Video Tip: How to Fix Your Backswing

A “manufactured” or “phony” backswing is a trap that snares many recreational golfers. Mike Rugg of the Steve Dresser Golf Academy in Pawleys Island, SC is here to offer some practice tips on how to avoid it. As you’ll see, there are several techniques you can use to eliminate “lifting” in your swing.

 

 

Mike Rugg:

Hi, my name’s Mike Rugg. I’m one of the golf instructors here at the Steve Dresser Golf Academy, located at the True Blue and Caledonia golf courses in Pawleys Island, South Carolina. Now, I want to talk to you, something that we’ve been seeing a lot lately. And to be quite honest with you, I’ve seen over my years as a golf professional, we see it a lot. And that’s the issue of making a manufactured or a phony backswing. We see people coming out and just more or less just picking the club up. And they blame old age or lack of flexibility for that. And really, it’s what we’re trying to do in our backswing.

So how do you know if you have it? Well, the easiest way is take the club back and if you can reach over and grab the club head, your width of arc is not wide enough. It’s too narrow. You’re manufacturing something. So, we want to make a winding motion in our backswing. We don’t want to necessarily make a lifting motion.

So, one of the things that you can think of is if I had a shelf over my hands, I want to keep the club underneath that or my hands underneath that shelf till we get to about hip high. Again, we don’t want any lifting. There were some other drills have been around forever and I’m borrowing some from great instructors. One is just put another ball about 18 inches behind your ball and try to put your club over that. You can also put a barrier or a cone or something like that. Again, getting the sense of stretch here on the backswing. And we want to maintain a softness of the arms. It’s not a tightness in the arms. And finally, the famous one of just pushing the two by four back. As you can see, I can’t reach and touch my club head now. This will give you a little wider arc, give you a chance to coil better on the backswing, and deliver more power.

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