Drills To Cure The Chicken Wing In The Golf Swing (Video) - by Pete Styles
Drills To Cure The Chicken Wing In The Golf Swing (Video) - by Pete Styles

So here's another really nice drill that’s going to help you understand this chicken wing motion, and how you can eradicate it from your game. So if we understand that a chicken wing is the lead arm bending upwards, getting stuck this way through impact it really stops the club from releasing in an efficient fashion. Effectively it's slowing the club down. It's putting the brakes on. We're going to hit shots with this that go high and scoop out to the right-hand side for the right-handed golfer. And it’s that lack of releasing action that causes the problems.

So let's work on an exercise and a drill that really focuses on the correct release. Now one of the problems when we hit the golf ball normally is, is both hands holding quite a light golf club, your hands can have too much influence over the golf club. You can dominate it too much. And you can hold the head back, but we don't want to hold the head back. We want to release the head and let it go. So the exercise that I encourage you to do here is actually just to take it with your lead hand only. So for myself it’s my left hand. So I grip the club with just my left hand, and I just swing the club back to sort of shoulder height and shoulder height back and through. So my lead arm gets sort of parallel to the ground on both sides. And as long as I’m not trying to fight this, and as long as I’m not putting too much effort into my lead arm here, I’m just letting the club head do what it naturally wants to do. You’ll often find this will happen. You’ll extend your lead arm nicely, but the elbow will break down very slightly in a downwards fashion rather than having it in an upwards fashion. If the elbow gets above the wrist to shoulder line this line across here, we would call this the chicken wing. If the elbow stays below the wrist to shoulder line, we're going to call that a proper release. And you can see the club had moved through far faster here than if I were to do this where I’ve held the club head down. So once I’ve done a couple of dozen of these swings releasing it with my left-hand, I can start to build a bit more speed into it, start to get a proper little swoosh, and then the release happens really nice and quickly. Bring my bottom hand into that as well, a few more swings and my chicken wing has all but disappeared. I’m not getting stuck in this position any more. So if you feel that you consistently go back to doing the chicken wing, it's starting to bug you and it’s starting to plague you on the golf course, maybe you can incorporate some one-handed goal swings in your pre-shot routine just to remind you of the correct feeling. Then go ahead with both hands, repeat the same feeling. And hopefully that one handed exercise will reduce the chicken wings in your swing. 2016-07-08

So here's another really nice drill that’s going to help you understand this chicken wing motion, and how you can eradicate it from your game. So if we understand that a chicken wing is the lead arm bending upwards, getting stuck this way through impact it really stops the club from releasing in an efficient fashion. Effectively it's slowing the club down. It's putting the brakes on. We're going to hit shots with this that go high and scoop out to the right-hand side for the right-handed golfer. And it’s that lack of releasing action that causes the problems.

So let's work on an exercise and a drill that really focuses on the correct release. Now one of the problems when we hit the golf ball normally is, is both hands holding quite a light golf club, your hands can have too much influence over the golf club. You can dominate it too much. And you can hold the head back, but we don't want to hold the head back. We want to release the head and let it go. So the exercise that I encourage you to do here is actually just to take it with your lead hand only. So for myself it’s my left hand.

So I grip the club with just my left hand, and I just swing the club back to sort of shoulder height and shoulder height back and through. So my lead arm gets sort of parallel to the ground on both sides. And as long as I’m not trying to fight this, and as long as I’m not putting too much effort into my lead arm here, I’m just letting the club head do what it naturally wants to do. You’ll often find this will happen. You’ll extend your lead arm nicely, but the elbow will break down very slightly in a downwards fashion rather than having it in an upwards fashion.

If the elbow gets above the wrist to shoulder line this line across here, we would call this the chicken wing. If the elbow stays below the wrist to shoulder line, we're going to call that a proper release. And you can see the club had moved through far faster here than if I were to do this where I’ve held the club head down. So once I’ve done a couple of dozen of these swings releasing it with my left-hand, I can start to build a bit more speed into it, start to get a proper little swoosh, and then the release happens really nice and quickly.

Bring my bottom hand into that as well, a few more swings and my chicken wing has all but disappeared. I’m not getting stuck in this position any more. So if you feel that you consistently go back to doing the chicken wing, it's starting to bug you and it’s starting to plague you on the golf course, maybe you can incorporate some one-handed goal swings in your pre-shot routine just to remind you of the correct feeling. Then go ahead with both hands, repeat the same feeling. And hopefully that one handed exercise will reduce the chicken wings in your swing.