club back you're probably going to see yourself looking like this you're not going to make much of a turn this is going to fold really early your trail shoulder is going to be really protracted and this is going to get you staying in flexion and then you're going to swing all shoulders we see that a lot but as you start getting this feeling of your arm staying relaxed floating them back this feeling of letting the club be pushed back with your body and some momentum it's very easy to stay wide and you'll see this in in jones's swing he went way inside but he still recovered from the top but one of the things that's always been fascinating to me is how wide tiger swing is without actually having really any tension a lot of times if i tried to replicate that i'd feel like i was kind of holding my wrists out but as soon as i started removing tension and started getting my body to feel what how they describe their swings as pushing the club back with the body and the left hand even though i don't feel like i'm taking my left hand and trying to shove it back that would cause me to move off the ball as i let it kind of float back it's natural for me to maintain all this width in my swing all the way to the top so if you're struggling with that club going inside hell stuff your head moving off the ball shoulders flat this will click all three of those problems with one simple feeling all right let's dive a little bit more into the club to give you a little bit better feel of how to actually make this happen in your real swing so you can take this out and play with it right away now one of the things that many great players did is they had a little forward press some had a lot some had a little if you're going to forward press and it's totally fine i'm going to explain how to do it the best way because really what you want to do with the forward press is get the club into a position where your wrists feel a little bit more stable when you look at jones's takeaway he was really really relaxed and had no problem keeping all that tension that's how he was able to push the club looking back when it was look like he was dragging it back like this is it's just got to be tension free in your hands a lot of players can't get that loose with the swing he was really really loose and you don't have to be that loose with your swing so a little forward press what it tends to do is get the wrist into a little bit of a preset position if you do it the right way and it makes the club and wrist feel a little bit more stable so what you'll find is this you know this is not a stable feeling this is a really loose flowy feeling but you'll see in tiger swing he has just a tiny bit of forward press and just doing this kind of gets the club in a position to where i don't really feel like i have to do really anything with my hands and so you'll note i talked about maintaining that cupping that you have at address it's okay to lose some and in fact as you get comfortable with this and you're no longer struggling with a club going way inside and behind you it's perfectly fine for that lead wrist to start to flatten out almost immediately off the ball it's totally okay as long as you have control over it it's not going to be something where you're you know you flatten it out a lot and then rip the club inside like this that's obviously way too much but if you're understanding the movement of reducing this tension and using your body to help start the club pushing back with your lead side of your body and the trail arm retracting then it's perfectly okay to i'm going to do a little forward bump and now as i go back the club head's still in line with my hands i just if i maintain the cupping it's going to be a little bit outside of my hands and if you're going to make a mistake that's the side of the ball to make it on you rarely are going to see a lot of great players from inside of here these days it's not that you can't play from there many great players have but most modern players make the mistake of keeping the club outside their hands because they're trying to control that golf club and you don't need to whip it inside like that it can shut the face it can also open the face it just is a hard position to recover from so a little forward press to get the wrist kind of locked in a little bit more locked in is perhaps not the best word we're talking about reducing tension but that's kind of what it feels like to me is i i'm nice and relaxed and i just add a little bump as i'm loading pressure into the lead side to help give me some momentum to drive that club back with my body then i feel like my hands are kind of in a more stable position than dragging it back like jones did so if you're going to use a forward press that's the best way to do it now as you're working on this i want you to understand that you want to move all the way to the top but it's perfectly fine and you'll probably need to at first to stop at the end of the takeaway the takeaway is not a position in the golf swing it's something you're moving through but it's a great place to stop and check to see if you're making the mistake of the club going inside your head moving off the ball etc so as you're working on this what i want you to try and feel is that you move through this dynamically all as one motion and that's the key the backswing when you watch the goats they never look like they're going back mechanically and statically it was all one fluid movement all the way back and through and that's the feeling that we want to have in our swing and you'll only be able to do that when you're tension free when your arms and shoulders are tight all of the stuff is going to go off so as you're working on this what you want to start to feel is that little press if you want a little forward press that's perfectly fine just press into that lead leg to get everything going back and then if you're certain that the club's going in a not going way inside your hands and your lead shoulder is going down keep going with that motion all the way to the top and what you want to feel is that as you're going up to the top you should naturally be starting to move back into the lead side this is really really key because the sequence of the golf swing most amateur golfers make this number one mistake is that they go all the way back a little everything up and then they try to shift back to the lead side and then it's too late the lead side shift needs to happen way earlier than people think and the simplest way to start to feel that is if you start to initiate your backswing with that motion it's loaded up and already ready to go very early in the downswing and i'm not going to dive into the downswing stuff i have a separate video that i'm working on for that but if you just felt that motion of the lead side now i feel like this is already starting to stretch in my body as i'm going back now i feel this saying okay i can't really go back any farther so i'm going to start to and especially if i'm already in extension it's really easy for me to start to fall back into this lead side so that my pressure shift happens way earlier in the transition than it does for most amateurs now if you're like this and you're inflection how am i going to get back over here it's virtually impossible you need to have to happen naturally it needs to happen fluidly and it needs to happen early so you'll know that i've talked about in some of the videos where most better ball strikers nowadays their pressure shift to the trail foot is done by the end of the takeaway and then they're already starting to get ready and shifting back to this lead side you never see that in a high handicapped golfer ever so if you want to borrow one thing from the goat and nothing else the goats all are getting back here way way early and if you think about what i'm teaching you to solve these three common backswing problems it's also solving the biggest downswing problem which is how to get back to this lead side in time so now we're starting to feel that it's natural for our arms to be relaxed because if our arms are tight we're going to tend to stay in flexion and we're going to fire them very early but if they're soft and being floating up to the top i'm already falling back here because i'm an extension i've used that left side to help push the club back and then i'm naturally starting to fall back into this lead side and that's what pulls the club down and starts getting the downswing to trigger so we've solved the three biggest problems if you did nothing else but you started to feel how your lead shoulder goes down to keep your head centered to get your shoulder steep and to keep the club out outside outside your hands by maintaining this little bit of cupping now we've licked 90 of all golf swing problems in the backswing and by starting to initiate it like jones talked about with the left side of his body it starts getting us able to fall back into this lead side earlier and then the downswing is going to sequence so much quicker and as i get into the downswing video i'm going to talk more about how all of this stuff works but if you just did this you're going to be so far ahead of the game you're going to feel so much better in your swing because at the end of the that's really what we're chasing that feeling of that pure shot that you probably hit on the 18th hole because tried all these different things and you didn't realize how tight you were and your swing mechanics were off we need to get to the point where we're chasing that feeling of a pure shot and the best way to do that is to be as little to have as little tension in our bodies as humanly possible and so this gives you that start to get your backswing with proper mechanics getting into extension steep shoulder playing club outside the hands head staying center shoulders down and that gets everything starting to feel like the goats and how they felt in their backswing