Tyler Ferrell is the only person in the world named to Golf Digest's list of Best Young Teachers in
America AND its list of Best Golf Fitness Professionals in America.
Meet your new instructor.
Keys To Transition
Subscribe now to watch the full video.
Many golfers battle the arms getting steep in transition. Two key reasons for steep arms are: the movements can feel powerful and the movements help close the club face. But, while it feels powerful, it limits the ability to use body rotation for speed. This limits the flat spot and challenges consistency.
When working on transition, at first, I always recommend using a pump drill or broken transition to disrupt the pattern and allow your brain to make changes more comfortably. The normal progression is:
- Pump the arms only
- Pump the arms with the body in golf posture
- Pump the arms in golf posture and swing through to finish, brushing the ground at the bottom
- Pump the arms in golf posture and let the ball get in the way as you brush the ground
- Monitor feedback of contact and ball flight.
Tags: Not Enough Distance, Transition, Member Question, Concept, Intermediate
00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:04,000
This drill video is working through shallow arms.
00:00:04,000 --> 00:00:12,000
So we had a request from a student and I thought to be a good video to kind of include the rest of the class on.
00:00:12,000 --> 00:00:20,000
So what we're going to do is walk through the process from going from steep arms to working to the pump to brushing the ground to then hitting a golf ball.
00:00:20,000 --> 00:00:24,000
And you'll see kind of where some of these sticking points may be.
00:00:24,000 --> 00:00:28,000
One of the challenge with working on shallow arms is it's a transition move.
00:00:28,000 --> 00:00:36,000
So you've already kind of if you're at that point in the swing, you've already done a lot of things similarly to what you've already trained.
00:00:36,000 --> 00:00:38,000
You know, your normal take away your normal setting.
00:00:38,000 --> 00:00:41,000
And so your brain will want to do its normal pattern.
00:00:41,000 --> 00:00:48,000
That's why I highly recommend whenever you're working on transition to do either pump drills or
00:00:48,000 --> 00:00:53,000
or broken transition drills in order to work around that.
00:00:53,000 --> 00:00:59,000
Then once you have a feeling start mixing in more and more full swings until you're primarily doing full swings.
00:00:59,000 --> 00:01:10,000
So this particular golfer, somewhere to a lot of golfers, has a pattern where to start the downswing the arms, tend to get steep, kind of like this.
00:01:10,000 --> 00:01:13,000
And the body is standing up or shallowing.
00:01:13,000 --> 00:01:15,000
So it kind of has that look like so.
00:01:15,000 --> 00:01:20,000
And I know that if I do that and I kind of throw my hands at the right place,
00:01:20,000 --> 00:01:23,000
I can control how it's going to hit the ground.
00:01:23,000 --> 00:01:29,000
Problem is it gives me a very limited flat spot and it has a lot of trouble with the longer clubs,
00:01:29,000 --> 00:01:32,000
especially if you go in swing hard.
00:01:32,000 --> 00:01:36,000
It's almost disastrous instantly with the longer clubs.
00:01:36,000 --> 00:01:42,000
So the goal would be to get a little bit more shallow arms and we usually do that by working on kind of the delivery drill,
00:01:42,000 --> 00:01:48,000
right by working on letting the left form or a tighter letting the trail shoulder rotate.
00:01:48,000 --> 00:01:55,000
Now what'll happen is if I do what I've always been doing and I just shallow my arms, it'll frequently look like this,
00:01:55,000 --> 00:02:02,000
where the form is going to be pointing well above the golf ball, where when I do my steep movements,
00:02:02,000 --> 00:02:05,000
that form is pointing more or less at the golf ball.
00:02:05,000 --> 00:02:11,000
So what you have to do is you have to figure out how to do this shallow arms while still getting in an employable orientation.
00:02:11,000 --> 00:02:15,000
In this case having that form pointing closer to the golf ball.
00:02:15,000 --> 00:02:26,000
So what'll happen is I do this shallow arms, but now I've been forward and I kind of steepened with my body in order to get this pointing more in line with the golf ball.
00:02:26,000 --> 00:02:32,000
If I did shallow arms and stand up, I wouldn't be able to hit the golf ball or the ground.
00:02:32,000 --> 00:02:41,000
So that's why a good bridge to getting to actually hitting the golf ball is going to be making that little pump move,
00:02:42,000 --> 00:02:46,000
but brushing the ground. So you notice on that one I stood up a little bit, I wasn't able to brush the ground.
00:02:46,000 --> 00:02:54,000
Now if I were to kind of keep my posture still do that shallow arms, now I can get the club to brush the ground.
00:02:54,000 --> 00:03:01,000
So I'd work on doing a few pumps or a broken transition. So the same thing would be if I did this and I said,
00:03:01,000 --> 00:03:07,000
okay now try to brush the ground, there's no way I can get my hands down there because that form is just too high,
00:03:07,000 --> 00:03:12,000
where if I did that now from there I can finish this wing in brush the ground.
00:03:12,000 --> 00:03:21,000
So broken transition or pump drills are two good ways to kind of trick the brain to swing into a certain position.
00:03:21,000 --> 00:03:28,000
Then what I can do is after I've practiced making the movement isolation, making the movement where I can brush the ground,
00:03:28,000 --> 00:03:34,000
now I can put the golf ball in the way and start to read the feedback of contact and direction.
00:03:34,000 --> 00:03:40,000
So the important thing is if you feel like you're doing a movement in your practice wings and it looks visually like you're doing a movement in the practice wings,
00:03:40,000 --> 00:03:48,000
but then you're not doing it when you have the golf ball in the way, you have to pay attention to the details of what's really different between those two.
00:03:48,000 --> 00:03:54,000
Usually there's a critical detail that is preventing it from working when the golf ball is there and you're trying to hit it.
00:03:54,000 --> 00:03:59,000
So now just walking through kind of the normal progression, you would do,
00:04:00,000 --> 00:04:05,000
alright I'm going to make a little shallow move, just the shallow move with the arms,
00:04:05,000 --> 00:04:13,000
good now I'm going to make that shallow move and work on brushing the ground, not quite.
00:04:13,000 --> 00:04:20,000
So that was good shallow there. So to fix it I changed my body angle, I didn't change the arm shallow movement,
00:04:20,000 --> 00:04:26,000
and then I can do the same progression with the golf ball getting in the way.
00:04:26,000 --> 00:04:41,000
So I would do that arm shallow movement like so. Now I can pump it a couple times more in the position, now I can pump it a couple times and let the golf ball just get in the way.
00:04:41,000 --> 00:04:49,000
Once I've done enough reps where I can feel comfortable controlling the club brushing the ground more from my body angle,
00:04:49,000 --> 00:04:55,000
then with the arms then I can probably challenge it and take a full swing starting from a dress position.
00:04:55,000 --> 00:05:05,000
But if I'm having trouble with something that's a trigger at the top of the swing, the thing I want to avoid is having the same trigger for my take away that I normally use.
00:05:05,000 --> 00:05:10,000
So now for fun we'll take a look at the swing that kind of inspired this video and the question.
00:05:10,000 --> 00:05:15,000
So we'll see here was the original over on the right,
00:05:15,000 --> 00:05:20,000
and then we can see a little bit of loss of posture so he's already starting to shallow his body during the back swing.
00:05:20,000 --> 00:05:28,000
But then we'll see during transition the arms work in a very steep fashion getting the club almost vertical.
00:05:28,000 --> 00:05:31,000
The body will continue to shallow as it stands out.
00:05:31,000 --> 00:05:37,000
So then I had him send me a pump version.
00:05:37,000 --> 00:05:44,000
And now you'll see that the arms by themselves look pretty good with the exception of a slightly open club face,
00:05:44,000 --> 00:05:48,000
but you can see that this form is pointing way too high.
00:05:48,000 --> 00:05:54,000
And so little end up happening is if he continued rotating around that that axis,
00:05:54,000 --> 00:05:57,000
the club would basically swing on a path like this.
00:05:57,000 --> 00:06:04,000
We need to get that right form, pointing closer to the golf ball so that when he continues rotating his body,
00:06:04,000 --> 00:06:06,000
the club's going to intersect with the golf ball.
00:06:06,000 --> 00:06:12,000
So his brain knows that that's not going to work and so then when he goes to make the swing,
00:06:12,000 --> 00:06:15,000
it's it is an improvement.
00:06:15,000 --> 00:06:20,000
It is less steep in transition than what we saw with his original,
00:06:20,000 --> 00:06:29,000
but it's not quite as good as what he was doing in the practice swings and in my mind it's still kind of on the verge of getting into two steep.
00:06:29,000 --> 00:06:36,000
So with proper proper focus and paying attention to the key details as he works through these practice drills,
00:06:36,000 --> 00:06:40,000
hopefully he'll be able to shallow it his swing and hopefully you will too.
