How to Learn the Golf Takeaway FAST

The takeaway is one of those things in golf instruction, it’s been taught a million different ways. And unfortunately for the golfer, it’s just created a tremendous amount of confusion. There’s so many little things that golfers are trying to accomplish in the takeaway and they’re going about them the wrong way. And what I mean by that is let’s first establish a set of parameters of what we’re trying to do with the takeaway. The first thing is most golfers agree that we’re trying to keep our hands basically in front of our chest, the club, and roughly a toe up position and looking down the line, it should be basically somewhere over the end of our feet and pointing down the target line versus pointing way this way or our hands being deep across the chest, et cetera, for a lot of golfers, that’s just about impossible because they’ve been trying to go about it by trying to move the club into those positions.

But that’s not how it’s designed to work. It’s not how your body’s designed to work, and that’s not the simplest way to do it. And I’m going to teach you what the simplest way to create a perfect takeaway is every single time. And you’re going to get to learn it incredibly quickly. Once you understand the proper movement patterns. And that’s really what the golf swing is, the golf swing is all just learning sequenced movement patterns, nothing else. It’s not that complicated, but it does take time. Your brain doesn’t learn things instantly. You can’t just take a tip and all of a sudden start swinging like Ben Hogan or tiger woods or whoever else that you idolized for the golf swing. You have to learn things in a sequenced movement. And that’s exactly what we’re going to start with because the takeaway, if you start things off on the wrong foot, on the takeaway that throws off the rest of the back swing and the top of the swing and that throws off the down swing.

So when you start this bad chain reaction of events like this, everything starts going wrong in a hurry. So when we look at the takeaway, we will look at what muscles are contracting that are moving the bones. Cause that’s how it works. If your muscle contracts, it moves the bone at the joint and that in turn moves the golf club. So we look at it a little bit more inside out. We don’t look at what the club’s doing by itself. Rotary swing tour is all about moving the muscles in the right sequence and teaching the golfers to move those muscles so that everything else on the outside, the peripheral takes care of itself. And I’m going to show you what I mean by that to do a perfect takeaway. Here’s the only thing that I’m going to focus on. I’m going to focus on moving my shoulder blade.

This bony part right here in the back of my rib cage moves all over the rib cage has a lot of free. I’m a movement and I’m going to move it slightly down and in towards my spine. So as a visual, if you imagine my left arm here is my spine and my right hand as my shoulder blade, I’m going to move it in towards my spine and slightly right down. Now, why do I move it in simple? I’m trying to create centered rotation around my spine. I don’t want my head moving all over the place. And so if I want to create centered rotation, I need to move towards center, which in this case is my spine pretty simple. So if I move my shoulder blade, which I’m doing right now, I’m not trying to move anything else other than start to move that shoulder blade in towards my spine to initiate the takeaway.

It’s going to move about this far. Okay? So that’s all I’m doing right now. I’m concentrating on just moving my shoulder blade in towards my spine. Now let’s do that in a golf posture. I’m gonna do the same thing. Get it’s going to leave my hands and neutral, just hanging down in front of my chest. And I’m just going to move my shoulder blade two inches. Now you’ll notice as a result that might, my hands and arms are being moved. A couple of feet. I’m not moving my hands and arms. That’s pretty tough to train your hands and arms to move because they can move all over the place. And our goal is to try and keep them in front of our body the whole time. So let’s look at that from down the line. Now, if I do the same thing, glide that shoulder blade.

Now what I’m doing apart from starting to store energy here, cause I’m not moving my hips and just gliding that shoulder blade. My hands stay right in front of my body. What happens when we move it with the club? It’s all good into my setup and just move my shoulder blade. Now I’m sure that most of you would agree. That’s a pretty good takeaway. The club’s right down the line, ha club heads in line with my hands clubs and a toe up position directly over my feet. Now, if I tried to teach my students to just try and position the club here, they would interpret how to do that. A million different ways. That’s the danger in golf instruction. When you start focusing on move the club here, well, I can do that with my wrist. I can do it with my arms. I can do it by turning my hips to a million different ways to do it, but there’s always only one most optimum and efficient way to do it.

And I just showed you what that is two and a half inches of shoulder blade movement. And it’s giving you a million other side benefits. This is the same motion that your shoulder blade would take. If you were to take a ball and throw it, you’re loading up energy so that you can fire that right arm in the downswing. You’re creating centered rotation. So your head doesn’t move all the way, all over the place. And you’re moving the golf club in the right position, not by trying to move the golf club, but by learning to move two inches. So when we do that, if I move my shoulder blade two inches that moves my hands about two and a half feet, which moves the club about two and a half yards. Think about that. That’s a great return on your two and a half inch investment.

I bet you can learn to move two and a half inches really easy. And I bet you can do it way easier than trying to teach yourself to try and position the club two and a half yards away from you at speed, with something that’s happening behind you. It’s pretty tough to do. It’s going to take a lot of reps or you can just sit here in your chair while you’re watching this golf channel video and learn to move your shoulder blade two and a half inches and you can do it perfectly every time. That’s what the rotary swing tour is all about. We don’t just stop at the takeaway. The whole golf swing is taught that way. You learn how to move simple movement patterns. You learn how to move your body and start to engage the correct muscles so that you start to move efficiently and powerfully and safely.

And that’s what the golf swing is really all about. You want to be able to play for a lifetime. And it’s very, very frustrating. If you’re out there trying to move the golf club all over the place because your instructor told you to, to set it here. Well, that’s not the goal. So much of the golf swing. That’s a result of moving your body correctly. What we want to do is load our body up and create power because the golf club by itself really doesn’t do anything. It’s the muscles contracting and stretching that creates power in the golf swing. Not the fact that the golf club moved over here by itself. It didn’t your muscles contracting move that golf club. So that’s how you need to understand the golf swing. And that’s how you need to start to learn the fundamentals of the golf swing.

It was learned piece by piece, how your muscles move in the right sequence. The takeaway just got a lot easier. If you can move two and a half inches, you can have a perfect takeaway like tiger woods or any other great golfer. That’s on the PGA tour in less than five minutes of practice a day, sit here and work on moving your shoulder blade down an end, slightly towards your spine. And you got a perfect takeaway. Every time as a golf instructor, I get hit up all the time for a quick tip as somebody heading to the range or to the first tee St. Chuck, I’m not hitting it. Well, what is this one thing I need to do? Just give me a tip to get me through the day. And I always give them the same tip. And this is the same tip I’m going to give you right now.

It’s the most important tip you’re ever going to get in terms of golf instruction. So I want you to listen closely, stop searching for quick tips. They don’t work. You’ve never learned anything else in your life like this. Think about learning how to ride a bicycle or play a musical instrument. You didn’t get a tip and start playing it. You learned fundamentals. There’s this an established pathway of learning. When you learn to play the piano, you learn the scales. You learn the keys. You learn how to use the foot pedals, learning how to ride a bicycle. You learn things incrementally. The golf swing is no different. It’s a very complex movement pattern, and you can’t expect to just go out and start swinging like tiger woods. The first time you pick up a golf club or the first tip you get from a buddy on the range, learn fundamentals. Take the time to understand the golf swing, learn how simple the movements are when you learn them piece by piece, rather than trying to put everything together at once. Then you’ll start to build a golf swing. That’s going to last you a lifetime. And that’s the most important thing. So when you start learning the golf swing, think about it this way. Don’t think about it in terms of tips, they’re worthless, just like stock tips are, think about fundamentals and you’ll make lasting improvements.