Why You Can't Stop Overusing Your Arms in the Golf Swing

Ever wondered why, no matter how hard you try, you can't stop your arms from taking over your golf downswing? This is something that 95% of all golfers struggle with, so rest assured, you're not alone. However, this video will give you the inside track on how to fix it, and that will move you over to the 5% who can hit the ball a mile without even trying.

sorry no that's why i fall okay oh wow yeah gosh that was a rough year for me yeah a long time ago but rst has always kind of been on my radar and um you know i liked kind of the anatomic basis of everything back then um and kind of through the years i've kind of always kind of gravitated back towards you and your teaching because i've i've myself kind of gone through traditional golf instruction and have been very frustrated with it and i can you know personally admit to going to a lesson and getting told to do things that you you know frankly i didn't really think i should be doing or thought that it could really hurt myself or you know i've been told you know don't let the club turn over you want to keep it square things like that so i'm kind of a skeptic kind of i think as you are and i kind of actually kind of shy away from a lot of traditional golf instruction because to me it's just not what i'm trying to do in my golf swing yeah so now as an orthopedic surgeon do you have an area of focus uh mostly shoulders and knees primarily okay so have you the stuff that you were being taught did any of that stuff kind of ring alarm bells in your head well i can just think just from a personal standpoint i felt like some you know some back pain to be honest with you because i was told you know i need to really rotate my chest really hard and i just conceptually i was like well i don't think i need to be working this hard in my golf swing to try to get the ball to go somewhere and gosh it kind of seems like i'm putting a lot of stress on my body for not a lot of output if you will yeah i mean this little thing only weighs an ounce and a half yeah it doesn't need a lot of power there's no kinetic energy it's just sitting still like that that type of stuff has just driven me nuts as you know for you know teaching people to rotate their body through and putting that sheer force on the spine it's just it's something you can do for a little bit while you're young you may still feel like some soreness and whatever but people just kind of tend to accept that like now it's just part of golf you know you're going to be sore or whatever but as you know i vehemently disagree with that you know it's it's so much more efficient to post up and let the club release there's so much energy there absolutely and and if you as i've studied the golf swing i mean obviously you see that in every good ball striker especially the guys now who hit it a ton like rory for example he and i are about the same size you and i are probably about the same size don't weigh i don't weigh more than about a buck 60 the guy he's hitting it further than guys that are that outweighing by 50 pounds because he's obviously using the ground and using leverage and kind of just maxing out every everything he can yeah exactly you don't have to be a big strong guy like you said to hit the ball long ways and i that type of stuff again it just i think there's two different issues here one people receive bad information right and they're just being taught and it's just out of ignorance it's a simple truth of the matter and then the second the second thing is when people start believing that there's like some simple quick fix you know right the simple reality is that if golf was easy none of us would play it right we don't play shoots and ladders and go fish with cards anymore because it's not a challenge but the cool thing is with what you're doing getting back into and i hear the story a lot people it's it's tempting right to be like okay i know what rst is i know what it stands for and why it's there and i understand that there's work that has to be done but gosh if there was just a pill i could take i would be all over it right and so people tend to kind of go off and go i'm gonna try doing it a different way or try different tips and quick fixes and then they always kind of end up coming back and we've seen that happen a lot over the years so yeah i mean um i'll say so just to to transition my game i'm uh i play to a six handicap um but interestingly i feel like my i've really i've never been a really good ball striker uh my ball striking i feel like has gotten worse in the last year but i've really had to rely on my short game and my putting and minimizing the big numbers and so i've by default i've actually learned how to play the game and my scores have actually gotten better even though my ball striking in my opinion has gotten worse or or less consistent um and so i i really struggle with my iron play i just i hit very few greens um i tend to hit the ball thin and usually on the heel uh and then even with the driver i feel like i tend to hit it low on the face and don't ever feel like i really hit a lot of shots solidly throughout the course of a round but again i can kind of scrape it around and shoot 80 um if i'm really playing well i can shoot 76 if i kind of start compounding some mistakes or don't get up and down i can shoot 85 um and then i think specifically and i did a boot camp back in november that was really good i think it was the second one my the problems are the issues i've had and i'll also say i was supposed to come in colorado right at the end of march i think right when all this craziness started i was really bummed about that because i was really looking forward to spending some time with you yeah but here we are we figured out a way next best thing right um but specifically i feel like i make a pretty good backswing i can get into a pretty good backswing position i've just always struggled with the transition in the post-up like during the in the boot camp for example i feel like i'm a pretty good athlete played a lot of sports played college tennis if you tell me to get into a position i can get into it what i felt in the boot camp is as i was going through the reps and we were going through the live sessions i could feel 10 different things in the transition and still get to the same place yeah the same thing is probably true of the post-up so then my problem is taking that out with the club with the ball and so basically every time i go out to play golf i've got like a different feel or a different swing thought about how to try to transition and post-up yeah and you know depending on how it's working on the range i'll just kind of go with it yeah i'll change the feels throughout the round you know and so it's just you know obviously that's not the way i want to be playing golf but specifically i guess i have an issue with trying to blend i know what i need to do i know there's a lateral weight shift i know that i got to get i got to rotate my hips back to square i know that i got to post up and that the hips go up and back and that's what takes the club down and out and i can feel i i was a high jumper in high school played a lot of basketball so the squat and the jump and using leverage feels really natural to me and i can feel that that's where the power comes from or the speed and that i don't have to necessarily work so hard but i guess my own assessment is i probably aren't getting my hip back enough as as i go up and that's probably why i hit it thin and maybe in the heel um but some days i'll think about a lateral weight shift something times i'll think about the squat and the jump sometimes i'll think about rotating but i've never felt like the rotation ever felt very powerful to me it actually feels the opposite it feels really weak for me to just rotate from the top and i played last week and i i you know i felt like i spun out of a couple shots and just hit these big blocks and then then if right when that happens i'll compensate and i know the lower body then stalls and then i i swing all arms and i hit a pull hook and so i you know i got a two-way miss because i have a hard time sinking my arms in my body and then probably theoretically trying to figure out exactly what i'm trying to do with my lower body in my transition and downs perfect so let me explain what's most likely happening obviously i haven't seen your swing and but the the simple truth that matters when people kind of mention the same things going through the same problems of having you know as you mentioned kind of 10 different feelings to get into the same position that impact what's really happening there typically is that the load in the backswing is not right and it doesn't mean that you didn't load up your lower body right per se but it can mean that you loaded up your arms too much too soon or too much the wrong spot or not enough load in the hips or you know the left side gets too passive and you can't get back over and so it's typically it it may feel like gosh i've just got a bunch of balls up in the air i'm just trying to pick one for that day to play with but really what it comes down to is just understanding that if you load correctly in the backswing then a lot of the downswing stuff will truly happen almost completely automatically not completely you still have to understand what you're trying to do sure but it will be so much more natural when that stuff happens correctly in the backswing so that's going to be the first place that we're going to check is just to see like you know did the arms start to run away in the backswing and you build tension in the shoulders and it happens so fast that you can't really feel it unless you're being super careful monitoring that kind of stuff because then the lower body doesn't have a chance you know no matter you can try but like as you said if you're not clearing your hips out enough typically that's a time thing you just physically don't have enough time because your arms are firing too soon because they loaded to her the backswing so it's typically you know one of these things is kind of stacking on and then it builds and builds and builds and then that's where you're off but the good thing is it's not it's not usually that big of a deal to fix you just have to understand that the true cause and that makes sense i mean i think that i uh i'm kind of built i've got skinny legs and broad shoulders and i think i i can feel i've got some tension in my upper body and i know that i you know tend to kind of power it probably more with the upper body i really need to use a lower body more and then i also know i can move i can move my arms fast i can move my hips fast again i'm a sprinter i can move fast i guess the problem is i've had a hard time sequencing it because it's like well my hips can move fast and i'll spin out or my arms can move fast and i'll hit a pull hook and so it's like and i guess some of that tension in my upper body comes from not trusting as you've said before not trusting that if i let the arms chill out and let things load and and fire properly there's plenty of speed and plenty of power there without having to feel like i gotta like go whale on it with my arms and my shoulders and whatnot honestly that's the biggest mind trick with rotary swing and just a powerful efficient golf swing in general is it really is going to feel like you're doing nothing when you do it right and that's just so hard especially if you you know if you're stronger and you have more muscles in your upper body and you just feel like yeah i i can get speed here it's just the speed is wasted back here instead of down here and then i can't if i'm releasing it down here then i can't control the club face down here and so and that typically happens too if you're you know you're describing kind of feeling like you just rotate and spin out that is actually tends to be caused by your upper body and that's when you don't feel that post up and so this starts to fire and this just feels like it's just ripping out of the way and then you feel really out of control because you don't have that stable base anymore and then golf becomes as you said it's a two-way miss then you're just like i'm not really sure where this ball is going and then you know i i can feel i know that obviously i gotta accelerate and then decelerate my hips and my lower body and let all that that energy transfer um and yeah sometimes i feel like i can do it when i when i feel like i make that squat move i can feel that energy transferring and you know the speed feels um effortless but then yeah other times i feel like everything kind of rotates through at the same time and yeah there was no acceleration deceleration then obviously there's no transfer of energy there yeah well i'm pretty sure i have a pretty good idea what we're going to tackle but i want to video a couple of your swings okay screen capture them so let's get the camera set up to where i can see you yeah let me let me see i gotta adjust this yeah i can just see part of you there let me get a little closer i'm trying to figure i'm on my laptop and i'm trying to figure out how to get i'm only getting my upper body yeah that's a star i can at least work with that okay i can i can try to go i can work with that okay yeah that's fine okay so i'm going to go and i'm going to screen capture all right that's all i needed that's perfect and then yeah i don't even need it okay so i'm going to share my screen with you real quick okay all right okay can you see this uh see your video here okay all right so very simple to see what's going on even in your practice swing watch your practice swing here this is 100 arms and shoulders your lower body has barely changed at all right so if we're doing that in our practice swing that's definitely going to probably be the same case in the full swing you know at speed in general and in this case it definitely is as you start going back you actually shift your hips toward the target slightly you can use this tree in the background as a reference point or maybe this window over here and you'll see that you actually shift away from that right hip line toward the target yeah and then you pick the club up with your arms and shoulders you're not really turning at this point and you can't because your pelvis isn't allowed to turn very much okay especially when you shift your hips kind of toward the target just a little bit then that makes it even harder for your hips to turn and so then you have to just pick the club up with your arms and so you have you've made maybe an 80 degree turn here and so as you come down there's no chance of really using your legs properly and that's absolutely where all the spin out stuff is coming from so the cool thing is this is 100 exactly you know this is your lower body is not engaging from from the very first move you know inch of movement of the club and that's what we've got to get in there and once we get that working then the downswing transition and stuff has a shot but if the backswing is not loaded upright there's just no chance there's nothing you have left to hit with other than your arms and hands and that makes sense because i i think what i think about in my backswing is all about that my core and that right shoulder blade glide and i probably and i think probably i think about that in my backswing and then i try to focus on my lower body in the downswing but i guess like you said if i don't load the back the lower body properly in the backswing i've i guess i can't i can't really get where i want to go after that it's impossible right we have to create a stretching in those muscle fibers or we can't use them right and so right now when you're going back and you you know your hips are kind of frozen in place and then the arms start the arms and shoulders start to move first you are loading your core more the upper part of your rib cage you know you're using the lats and serratus and a bunch of muscles up here but we need to move that down and it needs to be from here to here not from here up okay as soon as you do that it's going to be a game changer but it's going to feel strange for sure at first because you're not used right now when people really kind of freeze their lower body one it takes all the athleticism out of the swing but two it makes us feel like we're more in control and it's an illusion right we have to really kind of give up some sort of feeling of control to truly gain control in the swing but if i don't move my lower body and i just move my arms and hands well this is all my tactile sense in my daily life right if you're a surgeon you know you trust your hands you know exactly where they're at you can feel where the club is and as soon as you start moving other parts you start transferring that control to a different part of your body that you're not used to associating with control honestly in my own personal swing i don't really talk about my personal feelings a lot just because obviously i try not to be subjective or anecdotal about stuff but the truth of the matter is my brain is in my left boot that's where my focus is from the moment i start that club back and i know that sounds strange some people are fixated on the club and this and that i couldn't care less where that stuff's going because i know if i'm just not doing anything extra with it it has no choice but to go where it's supposed to what i'm really focused on is not my position to take away my shoulder blade glide position at the top it's whether or not i'm going to be able to get this to initiate the swing and post up correctly because at the end of the day that's all that matters i can screw up all kinds of stuff in the backswing as long as it's in the right zip code but i can't screw this up if this doesn't fire if this doesn't load during the transition and engage and post up in the downswing then you have to use your arms and hand there's no way around it right makes sense yeah it makes sense so what i want you to do is we're going to do some exercises to kind of get this woken up okay and then we're going to start transferring where your focus is away from the golf club and into your hips okay so the first thing i want you to do is we have to kind of do this progressive in a couple little steps the first thing is to really exaggerate some of this stuff because your hips are frozen and we're going to wake them up so you said you played a lot of other sports obviously you're fit you're athletic as you play you know any hitting or throwing sport if you feel how you rotate back to throw a ball the truth of the matter is a big exaggeration but when you start to feel what's really happening here you start to understand the kinematic sequence of the golf swing right loading up these big i'm not if i was a pitcher getting ready to throw a ball and i'm winding up i'm not loading up my arm first right right but that's what you're doing in your swing by just doing this right now we're going to get you to feel this i'm actually going to have you stand up make a big exaggerated move i'm going to have you literally pick up your left foot and pivot 100 on your right leg you're going to make a big hip turn you're going to start to feel your glute load way different than what you're used to in your normal swing literally just like a baseball player pivot on that whole right foot there you go not hard right but now you can feel how instantly the transition is a balance move it's just i'm already pivoted here i've got some wind up on this right hip socket i've loaded that muscle and the supporting muscles on this hip and once those are loaded this naturally wants to happen that's the transition right sure once i transition i'm moving weight i'm moving pressure onto that left glute that's where your brain's gonna go you're going to feel this left glute engaged because you're going to push that puppy squat down slightly into the ground and feel this left glute completely engage and then post up on it yep so so wind up push and squat down a little bit as you there you go do you feel the difference in the muscle engagement there good so in the golf swing this is the exact same movement you any hitting or throwing sport from the time that we were cavemen throwing javelins and spears and stuff this is the kinematic sequence that we figured out the most efficient way for the human body to do this stuff otherwise we're just relying on the arm musculature by itself so if we want to use our glutes we have to first engage them in the back swing we have to turn our pelvis we have to load up on this hip socket so then it becomes natural to shift over now obviously in the swing that the hardest part about the golf swing is that the ball is static and we are static right you know if you play tennis you're always moving and that's the challenge of golf is that we have to maintain that sense of freedom and movement while our feet are planted on the ground so when you're doing the hardest thing about golf is it's not reactionary like every other sport i can tell you how many guys i you know thousands of lessons where guys get over the ball they're just going through a pre-flight checklist and they don't realize they've been sitting over the ball for a minute it's impossible to move dynamically and athletically impossible so now as you're doing this this is just going to be your freedom drill you're just going to wake up and you're going to before you hit balls you're just going to get hey my legs they got to wake up and this is how i'm going to wake them up every day and start to feel my glutes if you can't feel them when you plant that weight squat down slightly really engage the glute and then what we've got to do is we've got to make that step smaller right so right now i'm letting you pick your whole left foot up make a big pivot on that hip socket and then eventually we're just going to kind of do it let the left heel come up old school jack nicholas 70s 60s kind of golf right but you can do that same thing feel the same movement the same load in the hips but by just lifting up your heel right now because that makes it easy to transfer that weight and then plant that heel on the ground and squat into it push into it there you go and then post up and then you're going to start to make this more and more like your regular golf swing so instead of having such a big hip turn and letting this heel come up you're still going to make the hip turn still make the load still feel athletic your heel maybe just feels light in your shoe maybe the heel comes up slightly but you keep just making those movements a little bit smaller but you still try to feel the same amount of muscular load that you do when you pick your feet up does that make sense there you go now get your weight off get your hip all the way over to the left so watch me for a second so when you're shifting you're doing this okay i need moving but the hip isn't okay hip has to go move your whole pelvis over that left ankle now still knee knees going outside the foot still knee so you're still doing this the knee barely moves it's just a little bit just to get it over the ankle but then you're really getting your weight so think of it this way lift your right foot up as you come into the fall into the post up or the transition and put all your weight on your left foot there you now do you now how if there's not weight there you won't your brain is way too efficient when it comes to loading muscle fibers and so your brain just be like yeah if there's not that much weight over there i don't have to work that hard so i'm going to recruit the minimum amount of muscle fiber humanly possible but when you put all your weight over there your brain's like oh man i have to really work there you now there you go feel the difference yeah and so i went and saw chris tyler two summers ago maybe okay you remember i only spent a couple hours with him but i do remember feeling like i had to make up much more i had to make much more of a shift over to the left than than i felt like i did yeah yeah i was having to do see the same thing here you're just kind of getting just your knee over there but not your weight not your hip over there there you go so now as you're practicing this i want you to be free to move around right now right because you've kind of frozen your body in place and what you're going to do is you're going to start refining these movements still focusing on muscular recruitment right muscle fibers that you're trying to engage with pressure and weight and minimizing movement right so right now i'm allowing this your head to move a little bit off the ball your head to move back that's okay right now because you're waking your body up your lower body now we're going to start trying to refine that and feel can i feel the same amount of muscle load without my head moving i'm just moving my pelvis now okay i can feel a load in my in my glute and my hamstring and my quad right here good yeah perfect i guess what i've seen in my video and we kind of saw it today is that when i make that transition move and i try to get over to the left i've certainly seen that my torso or my head leads or it goes along with the lower body is that okay yes and no so first off your head has moved off the ball more than it would in a regular swing right now right so you have to balance that out yeah so right there's the maximum no more than that so what you're going to find is that your hip is going to shift while you're turning rather than your upper torso moving to feel that same load on that right hip there you go i felt centered if you will with my head and torso but i did feel load in my right foot good maybe that's a little it's hard to maybe a little bit too much hip turn but you're in the ballpark right it's okay to overdo it a little bit right now there you go so now when you shift to the left don't think upper body think your pelvis moving back over to the left there you go get a lot of weight on there feel that same left hip there you go so now when you're practicing that wall drill where you just go and put your head up against the wall and you start to because that's going to keep your head your head can move a little bit but when you're doing the wall drill you'd be dragging your head across the wall so it's a little bit of an exaggeration but at least then you're starting to focus down here because now you can't move your upper body so much to cheat to create that pressure and load on the hips can i put the setup where the wall is on the left side of my head i usually put my head literally right on on a flat surface got it there you go so now your head barely moved at all but i can tell that you're loaded up on the right good now you're cooking with gas now your lower body is leading the entire golf swing does that make sense yeah that's what you need to be feeling that transition move where it feels like it's all lower body that's going to create a little there's going to be an increase in axis tilt because of how the lower body is moving the upper body is kind of staying fat is that correct yeah that's what we call secondary axis tilt so you will have a little increase there as you go into impact and that helps shallow out the plane and shift the path there you go now that will shift what feels like it to me i can really feel the shoulders staying closed because i know that's also a problem of mine because i'm so upper body driven in my swing yeah 100 perfect so angelo shoot we ran out of time already believe it or not but you know exactly what you need to work on now it's all of this that's all that matters don't worry about arms swing plane pad position all that stuff focus on this for right now and then start stacking your left arm in there and start feeling like oh do i start wanting to swing my arm and it takes over this has to be 100 where your brain is as soon as you keep getting that and you start stacking pieces on there just see how soft you can keep your arms and shoulders and keep the focus down here the same load and that's going to be how you get to that next step and get you back down to being a good ball striker again because this is a huge this is 180 degree flip from what you're doing 20 minutes ago okay does it make sense yeah it makes sense awesome you mind if i share your lessons like a lot of people are doing the same stuff that you're doing i think it'd be really helpful that'd be great i think i saw a lesson that you posted where it was very similar to what what we're talking about today yeah there's quite a few oh thank you so much man i'd love to see you again soon i gotta run to the next lesson but i'd love to see an update here soon okay thank you chuck all right buddy talk to you later