A recent lesson with my friend Travis reinforced something that’s important to remember no matter where you’re getting your golf instruction: If you want to fix something in your swing, you have to fix the cause. Too many golfers just chase symptoms.
Travis is a former mini-tour player who’s taught the game himself, so he’s no stranger to instruction. But early extension had crept into his swing anyway, just as it does for players who’ve never even been on a lesson tee. Coming down, he’d stand up out of his posture, stop rotating and flip the club through impact, trying to launch the ball higher and add speed.
The fix wasn’t to give him drills to stop standing up. We had to go back earlier in the swing to find the root cause, which you can see in this video.
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The first thing we addressed was the clubface, specifically what it was doing on the takeaway. If the face doesn’t get into a good position early, everything downstream can end up compensating for it. For Travis, that compensation showed up in his right arm.
That’s where we went next, building better structure in his trail arm instead of letting it break down and cost him width at the top. Travis had a habit of over-bending his right arm on the backswing, flattening the top of his swing and setting up a steep, stuck move in transition.
I had him use the AMG Arm Shark, a training aid invented by my friends at AMG, Shaun Webb and Mike Granato. It’s a strap with a magnetic fin that sits against the bicep. If you move outside the range that keeps the fin in place, the magnetic connection releases with a noise. That gives you immediate feedback on the mistake, rather than waiting for me to shout “wider” from the sidelines.
Once that structure started holding up on its own, we slowed things down. I had Travis hit balls off a tee at well below full speed, making three-quarter swings at most, so he could ingrain the new pattern before asking it to hold up at game speed. Trying to fix your structure at full speed is a good way to blow right through the change process before the adjustment ever sticks.
The final piece was rotation, specifically learning to rotate while maintaining his posture instead of standing up to make room for the club. I used an alignment stick to give Travis immediate feedback on his hip depth throughout the swing, giving him something he could feel rather than simply hear me describe.
Once he started maintaining that depth, two things improved almost immediately. He stopped catching the ball toward the toe, and the club began approaching impact on a shallower path. Better depth led to a better path, which led to better contact. Each improvement fed the next.
None of this started with a stance adjustment or a drill designed to stop Travis from standing up, because standing up was never the root problem. It was the result of what had happened earlier in the swing. Find the cause, rather than just addressing the point where everything finally breaks down, and the symptom often takes care of itself.
