Why You Need This:

What is the #1 key to making a good full turn in the golf swing? Most people don’t know.

It is usually surprising for players to learn that the golf swing takeaway is crucial in getting the shoulders to load, and getting you the distance you deserve.

Worst of all, most pros teach the takeaway the dead wrong way. A lot of pros teach to do the takeaway with the hands which causes the shoulders to get lazy and your power to be sapped.

I am excited to work with you on your shoulder turn so you can start out driving all of your friends.

What's Covered: How to make the proper takeaway for power in the golf swing.

Golf Pros Featured:

Instructors Featured: Clay Ballard    

Video Duration: 3:01

Video Transcription:

Hi guys and welcome back.

I have a great video for you here today, we’re going to talk about how to get a full shoulder turn and the most important key, where it goes wrong for so many players, is in the takeaway.

The first several feet of your backswing you can either make or break your good full shoulder turn.

It seems kind of counterintuitive but it will make a long more sense once I start to explain this.

So if you look at all the top guys, you look at Rory McElroy, look at Tiger Woods, you look at Dustin Johnson, these guys that are getting big, full shoulder turn, really ripping the ball.

They’re all having what’s called a very wide takeaway and the reason for this is their arms are doing very little, and their shoulders are rotating right off the bat.

So let me explain this to you. As we set up, if I’m looking at those top players, what I’m going to see in their takeaway is in the first few feet the hands and arms are doing very little, and that’s forcing me to rotate my shoulders to pull this club back.

So there’s really two different ways you can pull the club back.

I can either rotate my shoulders, although I’ll go ahead and do it correctly here, I can do it this way.

I’m going to have a wide take away, I’ve got a lot of rotation, you can see that my club’s only halfway to the backswing, and I’ve already gotten 45° of shoulder rotation if not a little bit more.

Or I can do it the incorrect way, which is just picking it up with my hands and arms.

Now you’ll see that I’m not really rotating my shoulders, I’m just pulling this club back, that’s going to continue to lead throughout the backswing rather than me just picking the club up and not getting a shoulder turn, versus if I can get wide now my shoulders are going to turn all the way to the top.

So if I do this correctly, good full turn, I should feel a little bit of stretch in my midsection when I stretch these muscles out.

I’m going to be able to use that for power in my downswing.

There’s three keys I want you to focus on as you’re doing this. Number one, I want to make sure that I use very little wrist.

I don’t want to be setting early, so if I’m picking the club up, you can see how much wrist action there is here. If I do this properly, I want you to focus on the top of your wrist.

Right above your thumb where your thumb meets your wrist on both the right hand and the left hand, and I want to make sure that that stays flat as I’m going back.

So that’s flat, that means that this hasn’t bent very much.

The opposite of that would be cupping the wrist which would be bending it this way.

So that would be what’s called radial deviation, moving the wrist up this way, but I don’t want to start to cup the wrist right off the bat, I want the tops of my wrist to be very flat.

That’s going to force me again to rotate these shoulders to bring the cub back which is obviously a very good thing.

The second thing I want you to focus on to know if you’re doing this correctly, is to make sure that when you go parallel with the club in the take away, when my club goes parallel to the ground, I want this club to be between my belt and the bottom of my pocket.

So if we’re looking from the side, right here between the bottom of my pocket and my belt is where the club should be parallel with the ground.

Let me go ahead and show that to you again.

Again, very little wrist motion, club parallel right there, just below my belt.

The third piece is we’re going to be moving these shoulders to help wind up our torso.

So my right shoulder is actually going to be retracting, it’s going to be going behind my body, and the shoulder blade can move quite a bit independent of your actual torso.

So I want to be feeling like I’m pulling this back, and my left shoulder is going to be what is called protracting, or going forward.

I’m going to show you this from the side. That shoulder’s going to be going forward as this one’s going backward.

You can imagine if you had a towel and you had kind of stuck a T or a bar through the middle of the towel that you looped around there, and you started to twist that around, that’s really going to wring that up and that’s what’s happening to the shoulder.

The right shoulder is going back, retracting as the left shoulder is protracting, and that’s really going to help to rotate.

So that’s where you’re going to feel the motion of these first several feet in the swing.

So again, let’s go over all three pieces.

Number one, keep the top of my wrist flat, number two, I’m going to make sure that the club is parallel to the ground just below my belt, and number three, right shoulder retracting as my left shoulder is protracting to help me really get a big turn in the takeaway.

Now from here, all I’ve got to do is continue the turn up to the top and I’m going to get at least 90° if not a little bit more, and I’m not going to be just picking the club up with my arms.

That’s going to get me a lot more distance, a lot more power, as I go into my downswing and a great stretch of the muscles that are needed in that power.

So good luck to you guys.

Go over, check those three points, get a couple hundred reps in, get comfortable with this, each individual piece, then you can put it all together, start going out and hitting some golf balls.

I’ll see you guys soon.