The location of your arms during the golf swing, in relation to the rest of your body, is an important piece of the overall puzzle.

If you let your arms get out of position, it’s not hard to imagine how the swing would quickly come apart. After all, the club is being held in your hands, and your hands are attached to your arms. Learn how to connect the swing of your arms to the rotation of the rest of your body and you’ll be on the right track in this game.

With this article, we hope to help you understand how you can keep your arms in position in order to improve your hip turn on the way through the ball. When taken all together, this can be a rather complicated topic to understand. As such, we are going to attempt to break it down into chunks, so you can more easily digest the information. By the end of the article, you’ll hopefully have a good idea of how all of the pieces work together, and what your swing should look like as a complete package.

All of the content below is based on a right-handed golfer. If you happen to play left-handed, please take a moment to reverse the directions as necessary.

Keeping Your Arms in front of Your Body

As stated above, we are going to need to break this down a little bit if you are going to understand the general idea when all is said and done. So, let’s start by talking about what it means to keep your arms in front of your body during the golf swing, and why that is important.

Keeping your arms in front of your body during the swing is pretty much exactly what it sounds like – you are going to make sure your arms don’t get too far ahead of or behind your chest as the swing develops. You can go wrong on this point in the backswing or the downswing, so paying close attention to your performance in this area is critical. The best way to avoid making a mistake with this part of your swing is to understand the likely ways for it to go wrong. Check out the list below to see what you should be trying to avoid.

• Arms go too fast in the backswing. For starters, you need to make sure your arms don’t run away from your upper body early in the backswing. This is a relatively common error, especially among beginning players. If your arms swing back too fast, you’ll fail to make the proper shoulder turn before the backswing is over and you need to start swinging the club down. The key here is to focus on your shoulder turn above all else in the backswing. Let your shoulder turn lead the way and allow everything else to follow along. Basically, you should feel like your arms are just going along for the ride on the way back, as your shoulders do the work.
• Arms go too far at the top. Most golfers think that it’s ideal to make a long backswing. While there is nothing wrong with a long backswing, of course, forcing your arms to keep going back just for the sake of a long swing is not going to be beneficial. When your arms swing too far at the top, they will start out the downswing in a position behind that of the rest of your upper body – and they probably won’t be able to catch back up before impact. As a simple rule of thumb, you should stop your arm swing at the same time you stop your shoulder turn. That way, everything will be nicely in sync at the top and you will be ready for a powerful and coordinated downswing.
• Lower body races away to start the downswing. This is one of the most common problems in the game of golf, and it extends all the way up to the professional game. Even if you get through the backswing without any trouble, you still may have problems when you transition into the downswing. Those problems will come when you allow your lower body – and your upper body by extension – to race away before your arms can keep up. It’s a good thing to use your lower body to begin the downswing, but you don’t want to be in a rush at this point. Rushing your lower body right from the top of the swing is going to throw the entire rhythm of the process out of whack. You need to be patient at your downswing begins, moving gradually before picking up the speed through the hitting area.
• Downswing rotation stops before impact is reached. Once the downswing is underway, your entire body should be turning steadily toward the target. Your lower body should be leading the way, with your chest and arms following along together. As long as you keep turning, things should work out pretty nicely. Unfortunately, it’s easy to give up on the swing at this point, which will lead to all kinds of trouble. If you stop your body rotation, your arms are going to keep going and move past your body while the club swings through. This is going to encourage you to swing across your body from outside-in, and the shot will almost certainly start to the left of the target. If the face is open at impact, you’ll end up with a slice – one of the most frequently seen errors in this game. To find success, you need to keep the speed of your rotation up as you move through to the finish. Don’t let a lack of confidence cause you to give up on your shot prematurely. Keep on turning through the ball, let the club whip through impact, and look up to see how you have done.

The ability to keep your arms in front of your body during the golf swing is incredibly powerful. You may be surprised to find just how much your game will improve when you are able to manage this key successfully. Are you automatically going to hit great shots when your arms are synced up with your body? Not necessarily, but it’s a great start. If you can steer clear of the mistakes we have outlined above, your body and your arms should work together nicely swing after swing.

Turning Your Hips Through the Ball

The first half of the equation that we are trying to bring together was outlined in the section above. Now, we turn our attention to the lower half of your body and turning your hips through the ball effectively in the downswing. This is something that many amateur golfers struggle to do properly, which is why so many golfers are unable to produce the kind of power they would like to see.

With the tips listed below, we hope to provide you with a clear understanding of how your hips should work during the downswing. If you are able to turn your lower body through your shots correctly, you’ll have access to power that was previously locked away in your swing.

• Holding position on the way back. Before we can even get into the matter of how to turn your hips in the downswing, we first need to make sure that you are in a good position at the top of the backswing. For the most part, that means holding your lower body steady while your upper body turns away from the target. There should be very little movement in your lower body during this first half of the swing. Let your shoulders do the work of turning back while your hips and legs hold steady and provide a solid foundation. If you can do this successfully, you should feel nicely balanced at the top and ready to fire the club down through the hitting area.
• The first move. Turning your hips toward the target needs to be the first move you make during the downswing. This is a hard lesson for many amateur golfers to learn, as it is natural to want to move the hands down first before the rest of the body gets going. And, to be fair, that impulse does make some sense – after all, your hands are holding the club, and the club is what you will use to hit the ball, so shouldn’t your hands go first? As it turns out, no, they shouldn’t. You want to delay the movement of your hands for a moment, so your lower body can start to build some speed. By starting with your hips turning to the left, you’ll build some moment and eventually your upper body – including your hands and arms – can follow along. We mentioned in the previous section that you need to avoid allowing your lower body to race away at the start of the downswing, and that remains true. You don’t want to turn so quickly and aggressively that your upper body falls way behind, and the club gets out of position. Try to make your swing as smooth as possible and build speed gradually until you reach the point of impact.
• Stay down while turning. This last point in our list is an easy key to overlook, but it is tremendously important if you want to succeed with your lower body turn. As you rotate toward the target, be sure to do your best to stay down and in your stance. Many golfers come up out of their stance during this phase of the swing, either by standing up onto their toes or picking their head up out of the shot – or both. If you make this kind of mistake, you are going to run into a couple of negative outcomes. For one thing, you are going to lose rotational speed, as the act of lifting your body up is naturally going to take away from the act of turning toward the target. If you want to unleash all of your potential power into the back of the ball, you need to stay down and keep turning. Also, by lifting up during the swing, you run the risk of making poor contact. It will be far easier to achieve the clean strike you are looking for if you stay down in your stance properly.

There are few things you can do in golf which will be as beneficial as turning your hips properly through the downswing. Simply put, most amateur golfers fall short on this point. The typical player struggles to turn through the shot aggressively enough with the lower body, which is a big part of the reason so many golfers lack power. Not every player is going to be able to blast their tee shots 300+ yards, but many players would be able to find more distance simply by making a better lower body turn in the downswing.

Bringing It Together

To this point, we have spent most of the article talking about two different parts of the golf swing. We’ve talked about the importance of keeping your arms in front of your upper body, and we’ve also talked about how you need a good hip turn to hit quality shots. Now, finally, it is time to bring the two together. How do these two parts of the swing work together to help you hit your targets?

One of the frustrating issues you may run into while working on your swing is that one of these two elements may create a problem for the other. For instance, if your hip turn is not working quite right, you may end up pulling your arms away from your chest as a result. Everything in the swing is connected in one way or another, so an error in one aspect of your technique is almost certain to have a negative impact elsewhere. Only when you are executing both halves nicely can the whole thing come together in a coordinated package.

If you feel like you are having trouble bringing these two parts of your swing together, start by checking on the timing of your hip turn at the top of the swing. For many players, the hip turn starts just a bit late, and everything else is thrown off-track as a result. If your hip turn does not start in a timely manner, you’ll move your hands down toward the ball instead. Even if your hips eventually do get going, it will be too late, as the sequence of your swing will be out of order and your arms will likely be ahead of your chest in the race down to the ball. It is imperative that you get your hips moving in time, so work on this key in practice until it becomes a natural part of your swing technique.

As you continue to practice your swing and build confidence in your ability to turn your hips and keep your upper body in sync, you need to understand what is happening along the way. Even if you aren’t thinking about it, each practice swing is another opportunity for your body to get comfortable with the rhythm and timing of the swing. There is a very delicate timing involved in the swing, as you have to start your hips at just the right moment to let the rest of the downswing fall into place. Also, you have to avoid starting them too aggressively, or they can ‘run away’ before your upper body can keep up.

To improve your timing and make your swing more consistent, just keep practicing. This is one of those things that should come along as the result of repetition. You need to make sure the fundamentals of your swing are in place, of course, but don’t worry too much about actively thinking of your timing as you hit shots. Just keep going and expect to get better and better as the practice sessions add up. There is no substitute for repetition in this game, so be sure to hit plenty of practice shots each time you have the opportunity to visit the range.

In the end, bringing together your hip turn and your coordinated upper body is going to come down to a lot of practice and paying attention to the small details. Are you doing a good job of holding your lower body in position during the backswing? Are you stay down in your stance as you swing forward toward the target? If the timing of your transition dialed in properly? As you start to bring together more and more successful techniques, you will see your ball flights improve and your scores should be soon to come down.

Spotting Trouble on the Course

Every golfer knows that the range and the golf course are two completely different environments. Yes, the driving range is extremely important to your development as a player but hitting good shots on the range is not the same thing as producing quality shots on the course. It’s much more difficult to deliver a great shot during the middle of a round than it is during the middle of a practice session.

With that in mind, we’d like to offer some tips for how you can spot trouble on the course with regard to the coordination of your swing. If your hip turn or upper body connection is getting away from you, the issues below might be the first indication of a problem.

• Missing way right. If you start to miss some of your long shorts – or even some of your shorter iron shots – way to the right of the target, there is a good chance that your hips are spinning out of the swing too quickly. This is a common issue to develop as you go from the range to the course. On the range, it’s easier to maintain a steady tempo throughout your swing. Once on the course, however, you may feel some nerves or excitement which cause you to rush a bit. That rushing will typically translate into a hurried hip turn at the start of the downswing, and your shots may end up wide to the right as a result. Do your best to slow down and get back into your normal rhythm to bring the ball back toward the target.
• Deep divots. When hitting iron shots from the fairway, pay attention to the depth of your divots. There is nothing wrong with taking a divot on a standard iron shot – in fact, it’s usually a good thing – but you want to make sure those divots don’t become too deep. A particularly deep divot is a sign of a steep downswing, which is going to make it hard to control the flight of your ball successfully. If you do find that you are getting steep on the way down, make sure your hands aren’t starting toward the ball before your lower body has a chance to get moving.
• Failing to hold your finish. You should always strive to hold your finish after completing a golf swing. Not only does it look good to hold yourself in a balanced position as you watch the ball sail down the fairway, but there is also a functional benefit to this approach. When you hold your finish, you will be confirming that you did a good job of getting all the way through the swing and onto your left side. If your lower body gives up on the downswing rotation before the job is done, you won’t get to a balanced finish and you won’t be able to hold your pose.

A great hip turn is one of the big keys to living up to your potential on the golf course. And, along with that, keeping your arms and the rest of your upper body in sync will help you turn through each shot successfully. Good luck!

think for any golfer that misunderstands how important their hips are in the golf swing, they can really fall foul of a couple of key points if they miss out this important area. So if we look at setting up to the golf ball from down the line pointing at my red flag down there at my target line level to this club. I’d like the club to be swinging back and down on a nice even swing path so it comes into the golf ball very slightly from the inside would be my preferred position. But I've got to be careful I don’t drop the club too far behind me. Now if I take the golf club up to the top of the swing here and I drop my hands and arms aggressively down from the inside, I can actually get a bit stuck here and I can find it quite difficult now to rotate my hips through the golf ball, effectively my hands and arms sort of pull my body weight back and they square my hips off and I can't release through effectively. But if I have the club more out in front of my body, I’ll probably find it easier to turn my hips through the golf ball aggressively. And the question really here is; do the hands keep the hips back or do the hips keep the hands back? But actually we want to work on both areas together. So from the top of the backswing we’re going to turn the hips nicely to the left side and that’s going to allow the hands to come nicely back on line and stay in front of the body. We desperately want to avoid the hands getting trapped and stuck behind us. Now the hands can still swing down from the inside, the club can still swing down from the inside, there’s difference there between getting trapped and stuck or swinging from the inside.

So getting trapped would look like the club gets here, then when the body turns, the club is so far from the inside I can't possibly square it up, I'm going to hit a lot of push shots, a lot of block shots with that filling. So from the top of the swing here we want to understand how the hands and arms can come down in front of the body as the hips are turning to bring that club nicely down on the correct line. Now the feeling there is from the top of the backswing, if I drop my right elbow in I actually get more angle in my wrist and elbow than I need and should be allowed to extend my arms away as I turn my hips through. So it’s a feeling of getting to the top, stopping, extending the arms away, so the club is in front of my body not behind my body and then turn my hips through top keep it on line. So I set up to, to the top, in front of my body and then turn through and I think that way you'll feel like your hip turn is efficiently working to keep your hands in front of your body rather than letting the club get too dropped in behind you before you can actually initiate your hip turn. Work on that drill there of extending your arms before you turn your hips to keep your hands and arms more in front and get better hip rotation.