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Understand Your Swing Plane/Path
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The swing was once described as moving on a plane, and while this is close to the truth, better science has revealed that swinging on a true plane would be less than ideal compared to what the best golfers do. Here is a first person view of what the hands actually do to the club.
Tags: Not Straight Enough, Draw vs Fade, Iron, Follow Through, Drill, Intermediate
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This video is my view of the handpath.
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So we're going to do just a global handpath of what's going on during the golf swing.
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They've always talked about the swing plane, but we now know that the hands and the path
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that the arms and the path of the club are going on is slightly different than a true
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swing plane.
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So from the top of the swing, the first thing we're going to see is a little bit of a
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shallowing out of the club.
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So if I did it from this point of view, it's going to go like this.
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Now it's very very slight, but what that does is that prepares or that builds a force
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that when I pull in, is going to cause that club face to square that way.
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So what'll happen, I'll show two perspectives.
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So I'm going to go to the top of the swing.
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There's that first shallow move.
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Now I'll do that watching the club.
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So there's that first shallow move.
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Now you'll see from my perspective, it looks very dramatic from the camera's perspective.
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It's not going to look too dramatic.
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Now we're going to use my visual alignment system, or visual kind of reference frames here.
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So we got target line perpendicular inside 45 and then outside 45, just far enough away
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so that I'm not going to make contact if I did swing.
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So I'm going to do that first move.
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And once I get to about delivery position, you'll see right around here the club is roughly
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parallel to this target line.
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Now from here, what's going to happen is because of my body continuing to rotate the path
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of my hands, even though they're extending away from me, is going to be coming in just
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like so.
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So you'll get a good perspective of it right here.
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Where you'll see that my hands are going in, even though the club where the club head
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is going down and out.
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So it ends up looking kind of something like that.
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We'll go ahead and hit one, show you how this hand-path thing works.
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So that's a perspective on my view of what the hands are doing through the majority of
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the golf swing.
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So now let's go over a couple ways that you might have problems with this.
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So what a lot of golfers will do, and I'll show you what it would look like, is they will
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get the club out away and those arms extended kind of down like so.
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And then they will basically bring the club straight through kind of like this.
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So that's more of a cast pattern where my arms are getting extended very, very soon.
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And then you can see the path of the club coming through slightly out in.
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It doesn't look that dramatic from here, but if I was to look at it from the down
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the line view, basically it would look like it's coming kind of major left to right.
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That's one of these optical illusion things that we have to get over.
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The other piece that we'll tend to see is going to be more of an early extension.
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So if my body goes in this way, I'll get a lot of that early move.
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But now as I'm extending my arms, what you'll see is compared to the target line,
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you will see that my hands are kind of continually going in and out.
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So what'll happen is if I do that, it becomes very hard for me to have a downward strike.
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I'm going to basically pick the ball or if I am going to have a downward strike, it's going
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to come from an overly forward body position kind of like so.
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So either the cast going out like so, or the early extension are going to cause problem
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with this hand path.
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And hopefully you can see as I look down here, what we're trying to accomplish by having
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these hands follow my body as I release.
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So now we'll go ahead and try one here for you so you can see what that all looks like.
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So hopefully that helps you understand why we're doing the things in transition, why
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we're doing the things in the release, ultimately what's that's going to do to the club
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and how that's going to help you overcome your major swing issues.
