backswing length

Self evidently true - but what I thought would make for an interesting thread is a discussion of HOW 5sk views backswing length, or the synchronisation of arm swing and body turn, impacting on keys 4 and 5.

Phil's actually one of the guys I had in mind when I first posted - given that Butch claims to have worked hard with Phil on shortening his arm swing, at least with the irons.

FWIW, I thought that was a terrific answer.

OK. I don't want to put words in anyone's mouth or impose a particular terminology on the discussion - but what I'm thinking of is what is often talked about as swinging the arms past the shoulder turn at the top.

Phil and Bubba have long swings - but at least match it up with a full turn.

Here, I'm thinking of where the shoulder turn stops (probably short of a 90* turn) but the arms continue swinging to the top. Some people refer to a "false" backswing. Others refer to "losing width" (although I'm not sure I've ever seen a good explanation of the function or benefit of "width" in that sense) as either the left arm bends or the right arm gets much narrower than 90* at the top.

My gut feeling is that you can probably do this without disrupting the usual alignments used to measure clubface and plane on the backswing - but there could be consequences for sequencing on the way down.

I agree that you're really focussing on the effects on keys 4 and 5. I'm less sure whether this sort of "overswing" shows up as directly as mismatched alignments - or if you're just making it harder to time the downswing and consistency suffers.

typically the arms would stop with the shoulder turn. You can continue with the arms, as long as your not getting your swing out of sync.

So, what does that actually mean?

Well lets say you take your backswing, your hips stop rotating, your shoulders stop, and your arms keep going. You start the downswing, what if because your arms move more than intended, now you got to catch up. What happens, well, you might thrash at the ball. increase hand speed, you might flip the club. If your doing something that is causing something to go bad in your swing, don't do it. Some people can, some people can't. For me, an extra long swing cause a pull cut. I hit more draws with a shorter swing than i do with a long swing. Taking such a long swing makes it hard for me to get the club inside.

If the arm swing keeps going after the shoulder turn has finished, the arms can get stuck behind the body during the downswing. This guy is guilty of that. I'm working on lessening my right arm bend to keep the arm swing shorter.

Just to add my me-specific $0.02 as an example.  For me, too long a back swing usually means some combo of bending the lead arm and letting my lead wrist go from straight to a pretty extreme cup.  But I don't come into impact Lee Westwood style, so that means my hands are stuck too far behind (even if my lead elbow isn't!), and one of two things tends to happen:

1) Not enough weight forward cause I try to rescue the hands being behind by rotating around and not driving the weight forward, resulting in an OOT move.

2) More deliberately getting my hands down to keep coming from the inside, but then I have to very deliberately perfectly time an armsy motion to the get the club coming from the inside and a perfect timing with un-cupping the lead wrist.  Usually this results in a push-cut with the path straight-ish but the wrist never getting back to square and an open face.  Sometimes a more deliberate roll/pull-across leading either to bombed pulls or even bigger slices.

If I both keep my lead arm straight and my lead wrist flat at the top, I feel like I'm taking like a 1/2 swing but video proves I'm usually past parallel at the top even then, and I'm much more able to hit straight shots or even slight draws that way.  Still something I'm able to achieve on the course pretty rarely.

Thanks to everyone who contributed their thoughts. Lots for me to think about here, from the point of view of trying to understand the swing generally.

Closer to home - after a session at the range, I'm not convinced that a shorter armswing is "low hanging fruit" for me.

Well if you look at in terms of constraints, meaning the distance between your shoulder will stay the same. The distance from your hands to your shoulders has a max length. If you rotate your torso around your spine on an incline plane, and keep it there. Then the only way to lengthen your swing is to break down your left arm at the elbow. Because if not, then your shoulder would be coming out of its socket. So, if you just keep your left arms straight, your right elbow can not fold to much because they are linked at the club..

True. But, and of course this is somewhat subjective, there's a fine line between 'left arm straight' and 'left arm stiff'.

I had a very productive session at the range today working on keeping the right/trail arm straighter - which is an easier swing thought for me to implement. I'm looking forward to seeing the results on video. I'm sure my backswing plane is going to be steeper (in a good way) - but will be interested too to see if it's also a bit shorter. Would be happy if it is.