Rickie Fowler Swing Analysis
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An analysis of Rickie Fowler's golf swing from the Rotary Swing Podcast.
Rickie Fowler takes the "Hands in, club out" adage to the extreme, leading to a very, very steep plane going back | Pushing with the left shoulder, he gets the club completely vertical, even pointing the wrong direction, in the backswing | The top of his swing is distinctive - the swing is very long, reminiscent of Ben Hogan | Coming down he pulls extremely hard with the left, gets back on plane & recovers into good impact position | It's an extremely arms-dominated swing with a very hard release with the right hand | He gets up off the ground through impact, which could damage his knee, long-term
All right, Josh, so I've got Ricky Swing here up on the left, and I'm going to use Tiger as an example.
He's a pretty easy example to pick out on things that are done pretty efficiently.
So at setup, the only thing that you'll notice that is a little bit off in Ricky Swing, and off is a relative term here, is he's set up a little bit on the balls of his feet.
Of course, we know that the balance is obviously through the ankles, that's how the body's designed to bear weight, but nothing horrible here, because he's not going to stay on the balls of his feet.
He's a very athletic kid, so he makes some good moves to get back, But the one thing you are going to notice that's pretty unusual looking for most people in Ricky Swing is the plane that the club travels on, and you're going to see this here.
He's basically got his hands in.
And this is, we use an adage in golf instruction, hands in, club out, and this is taking to the extreme.
So his hands are well inside of the club head at this point, and the club head is way outside, and this is going to make the club shaft look really, really steep here in just a second as we keep going back.
We use Tiger as an example because he's got a beautiful plane.
As he goes back, you'll see the club head much closer in line, and there's a huge difference here.
So just for the viewers at home, we try to kind of create a little circle here where the hands are, and if the club head's in that line, that one's a little off, club head's in that circle right around the hands or right through the center of the hands, we're in good shape, we're close to it.
But you can see Ricky's is well outside of it.
So as we keep going back, he's going to get really steep as I mentioned, and this is because as he starts the club back, he really pushes his left shoulder around, and when we look at the face on view, this will be really obvious, and he's really pushing that left arm deep around his body.
As he goes back, now the club shaft is really, it's kind of actually pointing the wrong direction at this point.
So, Tiger at the same spot is actually going to get the club on plane, and Ricky's on plane if he was lefty, actually.
This would be a good position if he was left-handed, but it's a pretty crazy position.
Now, interestingly enough, this is due more to him not really manipulating the club much.
He's not getting any rotation of his forearms or his wrists to let the club come back around.
He's really just kind of shoved it back and cocked his wrists, and that's what's created this position.
Whereas Tiger's allowed some forearm rotation and some left arm internal rotation.
It's allowed the club to work on a natural plane, which obviously this is a little bit unnatural.
at this point, the club shaft right about, let me go back a couple more frames, is almost vertical.
So, pretty steep here in terms of plane.
And what's really interesting is, I mean, this is literally as vertical as it gets.
What's interesting about this is that when we look at the downswing, Ricky's going to be much, much shallower, and at the top of the swing, going to be much shallower.
And you're going to start to see why this is happening, because as he's pushing his left arm deep across his body, his hands are very, very deep, and they're going to get really deep at the top.
And that's what's going to allow him to kind of put all these pieces together at the top.
Whereas Tiger's is just a little bit more balanced than neutral.
It's just a little bit less moving parts here.
He's really just rotating his torso, and he's not really moved his arm deep across his body.
You can see they're right about in front of his chest still.
Ricky's are getting pretty low here.
They're closer to his belt, and they're getting deep.
And as we continue this trend, now we get into kind of the, I would consider this probably Ricky's trademark.
He'll be kind of known for this position at the top of the swing, or really close to the top of the swing.
We're actually not there because he gets pretty long.
Compared to something that would be typically considered more conventional or more, you know, what we advocate for rotary swing tour, keeping the arms more in front.
Tiger got a little disconnected here, but this is pretty close to ideal.
And as we get to the top with Ricky, he's going to be really long.
That's actually the club head poking out behind his elbow.
It's going to drop, come back a little bit more as we get closer.
Now you can see the club head dropping out.
This is part of the transition here.
But this position is created during one dynamic move that's pretty interesting.
As he goes back, if we go back to the beginning, his elbow, if you imagine his elbow pit, this is on the front side of his arm, he's pointing towards the sky.
At this point, he radically internally rotates it.
And that's what creates that laid off look, which gives off planes.
It's actually a much better position than it was at.
And so as he rotates his arm, that's what creates this old school Ben Hogan-esque look.
It's all just due from that really quick left arm internal rotation.
And Sergio Garcia has a similar move and ends up in a similar position, although he keeps the club a little bit more in front of him, going back, and it's a little bit steeper.
And then he shallows it out to a similar position.
Long story short, teaching somebody to do this is crazy.
I mean, you wouldn't really ever try and teach somebody this move.
And I'd be interested to know how Ricky developed it.
If he's just being a smaller kid, he tried to figure out every way that he could create as much speed as he could.
And just always learned to swing his arms deep across his body.
And that's how he developed this move.
Because as he comes down, he really whips the club around.
And he's really pulling hard with his left side, left arm to get the club back down.
Obviously, it's not going to get in front of his body too easily from where he is.
But he does a great job of not really pushing off the right side.
When we look on the front view, he does a really good job pulling with the left.
Gets into a decent position.
And then as he continues to work down, he's on plane here.
Believe it or not, he's made incredible compensations.
If we remember on the way back, his shaft was here.
And now it's actually on plane.
Kind of the opposite of Charles Barkley, if I remember the Haney project.
This is kind of what Haney was trying to get him to do.
In a little bit of a goofed up fashion, taking it way outside and dropping it to the inside.
Well, Fowler's kind of learned to master that move.
Whereas Tiger just said, yeah, I'm going to take it up on plane and down on plane.
It's a little bit easier.
And we obviously advocate keeping the club on plane and parallel to the plane throughout most of the golf swing.
As he comes down, he's actually recovered into a great position.
It's just a testament to his athleticism and pounding thousands of balls to groove this motion.
Because it is very unorthodox.
But as he comes down, he's actually in a great position here.
Hips are open.
Shoulders are square.
Arms are back in front of the body.
You're going to see something pretty similar to Tiger in the same move.
The one thing that I did notice on a couple other swings I looked at, you know, getting the club that deep behind him and trying to shallow it out that much.
He did get stuck a couple of times where he tended to come in a little bit underneath.
And he couldn't really, a couple of shots that I saw him hit were very, very high.
And so when you're trying to shallow out from a very steep position to a very shallow position, It's going to be pretty tough to control trajectory and not tend to hit some blocks as you come too far from the inside.
And because of that, Ricky's developed a really, really hard release of the golf club, which you can see there.
The right arm really releasing the club hard.
Does VJ look a little bit like that?
Yeah, VJ's very similar.
He's even letting his hand come off at that point.
And he's doing that in order to get the club face squared up.
And you'll see Tiger's a little bit more natural release, Which is when the right arm and club shaft are kind of parallel to the line right over the toes as a normal release point.
And Ricky's arms are going to be quite a bit out of the way from his body.
So it's a very, very arms dominated golf swing, but he makes great moves at impact.
And this is, you know, very similar position to Sergio at impact.
Sergio's shaft actually comes out really flat underneath his shoulder here.
You'll notice Tiger hasn't come out quite a bit higher as we come through.
He's going to be more on the plane here.
But, you know, gets into great positions at the point that it matters.
If we look at his face-on view, his swing actually looks relatively very conventional.
So, face-on view, pretty good setup here.
Nothing particularly unusual about this setup at all.
Since he has a very similar move to Sergio, one of the interesting correlations you can draw.
Sergio is able to do a lot of the things that he does with the club because of a very strong grip.
And it's hard to tell from this video.
Some other video I saw, Ricky actually kind of had a weaker right-hand grip and a relatively neutral left-hand grip compared to Sergio's.
So, it's hard to tell from this video here.
Here you can see his right arm is way above his left.
And this is just showing how he's pushing his left shoulder and left arm deep across his body.
And the right arm is getting pushed up.
And that's how he's getting that really steep shaft plane that we saw going back.
And you can see pretty quick, he's going to start moving his left shoulder way under his chin.
So, it's a big pushing motion.
And that's why he looks like he has so much tilt of his spine away from the target.
Really steep here.
And then, as he starts back down, he actually gets, like I said, in a relatively good position.
You can see his left leg starting to externally rotate to get him a little bit back on the left side.
And then, as he starts to come down, You see that trademark Hogan-esque and Sergio move, where the left arm is internally rotated and is now shallowed out.
And that's what creates the appearance of having a tremendous amount of lag.
As he keeps pulling really hard with the left, he stays back behind the ball.
And you're going to notice his left foot is going to be way up in the air here pretty quick.
He's pretty much not even touching the ground at this point.
His left heel is well off the ground.
He's maybe just the very corner of his shoe is touching the ground.
And everything is starting to break down here a little bit.
His left elbow is broken down a little bit.
His left wrist is hinging a little bit.
This may not have been one of his best moves here, but obviously going at it pretty hard at this point.
So, he's losing control.
This is pretty typical.
He's pulled out of the shot so much with his arm that everything is starting to break down.
And then, as he comes through, he's in an okay impact position.
Not absolutely ideal, but again, we saw from down the line he recovers pretty well.
And you're going to see a ton of extension here as his arms really release away from his body.
But he's, again, totally up in the air.
And he's got to be careful with this because eventually if he keeps rotating, if he doesn't keep jumping up in the air to get off the ball of his foot, which he's on here, he'll eventually tear up his knee.
And so, he's got to, at some point, you know, he's a young kid and he's strong and he's athletic and he's going to get away with it for a while.
But we saw Tiger's move is identical to this.
It used to be identical to this before he learned to get his weight back over his ankle.
So, his hip could pivot safely without, you know, taking the balance joint away from the knee.
So, eventually this will catch up with him.
And I imagine this will be something he changes by the time he gets into his 30s.
He'll either develop knee problems or just realize he needs to kind of tone it down a little bit and get a little bit better.
Fundamentals there.
But, long story short, that's a quick review of his swing.
