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Try a Free Live AI Golf Lesson →Tiger Woods Backswing
There has been significant discussion and debate surrounding Tiger Woods’ more rounded backswing technique. Some confusion has arisen from the belief that Tiger has become a “one plane” swinger — which is partially true, but NOT by Jim Hardy’s strict definition of the term.
What makes Tiger’s swing “one plane” is that his swing plane is dictated entirely by the shaft angle at address. He swings the club on — or parallel to — that plane throughout his entire golf swing. Shortly after the takeaway is complete, Tiger shifts to a plane parallel to the address shaft plane and continues upward on that parallel track all the way to the top, as clearly visible in the photo below.
In the photo above, you can see that Tiger has shifted to a plane parallel to the shaft plane angle he established at address, as indicated by the red line — a beautifully consistent path from start to finish.
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To achieve this, he swings his arms on a slightly more rounded path than he did while working with Butch Harmon, and the clubface rotates open throughout the backswing to maintain this flatter plane alignment.
As an interesting side note: during the telecast of the 2006 Tour Championship that Adam Scott won, one of the announcers mentioned that Butch Harmon had told Adam to start “fanning the clubface open” during the takeaway because it was lagging behind his hands too much. If you watched Adam that year, you could see him moving toward a more laid-off position similar to Tiger’s at the top — and adding the forearm rotation during the takeaway was accelerating that transformation.
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