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Arm Shallow Not The Body

Shallowing out the club in transition is a key part of building a swing with a consistent flat spot. You can either do it with your arms, or you can do it with your body. If you do it with your body, then your hands will typically be too high and have to straighten too early in the swing. This usually results in the body stall and club flip combo that you see with a lot of golfers who struggle with consistency. If they were to continue rotating, because they didn't shallow with their arms, they would be too steep to have good contact.

Playlists: Keys To Transition, Swing Plane Simplified - Working with steeps and shallows

Tags: Transition, Concept, Drill, Intermediate

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The drill is shallowing with the arm is not the body.

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So I talk a lot about the arm shallowing in transition largely because I think that it is

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a critical piece to what the most consistent and powerful golfers do mostly with the clubs

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from about seven iron down.

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So the longer clubs, if you struggle with the driver, you're probably missing out on this

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arm shallowing piece.

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I'm going to include a couple visuals for you to look at.

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So the first one is going to show a tour golfer and you can basically see based on the image

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on the screen that the path of the hands is in red and the path of the club is in blue.

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And you can see that during transition there's a pretty big difference between the hand path,

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which is a little bit more vertical and the club path.

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Now we're going to take a look at two examples of amateur swings.

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So the first one is going to be more of a slice type swing.

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And here you can see that the hand path and the club path are going to be relatively similar

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to each other.

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Now that would make sense you would think that that would get the club to perform in a steep way

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and this golfer would struggle with shallowing.

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Right?

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Well, now we're going to take a look at a golfer who struggles with hooking the ball.

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So this golfer gets too shallow.

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But what you'll see is they shallow mostly from the body, but the arm or the hand path to club path

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or relationship is pretty much the same.

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Very good golfer is with the longer clubs tend to have this exaggerated difference between

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their hand path and the club path, where golfer is who struggle with the longer clubs

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are going to tend to have them both working in the same direction.

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Okay, so you've got kind of the image that we're trying to create when I talk about getting up to the top of the swing

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and shallowing the club.

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Your options are pretty much from the shoulders to the hands.

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So what a lot of golfers do who are used to getting steep with their arms is then they try to shallow it out

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and they still get steep with the arms but they do the entire shallowing with the body.

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The image that I like to create is this difference kind of like so where I want you to almost imagine that your hands are going to be traveling along this one

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because the yellow club or the white club, but you're going to try to get the club to follow the orange one.

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So I will frequently actually hold this and have my students try to kind of trace them.

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Well, you can visualize how if I still have those lines there in order to get the hands to follow this one, you can see that the club is pretty much following the same one.

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In order to get the club to follow the shower or one, I would have to let either my forms rotate or my shoulders rotate.

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But again, the only options for showing the club are going to come from the shoulders to the hands.

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So if you're struggling with the longer clubs, if you're struggling with getting the club a little bit steep in transition and then that messes up your whole release,

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hopefully this visual helps you understand exactly what I mean when I'm talking about the arms shallowing in transition.