Now Lee Westwood has a little quirk in his golf swing, but a lot of people don’t necessarily notice it. It’s one of these things that happens right at the impact position, it happens very, very quickly, and often the camera doesn’t pick this up on the TV. It’s only really when you break his swing down and analyze it, that you start to see that through impact, he has a very awkward left arm position, what we call a chicken wing. The left arm starts to break in a slightly upwards position, his elbows are a long way apart, lifting his left shoulder up a little bit.

Now for most golfers through that hitting area, we’d see the elbows actually very close together. When the forearms rotate, the elbows almost touch each other, and certainly extend them at target line. So Lee Westwood is a bit of a one off really here. And again, he’s been doing this his entire life, so he’s able to get away with this movement, but I wouldn’t encourage you to copy this one either, because coming down to impact, if your left arm starts of straight, it swings back nice and straight, ideally it would be in a straight position, as we come back to impact, to mean that this, and the golf club are at the same height, so we get a better contact. Because Westwood makes this bending action here lifting the left shoulder, he actually has to compensate by dipping into the golf ball slightly with his upper body and his chest and his head, to compensate for the left arm breaking up. He is still a fantastic golf ball striker, don’t get me wrong, but it’s a movement that we wouldn’t necessarily encourage you to make. Something he’s been doing his whole life, something I would try and encourage you, if you are particularly new to the game, to try and get away from.

So the key movement really to focus on is to try and extend your left arm, and point it down the target line as much as you can. If you get this position right, you’ll find your elbows actually get quite close together and it encourages a nice bit of rotation. Most chicken wings that I see in golf swings here cause open club faces and quite bad slices. It’s very difficult to rotate and chicken wing at the same time, so if you’re leaking the ball out to the right hand side and you’ve seen your golf swing, you featured this left elbow, looking like a chicken wing, work a little bit more in extending and rotating the hands as you come through, and hopefully that will improve your golf swing. So, again, Lee Westwood is on his own on that one. Try and avoid that left arm chicken wing if you can.