Natalie Adams – PGA Teaching Pro
When looking at how far you should swing the club back on your back swing, it really does depend on several issues such as your flexibility. The idea with the back swing is you are trying to create enough time to generate speed on your down swing and we want the club moving as quickly as possible. If we look at the back swing position then, ideally you want to create as much rotation in your shoulder as possible. So if you stand in your back swing position and turn your shoulders to the right for right handed golfers, this would be ideal position to have for the top of the back swing. So if you imagine a clock face around me, with 12 o’clock by my head, 6 o’clock down by the ball, what we are focusing on doing here is swinging the club back so my left arm is pointing at 11 o’clock but my shoulders have rotated. See too many golfers trying to get the club really behind them and this position here creates a multitude of problems for you to get back down to the ball and you actually waste energy rather than just powering straight into the ball. So in actual fact a more compact back swing will allow you to generate much more power, so when you at the range just try that, shortening the back swing work on getting the club into this position so that you can then accelerate out of that position for much more powerful and longer shots.