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Ready to learn how to swing a golf club the right way? It starts with the golf takeaway.
Does this look like your takeaway? This is a death move in the golf swing, and it’s always caused by the same thing. We’ve talked about pushing versus pulling during the golf takeaway — most golfers who struggle with this move get the club going too far inside. They also tend to have their head move off the ball, and it’s all caused by pushing from the lead side during the backswing. If you take the lead side and push the lead arm across your chest, the club goes inside, the head moves off the ball, and now you’ve got a takeaway you’ll have to work really hard to recover from. It’s very difficult to play consistent golf from back there. But what would happen instead of pushing if you pulled? What side do you have to pull with? Well, of course, during the backswing, it’s only the trail side.
So as you take the trail side and pull the trail shoulder back behind your head without moving your arms at all, look what happens to the club — it produces a perfect takeaway. You didn’t do anything other than move the shoulder blade a couple of inches. You can worry about trying to move the club six or eight feet back behind you at full speed, where you can’t see what’s going on and you’re worried about hitting the ball. Or you can learn to move two inches and have that move the club six to eight feet without doing anything else. Which approach will be more consistent — moving two inches, or trying to consciously move the club six to eight feet? The answer is obvious: learning how to move two inches. The whole secret to rotary swing, apart from this concept of pushing versus pulling, is learning how to move from the inside out. Your body dictates what that club is going to do — your brain and your muscles move the golf club.
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What you should focus on is the stuff that’s moving on the inside first. During the golf takeaway, all you need to focus on is two inches of shoulder blade movement. You’re going to take the trail shoulder blade and pull it in towards the spine a couple of inches — and look at how much rotation that creates. Moving the shoulder blade two inches moves the shoulder six to eight inches, which moves the hands a couple of feet, which in turn moves the club eight feet. You’re moving two inches; the club goes eight feet. That’s an incredible payoff. All you want to do is learn how to move as little as humanly possible, and that’s exactly what rotary swing teaches — the smallest moving parts, the most efficient way to move, to get the club to go exactly where you want. We simplify the swing dramatically. You can also use an AI swing analyzer to instantly see whether your shoulder blade is initiating the takeaway correctly or whether the arms are taking over.
All you need to do to get a perfect golf takeaway is two inches of shoulder blade movement. Now let’s look at a quick preview of another concept that illustrates just how much the head tends to move when you start pushing instead of pulling.
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