A recent lesson with my friend Travis reinforced something that is important to remember no matter where you get your golf instruction: If you want to fix something in your swing, you have to fix the cause. Too many golfers just chase the symptoms.
Travis is a former mini-tour player who taught himself the game, so he’s no stranger to instruction. Ma anticipated extension he got into his swing anyway, as for players who have never even been on a lesson tee. Coming down, he would rise out of his stance, stop rotating and reverse the club at impact, trying to launch the ball higher and add speed.
The fix was not to give them drills to stop standing. We had to go back first in the swing to find the root cause, which you can see in this video.
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The first thing we addressed was the clubface, specifically what it was do on the reach. If the face is not put in a good position first, everything in the valley can end up compensating. For Travis, that compensation showed up in his right arm.
That’s where we went next, building a better structure into his trailing arm instead of letting it slip away and cost him width at the top. Travis used to bend his right arm on the backswing, flattening the top of his swing and putting a steep, stuck motion into transition.
I’ve been using the AMG Arm Shark, a training aid invented by my friends at AMG, Shaun Webb and Mike Granato. It’s a strap with a magnetic pin that fits against the bicep. If it moves outside the range that holds the fin in place, the magnetic connection releases with a noise. That gives you immediate feedback on the error, rather than waiting for me to yell “wider” down the line.
Once the structure started to hold its own, we slowed things down. I had Travis hit balls off a tee at well below top speed, making three-quarter swings at maximum, so he could incorporate the new pattern before asking me to maintain game speed. Trying to fix your structure at maximum speed is a good way to get ahead of the change process before the adjustment stops.
The final piece was rotation, specifically learning to rotate while maintaining your stance instead of standing to make room for the club. I used an alignment stick to give Travis immediate feedback on hip depth throughout the swing, giving him something he could feel rather than just hear me describing.
As he began to maintain depth, two things improved almost immediately. He stopped catching the ball toward the toe, and the club began to approach impact on a lower path. Better depth led to better path, which led to better contact. Each improvement fed the next.
None of this started with a posture adjustment or a drill designed to keep Travis from standing, because standing was never the root problem. It was a result of what had happened earlier in the swing. Find the cause, rather than just targeting the point where everything finally breaks, and the symptom often takes care of itself.
