2 Crushing Faults in Your Backswing

🏌️‍♂️ Many amateurs struggle with maintaining the club on plane during the backswing, leading to overcorrection and slicing.

📏 Keeping the club head in line with the hands during the backswing is crucial for a proper swing plane.

🎥 Using a camera to check the alignment of the club can help golfers maintain a straight line in their backswing.

🏌️‍♀️ Proper shoulder tilt, around 28-29 degrees, is essential when the shaft is parallel to the ground.

💪 Maintaining width in the backswing allows for better body rotation and increased club speed.

📐 Measuring the bend in the lead elbow can help identify and correct swing issues.

🔄 Early extension in the swing can lead to a host of problems, including slicing and inconsistent ball striking.

📊 Data and measurements can provide clear insights and help golfers improve their performance over time.

00:00:00 - so the most common issue i see is hannah if you stand over the ball it's uh struggling at maintaining the club on plane so i see a lot of players really suck that club under plane in the backswing backswing and then in the downswing you're going to have to try to get that club back on plane right so what happens is that most amateurs kind of over correct and try to get the club back on plane and that caused them to come over the top and hit that nasty slice that a lot of players struggle with

00:00:33 - [Music] hey so i'm here with my friends hannah and frederick we're going to talk about some backswing stuff frederick likes to teach a little golf on the side when you're not kicking people's butt on the golf course so let's talk about some things that people do wrong on the backswing yeah okay you have a few tidbits to share yeah so the most common issue i see is hannah if you stand over the ball it's struggling at maintaining the club on plane so i see a lot of players really

00:01:07 - suck that club under plane in the backswing backswing and then in the downswing you're going to have to try to get that club back on plane right sure so what happens is that most amateurs kind of over correct and try to get the club back on plane and that caused them to come over the top and hit that nasty slice that a lot of players struggle with so what i'm really trying to look for in a backswing and we will look at it with the optimotion is to kind of try to keep that club on plane where the

00:01:37 - club head is in line with the hands okay so you can kind of have a checkpoint here if the club is too far under plane the club that is going to be inside the hands or if it's outside it's outside the hands so you kind of want to keep this in a straight line if you have a camera looking from straight okay all right well let's take a look at uh a couple swings up here got hannah and colin morikawa yeah he's pretty good so we'll just talk about a couple points

00:02:02 - in here so i've started it a little bit in the back swings and you notice the club's about two feet or so already away from the golf ball and they look a little bit different with the height of the club off the ground relative to colin how much higher that is then poor hannah's still dragging it along the turf there and i know you're doing this intentionally hannah this is a hard one for you to even even practice so the way to get the club to ascend there are

00:02:26 - a couple different ways when you go into the left tilt with your shoulders that makes the club start going upward but the other one is to start radially deviating your wrist or what most people call this that wrist for her it's too slow in this swing relative to collin so i think that's an awesome tidbit that you bring up because you can see when the shaft's parallel the ground hannah actually does this much better than most people with the club face angle and how much more open that is than say

00:02:53 - collins is at this point in time so he's maybe slightly over exaggerated that piece of advice he gave but it's definitely a better way to play than the face two open and the shaft that much more inward than your hands what do you think i mean yeah there you see world-class ball striker to the right and hannah trying to be a bad ball striker to the left uh that's i mean that's a fantastic checkpoint if you can start by just making sure you're in that position halfway back and that's why you see a

00:03:20 - lot of pros too they take these practice swings you can see justin thomas they take a practice swings and kind of stops here to make sure he's in the right position so if you do that you're quickly going to notice okay that's where i need to be i don't want to be there yeah practice is the feel for how to line the shaft up when it's parallel to the ground exactly and then the other part you see in here is colin's shoulders are more tilted to the left that's a big problem with

00:03:41 - amateurs right there hannah that's a good demo of don't have your shoulders level to the ground uh when the shaft's parallel the ground you're trying to have closer to 28 29 degrees of shoulder tilt at that point in time you do pretty well with the turns and i know we're going to talk about that here in a second but yeah i think that pretty well covers it you gotta you have to your wrists faster and a good way to do that is practice like you suggested with justin

00:04:04 - thomas line the shaft up with that down the line camera that you have you can practice that at home and actually and then just like you said too don't feel like the shoulder is rotated too flat can i point that left shoulder down a little bit it's going to help you maintain that club more outside or more on plane yeah awesome advice i guess other ways you could practice that if you have a couch at home you could use as an obstacle just anything you could prop up to help you not

00:04:26 - move the shaft inward too much with your level shoulders and some people it's not quite hannah's case but it's pretty close actually uncock their wrist from address ulnar deviate and that's no bueno that's a hard way to do it for sure okay so we got that tidbit and i think that's great advice for starting your backswing um what else do you see amateurs do that makes a mess of the rest of their game so another thing i see if i borrow a club there is that they lack a lot of width in the

00:04:52 - backswing so they tend to kind of either suck it in and don't really and keep the club head and the hands too close to the body or they lift it up and if you don't have width it's going to be very hard to have rotation in your back swing so if you instead feel like you're really wide almost like you're trying to shake someone's hand that's standing to the side of you you're going to be able to rotate the body so much easier get a lot more shoulder rotation and the club is going to travel further

00:05:21 - and from this position it's a lot easier to generate club base speed compared to if the hands are too close to your body yeah exactly and a lot of people don't do the the backswing moves of bending yourself backward and turning enough early in the swing and then to make it longer you bend your elbows it makes the club move you cheated right this is have a camp from caddyshack perfect model for that exactly so you you know the club needs to be parallel and if you don't

00:05:46 - rotate and have width you're going to end up here so what you do you bend it and you think this is perfect you ever see that playing a pro-am santa oh only occasionally only every single person that you play with okay so check this out with optimotion what we can do here is measure the bend in your lead elbow so this would be i can't really make my elbow zero degrees of flex you can though hannah you're doing a great job it's always a little bit flexed and this

00:06:11 - would be more degrees of flexion and if you could hyperextend it it would be a an actual extended degrees number so when you when you start taking it back you're at zero degrees zero degrees and you can see your left arm how straight that is in particular just your elbow here there's no flux in that one at all still at zero usually the lead elbow starts to bend a few degrees at the top as you're trying to slow the club down and that's not wrong and then generally

00:06:36 - from here it'll start to straighten as you see there bends a little bit more on the downswing and then here's the earlier part you talked about frederick when you move the shaft in too much yeah on the way back check out uh colin morikawa when he's got his lead arm parallel to the ground connecting the grip in your shoulder how uh hannah's moves through the top of her shoulder that's what people do slice and if we were trying to get her to demo worse than that that's as bad as you could do

00:07:01 - but on the lpga tour all the girls on the symmetra tour the shafts probably aren't too much higher than that you don't see a lot of girls on tour with an over the top oh that's the shaft that high because this at this point in time what you've really done is programmed your swing to be slightly out to end already so to not do that not slice across the ball now that's where you start to see people who you hear that term early extend a lot well it's a way to lower the shaft in to help

00:07:28 - you swing out bulb but that comes with a host of problems too so this is just bad and then when people are bad and they don't know how to get better they have the shaft out too far here and just keep going like you talked about in that first piece so there's your lead elbow it's at 10 degrees of flex you probably don't bend it a whole lot more than that it stays pretty constant and then in here it'll start to flex and extend just ever so slightly coming through the ball so yes you see

00:07:54 - the worst players have their elbow almost bent 30 40 degrees at the top of the swing and that's not gonna work too well because on the downswing when you straighten your arm out that also changes your wrists and starts to move those towards uncocking or the ulnar deviation and that's the beginning of smashing behind the turf is having too much flex on your elbow you're so wise frederick i mean good tidbits for people at home it's just kind of paying attention and uh i

00:08:19 - love i mean with this system you get a great visual straight away so you know as a player and even as a coach sometimes you have to convince your player the best place in the world you definitely have to convince them and with information like this there is no way you can say no that's not what i'm doing yeah right it's right there you got data and you can also have data to measure your performance over time to see if it actually gets better yeah because it's very hard to see you know

00:08:45 - just with the phone but when you have the exact measurements it's super simple yep absolutely that's why we have a bunch of smart people who work on this and have made it really accurate here's like a pro tip for you though a little bonus tip at the point in time where your lead arm is parallel to the ground you talked about making a good backswing all the pga tour players that we've measured at this point time have about 77 degrees of shoulder turn so that knowing that measurement at this

00:09:10 - point in time can help you make a good backswing assuming that you do the wrist cocking as you described really well that's like the makings of golf it's a good way to start i like your swing hannah right here is much better than earlier i was trying my best i'm trying to be over the top that's not my move it's hard demonstrating what you see other people do so you can always get help with this by getting your swing measured that's the best advice for everybody really

00:09:34 - and then golf tech coaches fix these problems all the time just like you do so backswing recap is a little quicker with the the wrist hinge or set or the wrist  or the radial deviation however you want to term that really doesn't matter and then you mentioned at the top of the swinger throughout the entire thing keep your elbow as straight as hannah did you're off and running love it did i miss anything no i think it's just that simple it's just simple simple with the

00:09:59 - right information i wish it were that well there's plenty of other places to really make a mistake but that would help you get off to a good start you guys did awesome thanks bud real pro thanks thanks for watching

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