Fix Your Flying Elbow in Your Backswing

We got a quick one for you this week. We're going to be discussing how to fix that dreaded flying elbow at the top of your swing or possibly even that dreaded across the line position that you may have been battling for years. I'm going to show you guys a simple little drill and a simple little tip that's going to help you get your golf club on plane every single time so that you're in a much better backswing position to be able to attack the golf ball. Let's go ahead and get started now.

                Okay guys, so if you've ever noticed on camera or you've had somebody tell you that you've got this really bad flying elbow problem at the top of your swings, that typically produces either some rerouting of your swing plane or produces a big over the top kind of miss in your golf swing, then I got a really simple tip that's going to help you overcome that today. Typically the reason why we get our arm in that position in the first place is because we tend to start to push the golf club back with our lead arm very quickly in the golf swing. What I mean here is if I took both my hands and put them out in front of my body and I started to push my lead arm across my center as much as I possibly could, my trail arm is eventually going to break.

                Now, that happens early on in the takeaway, but also what happens is it continues to work further and further and further back into your backswing. What we want to do to help alleviate this, for those of you that have the flying elbow, what we want to try and do is when we're turning our body we want to try to keep our forearms and elbows as close together as possible but relaxed. I don't want you to get really tense trying to deadlock them together. As you start to work from a takeaway into the top part of your golf swing by flexing your trail arm and you try to hold them close together, what that's going to force your trail arm to do is it's going to force your humerus to externally rotate. What I mean there is if you hold your arm straight out in front of you and you flexed it to about 80 to 90 degrees and then you just rotated your arm away from your body or your hand away from your face, that's what we call external humerus rotation. That's a variable. Some people don't have much mobility in their shoulder, but you don't really need any in order to be able to hold them close together anyways.

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                Now, that happens early on in the takeaway, but also what happens is it continues to work further and further and further back into your backswing. What we want to do to help alleviate this, for those of you that have the flying elbow, what we want to try and do is when we're turning our body we want to try to keep our forearms and elbows as close together as possible but relaxed. I don't want you to get really tense trying to deadlock them together. As you start to work from a takeaway into the top part of your golf swing by flexing your trail arm and you try to hold them close together, what that's going to force your trail arm to do is it's going to force your humerus to externally rotate. What I mean there is if you hold your arm straight out in front of you and you flexed it to about 80 to 90 degrees and then you just rotated your arm away from your body or your hand away from your face, that's what we call external humerus rotation. That's a variable. Some people don't have much mobility in their shoulder, but you don't really need any in order to be able to hold them close together anyways.

                Again, what our goal is, as we're starting to work from a takeaway position up to the top of our golf swing, is I want you to just try to hold your forearms and elbows close together. This is one of those fundamentals that elite players and those measured against the GOAT Model consistently demonstrate — a connected, on-plane backswing arm structure that sets up a powerful, repeatable delivery. You can use an AI swing analyzer to check whether your elbow position at the top is causing your misses.

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Read the full article: Fix Your Flying Elbow in Your Backswing