Quick – think of all the body parts that play an important role in the golf swing.
Right off the bat, you will probably name your hands, your shoulders, your hips, and even your head. But what about your elbows? It’s easy to overlook the role that your elbows play in the swing, but they are important if you are going to have success. In this article, we are going to discuss why it is important to keep your elbows together as you swing the club, and we’ll also provide some insight on how you can make it happen.
Before we get too far into this discussion, we need to make something clear – we aren’t talking about having your elbows physically together – as in touching each other – during the swing. That would be virtually impossible to do, and even if you did it, you wouldn’t be able to make much of a golf swing from that kind of position. By ‘together’, we simply mean that you are going to keep your elbows in relative close proximity to one another, avoiding the trap of letting them stray wide apart. There are a number of issues which you can run into when your elbows get too far apart, and we will highlight those later in the article.
You don’t want to be thinking about the position of your elbows while hitting shots on the course, so be sure to set aside some practice time to work on this important fundamental. If you can focus on this element of your swing during a few practice sessions, you should be able to get it under control, so you can worry about other things while on the course. Ultimately, that is the basic goal of any kind of practice you do in golf – to make the right moves feel natural, freeing your mind to focus on picking targets and withstanding the pressure that comes with playing this game.
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.
The Value of Keeping Your Elbows Close
You always need to have a purpose behind the things you do with your golf swing. If you don’t have a reason for making a certain move, it will be hard to convince yourself that you need to work on that move time and time again at the driving range. In this section, we are going to identify some of the ways in which your swing can benefit if you keep your elbows close together. With these potential gains waiting to be enjoyed, you should find that you have all the motivation you need to get down to work.
- Swing the club back on a good path. When you setup over the ball with your elbows close together and your arms in a straight position, you’ll find it much easier to swing back directly down an extension of the target line. Many players get into trouble early in the backswing by pushing the club to the outside or pulling it inside. Either way, you’ll struggle to get back into a good position in time to strike the ball properly. With your elbows together, it should be relatively easy to put your shoulders in charge of the early stages of the backswing – which is exactly what you want to have happen. When your shoulders start the swing by simply turning to the right, the club will naturally remain on or near the target line. That doesn’t mean things will continue to go well as the swing moves along, but you’ll be off to a nice start.
- Make a full turn. It might not seem like the position of your elbows would have much to do with your ability to make a full turn, but that’s how it plays out. With your elbows in tight, you can keep your shoulders turning away from the target until you have reached a comfortable limit and are ready to turn back in the other direction. If your elbows get away from each other, on the other hand, your turn could be compromised. Specifically, you may find that if your right elbow moves up and away, your shoulder turn will stop prematurely, and you’ll end up pushing the club over the top in order to start the downswing. For players who have always had trouble completing a full turn, it is worth considering that the position of your elbows might be part of the problem.
- Swing down in the slot. Perhaps the biggest advantage you will gain by keeping your elbows close together is an improved ability to swing down on the proper plane as you approach the ball. Countless amateur players run into trouble with a ‘flying’ right elbow, as discussed a bit in the previous point. When that right elbow gets up and away, it’s nearly impossible to come down on a path that is going to lead to a clean, solid strike. When your elbows are together, however, suddenly things seem a little less challenging. You can pull the club down into the downswing with a powerful action, and it will feel like your arms are working together to hit the shot – rather than fighting one another, as is often the case when the right elbow moves away. If you have been letting your right elbow get away in your golf swing for some time, it may take a period of adjustment before you feel comfortable making your downswing with your elbows in closer. Don’t let those early struggles cause you to give up, however – stick with it, keeping working on your technique on the range, and eventually the results will start to appear.
Three Technical Keys
So, now that you know how important it is to keep your elbows together during the golf swing, you can just go make it happen, right? Well – probably not. Simply standing over the ball and thinking that you should keep your elbows together might not lead to great results. Instead, you should build a foundation of other techniques and keys in your swing which will encourage your elbows to stay together properly. This is often how it works with the golf swing. Each piece of the swing influences another, so laying a solid groundwork is the best way to cause your entire swing to come together as a cohesive unit.
With that in mind, we would like to present you with three important keys that should help you manage to keep your elbows in a good position throughout the swing.
- Engage your lower body. By and large, the lower body is overlooked in terms of its importance to the golf swing. The club is held by your hands, of course, so it’s natural to feel like the upper body is the focus of your technique. That is not necessarily the case, however, as your lower body has a lot to do with how the club is going to move during the swing. At address, you need to make sure that your knees are flexed, and your lower body feels engaged and ready to work. During the swing, those knees should stay flexed as your upper body turns back and through. This is going to help your elbows stay together because your arms won’t need to do extra work to make up for the failure of your lower body. Players who fail to use their lower bodies properly often make an ‘arms-only’ swing, where the shoulders don’t turn, and the arms just lift the club and push it back down toward the ball. This kind of swing is rather weak, and rarely does it result in solid contact. If you need any confirmation on the importance of this point, simply watch a professional golf tournament on TV. Pro golfers tend to do an excellent job engaging their lower body in the swing, and you should strive to do the same.
- Keep the right elbow pointing down. We’ve talked a couple times already about the damage that a flying right elbow can do to your golf swing. One of the best ways to get around this problem is simply to think about keeping your right elbow pointing down toward the ground during the backswing and even into the downswing. The beauty of this tip is that it is extremely simple to remember, and you should have no problem focusing on it during a practice session. Hit a few shots during your next practice session while thinking of this tip and nothing else. As long as your right elbow continues to point down as your swing, it’s highly likely that your two elbows will remain close together all the way through.
- Turn through the downswing. Unfortunately, many golfers allow their swings to go wrong not long after they have gotten into the downswing. Having made it through the backswing without any trouble, these players make the mistake of stopping their body rotation as the club moves down toward the ball. With that happens, the left elbow may need to slide out toward the target just to get the club to the ball effectively. Instead of turning through the shot with plenty of power and aggression, you wind up just pushing the club into the ball, producing a weak shot that may travel badly off line. The problem here often comes down to confidence. As the player swings down, he or she has doubt about whether or not the swing is on the right track to hit a good shot. In the end, the player stops turning and just tries to guide the club into the ball. That’s never going to be a recipe for success. If this is an issue that plagues your game, work on building your confidence to the point that you can keep on turning through impact without any reservations.
The Other Necessary Moves
Keeping your elbows together is not the only task you have during the golf swing. It would be great if the game were as simple as that – you could just make a swing, keep your elbows together, and watch the ball sail into the distance. We all know it isn’t that easy, however. There are many parts which need to come together in order to elevate the overall level of your ball striking.
So, what else should you be paying attention to as you work on your game? The following points are a great place to start.
- The full shoulder turn. You aren’t likely to be surprised that this is the first point on our list. So much of the game of golf is about the shoulder turn, and it’s going to be difficult to reach your goals on the links if you don’t manage a solid turn time after time. Everyone is different in terms of flexibility, so don’t evaluate your turn on whether or not you make it as far back as the other players in your group – or the pros you see on TV. Rather, simply make sure that what you are doing feels like a full turn to you, and it is setting you up for a powerful downswing. It is common for golfers to rush through the backswing, especially when nervous, which is always going to cause the shoulder turn to be cut short. Before every swing, take a moment to remind yourself that there is no rush, and you can allow your swing to develop naturally before striking the ball. The advantage that golfers have over most other sports which involve a ball is the fact that the ball is not moving. With the ball sitting still, you can take your time and produce a quality swing.
- Quiet feet. We don’t think there is enough said about the role that the feet play in the golf swing. Since you don’t run or jump in golf, footwork tends to take a bit of a backseat to other things. That is a shame, however, because footwork does matter. Ideally, you will do a good job of keeping your feet quiet during the swing, using them as a stable base on which you can swing effectively. As you swing down toward impact, you can let your right heel start to come off the ground, as a response to the rotation you are making toward the target. It’s important to understand that this move should be reactionary. You aren’t actively trying to push your right heel off the ground – that simply happens as a byproduct of your great turn. One common point of trouble to watch for is the left heel coming off the ground in the downswing. This tends to happen when you try to swing particularly hard and you stand up straight on the way down as a result. It’s typically best to stay down in your stance and just keep on turning toward the target. Any vertical moves you make are going to take away from your rotational action, so avoid this error if you can.
- Steady head. When practicing your golf swing, one of the best ways to focus your mind is simply to think about keeping your head still and stable through the swing. That’s it. For a few shots, let all of your other mechanics take care of themselves, while you focus only on making sure your head stays still and your eyes stay on the ball. It’s an enjoyable experience to practice this way, as you probably hit a lot of your shots while worrying about several different things at the same time. Clear out your mind by thinking only of your head position and you may be surprised at how quickly the quality of your ball striking improves.
What About the Short Game?
Do you need to keep your elbows together in the short game? That is the question we’d like to tackle here in the last section of our article. In many ways, the short game is much less complicated than the long game, even if it is just as difficult to master. Since the swings are smaller, and use a slower pace, your technique doesn’t have to be quite as refined to have success. You’ll see players use a wide range of different methods to get the ball moving toward the hole when putting or chipping.
First, let’s talk about putting. It is not necessarily required to keep your elbows close together when you are hitting putts. With that said, many players do end up in a position where their elbows remain relatively close together throughout the stroke. The important thing here is not how far apart your elbows are positioned, but rather that they stay the same distance apart for the entire stroke. As your shoulders rock the club back and through, you should keep your arms in the same position relatively to one another. This is called a ‘pendulum-style’ stroke, because the whole things just rocks smoothly back and forth.
When chipping, you’ll probably want to keep your elbows close together only because that is what you will be used to in terms of your full swing. If you are comfortable with a setup position that places your elbows relatively close together at address while hitting full shots, why not keep it going in the short game? It’s possible to hit good chip shots with your elbows farther apart, but we think you’ll see the most success if you bring them in tight.
If you feel like you are a little bit crowded over the ball while trying to use this technique on your chip shots, try standing taller at address. When your elbows are close together at impact, that typically means your arms are straight – and that position is going to extend the club down toward the ground significantly. That probably feels right for your full swing, but it might feel awkward when chipping, especially if you hunch over at address. Do your best to stand in a tall, athletic position and you’ll find that there is plenty of room to swing the club freely.
All in all, you shouldn’t obsess about the distance between your elbows, or allow it to be something that consumes your thoughts while on the course. Yes, this is an important fundamental to monitor, just like so many others in the game. With that said, letting this one key take over your mind while there are other things to work on would be a mistake. Keep it in perspective, work on your swing as a whole, and do your best to avoid the dreaded flying right elbow. Good luck!
The conversations I often have with all the golfers about how they're trying to generate power, and try to generate distance, and try to keep the distance that they have 10 years ago. And ironically, one of the things they're trying to do to generate distance is probably costing them a lot of distance as well. And this comes from being tense and tight, and being too aggressive through the impact area. So in a good address position we want to see how their arms are straight and the elbows are quite close together during your backswing during the best jump possible with your front arm if it has a little bend okay, if it's straight then better. And through the impact area, keep those hands and arms releasing and extending that's the most efficient and powerful way you can have of hitting the golf ball. But if you're too aggressive, too anxious, and too tense through the impact area would often see this happen when the elbow separate and pull apart.
So David, if we swap places again and you jump into the mat, inserting yourself to the -just off a tee peg this time I think will let you swing through. So this is a nice address position, gently back and through. And through the impact area to follow through position here you just bring the arms down a little bit, just feel how there we want to try and extend the arms as much as possible. Stretch them out as far as you can there. And the close the elbows get together and the more extended the arms out this way, that's the better release and a more efficient release f power. So David, back down to the start again, so in this position just stretch your arms and bring the elbows together as much as you can. That's a great position to start with. And now we're just going to rock the club backwards and forward trying to not let this break down too much. So gently back to my hand here just rocking it back, keeping the elbow as straight as possible. If I can now pull you through and drag you through to there, then that's a really efficient use of your body turning your power, and that's the best way of maximizing distance down the fairway, bring that back down to the start again.
Even as you came through impact, you got very tighten tense on the golf club, you often feel the golf club comes into the body this way, and we see the golf leaning back a little bit too much, and the elbows pull apart too much. This often a very weak shot sometimes incorporating a high left to right flight for a right-handed golfer, so back down again to the start with. So just have a little rocking action here elbows squeezed together gently back to my hand, and just rock through to the other side stretching and extending through. Now if you're struggling with pulling your elbows in, you feel like you're losing power, you could go ahead and do this drill on the practice ground before tee off and play. And you could even start to just clip balls away, maybe just put 25 balls upon a little tee peg, just tick, tock, back and through trying to keep the elbows together in the follow through as much as possible. You might appreciate as well that the more you keep your elbows together, the more you follow through as well which is a great way of maximizing your power and avoiding any loss of power through that bad tension in your arms.
