Width at P4 Has Downstream Effects on P6 and P7

[iacas]

I work with a lot of golfers who want more shaft lean at impact, who currently have AoAs that range from +2° to -2°, and who love to see the handle lower and more "in front of their trail thigh" from face-on at P6.

And a lot of these golfers try to solve the issue by working on the downswing. They do something to drag the handle forward. Or they just leave their right thigh farther back so the same handle location "looks" farther forward. Or they move the ball back in their stance. Or they push themselves down into the ground to get the handle lower and increase (decrease?) their AoA (to be more negative).

The real fix is often to get wider in the backswing. To do LESS in the backswing. To hinge less, fold the trail arm less, abduct the trail arm less.

I had a case of this over the weekend. Before, the player had 110° of trail elbow bend, "lifted" his trail humerus only a few degrees, etc. The club traveled quite a bit around him, and he tended to "pick" the ball from the fairways.

In the "after" swings below (which are mild exaggerations — this golfer does not need to end up at < 70° of elbow bend. These were slower backswings with "hit it as hard as you normally would" intent downswings), you can see that he bent his elbow about 70° instead of 110° and lifted his right arm an extra ~15° or more. You can't see how much less this moved his hands across his chest (right arm abduction), but it was also decreased. His hands stayed more "in front of" his right shoulder rather than traveling "beside" them so much.

The two swings look like this:

The change at P6, without talking about the downswing one little bit (outside of him telling me that he tends to pick the ball), is remarkable:

Without 110° of elbow bend to get out (which he gets to 80°, a loss of 30°), the golfer actually loses slightly less elbow bend (70 - 50 = 20), but delivers 30° less elbow bend, lowering the handle and letting the elbow get "in front of" the rib cage… because it never got "behind" or "beside" the rib cage.

If you look at this video showing the before/afters of P6, you'll note the handle location (both vertically and horizontally) and the shoulders (the ball is in the same place in these frames).

This golfer's path was largely unaffected (still pretty straight into the ball, < 3° path and often < 1.5°), but his AoA jumped to -5° ± 2°.

I've always said, and in talking with other instructors they agree and feel similarly, that we spend a lot of time working on the backswing. This is another example of why.

[saevel25]

I would think of it in terms of time. The time it takes to get the arm angle into a good position to deliver the club with proper shaft lean. Another component is rotation, but that is also a matter of timing. It relates to how the body stalls to give the golfer time to hit the ball. If you have to get 80+ degrees out of that right elbow in one third of a second versus 50 degrees in the same time then you have to steal time from somewhere. It is usually body rotation. That does not help with shaft lean. 

I agree in that amateurs tend to make the swing more complicated than pro golfers. 

[Ty_Webb]

You should show this post to the people who say backswing doesn't matter. 

[saevel25]

At some point, the golfer is going to have to retrain their timing. When I exaggerate the right elbow stuff, I find myself at the P4 being like, "Uhhh, when does the downswing start." I am just hanging out at P4 for eternity because my backswing is usually like half a second longer. Half a second in the backswing feels like forever. Your tempo might be like 5:1 not 3:1. A 3:1 tempo is going to be very quick. It might be you need to speed up the backswing.