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Understand Your Swing Plane/Path
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If you chicken wing, then your arm is working around your body in more of a "chop" or row (gym exercises). If you do the opposite, which is more of a "lift" or a rotation. The arm working in front of your body can be a big power source seen in long hitters, which helps with keeping the path working out to the right.
Tags: Poor Contact, Chicken Wing, Follow Through, Drill, Intermediate
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The drill is chop-verse lift, lead arm to chest.
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So basically what we're going to look at is the way that the arms are working through
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the release and how they will relate to whether I'm hitting a wedge shot, whether I'm hitting
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a driver, whether I'm trying to hit a draw or whether I'm trying to hit a fade.
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So how can I use this lead arm as a reference point of what's going on with my body and
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a reference point of what's going on with my path?
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If I were to make a follow-through movement in your general direction, we can look and
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we can see where is this elbow compared to the body.
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And there's a classic chicken wing picture where basically from the down the line view,
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you would see that that arm has worked behind the body, or this is what I would call more
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of a chop movement.
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If I were to do more of a lift movement, you would see that the elbows they more in front of
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the body and the hand would be kind of reaching up or releasing more up this way.
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So one arm would be going like so, two arm would be going like this.
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Now how that relates is with the shorter shots with chipping, with pitching, I can get
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away with it up to about seven iron or so.
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It is very good to have this arm working more around your body, or working more kind of
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like so.
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That help keeps some of the steepness in my arm path so that I can get my body on top
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of the ball and still have a fairly good angle of attack or fairly good path through
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the ball.
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With driver, you will rarely see good golfers have that elbow coming behind them like so.
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Typically what you will see is if they have enough side bend and we're getting that arm
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extension, you will tend to see that this arm actually works almost closer just slightly
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in towards the chest as opposed to working around it.
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So a lot of golfers, especially if you're trying to get out of hitting kind of fades
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and slices with your drivers or even pulls with your drivers.
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So if I have a very left-ward path with the longer clubs, one of the biggest ways that
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you can help work on that is by keeping that elbow or having that elbow work more in front
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of your chest as you release through.
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Because that will continue getting the club to release further and further away from me
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and the further it releases away from me, the more it creates a right-ward path which
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that right-ward path is going to help me hit more of draws and potentially slight pushes,
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but mostly the draw that I'm looking for as long as I have a good face relationship.
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So I like to do this as part of a 9-3 and you can basically work on stopping and hitting
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kind of in this position where that elbow feels like it's working back here.
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When I'm working with students, oftentimes I will block the arm from getting behind them
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if we're working on this.
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So basically I would stand right here and I would put my hand kind of like this so that
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when I go to swing, I'm actually pushing that elbow slightly in front of them.
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Obviously I can't be there while you're swinging but you could ask a buddy to kind of squat
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down here and push on that arm or you could just focus on feeling like that arm is working
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more in front of your chest to keep the club moving out like so.
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You'll find that the two movements that are almost mutually exclusive are if I have
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enough side bend, it's very hard to have this work around me.
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So what will happen is I will tend to lunge in front of the golf ball and chicken wing
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and kind of hit those thin, picky shots or I will tend to stay behind the ball and
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let this club or let the arm stay more in front of me kind of like so.
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So you can use that elbow as a good reference frame for how this release is working and if
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you're trying to work on going from a draw or from a fade to a draw focusing on this
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elbow working more in front of your body can be a really good reference for you.
