Natalie Adams – PGA Teaching Pro

Keeping your left arm straight during your golf swing, especially as a lady golfer is absolutely essential to give you consistency to the strike of the ball, but also to help you generate power. So looking at how to start the swing, you want to get your left arm in a nice, straight extended position, really working on keeping the left shoulder to the left hand really straight in that position. Okay, we are going to take the address position up here and if we keep that left arm straight throughout the backswing, what that’s going to do is, it’s going to create a nice wide swing arc. That club head as it moves around you, is going to be as far away from you as possible. Yes, you are hinging your wrists, but if you bend your left elbow, you are pulling the club much closer to you, and the swing arc, the movement of that club head around you is becoming much more narrow.

Now the effect that was going to have is, is the narrow your swing arc is, the steeper you are going to swing down. So you will start to chop down on top of the ball and hit the top of ball, so you won’t find it easy to swing the club into the side of the ball at all. So you are going to now have a problem with a consistency of the strike, also the narrower that swing arc is, the shorter time it will take you to swing the club back. If we get a really wide swing arc and really get that club head traveling around you as wide as possible, because we are keeping that left arm as straight as possible all the way through the backswing and during the downswing, you are going to have a lot longer to pick speed up in that club head.

And the more speed you can pick up in the club head, the more club head speed you will deliver to that ball, which will translate into distance. So absolutely, crucial for lady golfers to keep the left arm straight during the backswing and downswing and into impact. So now we know why we have got to do it, let's look at how. I think the main thing for lady golfers here is not hinging their wrist correctly as they do the takeaway. So if you swing back and you are working on keeping a straight line from your left arm to your left hands of the club head. If you work on keeping that straight line, straight this way on, as you are viewing this, you will tend to lift your hands up and because you are lifting your hands up to maintain this straight line, you will lift the golf club up as well.

And then you will get to a position, where you have to let the club go over you and as you let the club go over you, your arm will buckle and your elbow will bend due to the momentum of the club coming over you and the pressure it’s putting on to your elbow. So you will find it very, very difficult to keep that left arm straight, so to work on hinging your wrist correctly, as you swing back. Yes, you do want to keep the left shoulder, the left hand and the club head all in a straight line, but you want to do it viewing this way up. So here you can see my left shoulder, my left hand and the club head all in a straight line, so I have maintained that straight line. But if I turn to the side, this way on, I don’t look like I am in a straight line anymore.

There is a hinge going on at my wrist and the club head is now as high as my hand. So hinging the wrists in this way, now creates an upward momentum in that club head, you set the wrist and the shoulders turn you into the position on your backswing. And that now allows you to keep your left arm in a lovely straight position and to get that arc as wide as possible. Okay, so you could work on hinging the wrists, but here is another great tip for you to give you the feel of how that left arm feels, because what's happening is if you are bending your arm, you have got used to pulling your hands into you, at the top of the backswing.

And what we want to do is teach your muscles here on how to push away from you rather than pull in. So this will help you, you could do this off the course to retrain your muscles and retrain the way that your brain fires your muscles to work. So what we need to do is take some resistance tubing, place it under your left foot, wrap it around the outside of the left foot and then hold as though you are going to hit your golf club, nice wide stance. What we need to do is now work on stretching that resistance tubing away from your left foot. So keep the resistance tubing really stretched out, that’s going to teach you how to push your hands out away from your body, which now is resulting in a really nice straight left arm position.

If I swing back and I just pull my hands in, I will feel a bit of resistance here and if I pull in, there is hardly any resistance in that tubing now. If I let go of this tubing here, the tubing is just going to flop back to the floor. So you can see, I am not generating power, whereas if I push the tubing away and feel that resistance in the tubing, if I let go of this position, the handle I am holding, the tubing is going to fire back down, because it’s been stretched. And again that will help you to understand how to achieve distance in your golf swing. So if we are looking at how to keep your left arm straight, start with it in a good straight position at setup and then learn hinge your wrist correctly, so you are not putting too much pressure on the left elbow forcing it to bend.

If you are using your wrists correctly and you have just learned to pull your hands in, try using the resistance tubing to retrain your body and your muscles and to teach them how to push your hands away. But if you are still struggling a little bit with that, you could always take a pop bottle, a liter and a half pop bottle, which is a round cylinder of plastic, cut either end of it off to make a round cylinder that you can slide up over the left arm. You can keep it onto that left elbow, so you have basically put a splint on the elbow, it won’t allow it move and then practice taking your backswing so that you won’t be able to bend the elbow, because the sleeve of the cylinder will be over it. But if you do, do that, please make sure you don’t swing through, your left elbow needs to be able to bend on your follow through, so that’s not a drill where you can hit balls. Okay, that’s just to give you the feeling of how to straighten that left arm out during your backswing. But try those tips, you will start having a much straighter left arm, consistency and power are bound to follow.