Hey guys, in today’s video I’m going to show you why you should stop trying to get the golf club in front of you. This is something I see all the time on the range too, especially with amateur golfers. They’re trying to get the club out in front of themselves, I think in an effort to get the club squared up early. I also have heard some pros talk about this very concept: “So long people talked about getting the club in front of you, getting the club in front of you, but I want to feel that the club is behind me. So I then have the incentive to turn my body through, and it’s like a water skier, you know, when the boat’s turning. Eventually that water skier gets flung out, and that’s the same with the golf club. You kind of want it behind you. Your body’s the boat turning to the left, and eventually that club is going to get kicked out.”
Now I want to show you the truth that pros actually never get the golf club back in front of themselves. If they did, they wouldn’t be pros. However, amateurs are capable, and I’ve actually seen them succeed in getting the golf club back out in front of themselves early like that, and it leads to disastrous results. So today, let’s break down why you should stop trying to get that club out in front of you and walk you through a better way to go about it.
Everybody, Milo Lines here coming at you from the studio today. If you’ve been following along, thanks. If you’re new to the channel, please hit that subscribe button. It really helps us out. So many of you at home have probably heard the idea that you’ve got to get the golf club back out in front of you in the downswing. Now, I’m going to burst your bubble right now and tell you nobody who is good does that. There have been lots of players throughout history who were way better than me who might have felt they did that. In reality, that’s not what’s happening. So let’s walk through what great players do so you can kind of see that that idea is not what’s going on.
Every single good player I’ve ever seen, they wind the golf club back. When they arrive back here at what’s called P6, where the shaft is back parallel to the ground and parallel to the target line, the chest is also just about parallel to that same target line. The hips are slightly open. So, is that club in front of me or is it to the right of me? I’d say it’s to the right of me, and a lot more than where it started. It starts in front of me, swings back, and it’s staying to my right, which allows me to be able to turn and hit it. If I actually am successful at getting that golf club out in front of me, there’s no way I can turn. And if I do, that sucker is going left. And if I’m successful at getting it in front of me like this, you can see I’m hitting it behind myself. So, it’s not what we want to have happen.
In fact, a trend I’ve noticed in today’s game amongst great players is that they’re realizing and understanding that they don’t have to get the club back out in front of themselves, as was something that was taught many years ago. In fact, a lot of them are saying they’re trying to let the club stay to their right as long as possible because it is going to catch up and fly by at some point. We’ve actually recently heard this from Justin Rose and a few others: “Like, you know, like in your head it’s like hit the ball. As soon as you try to hit it from the top of your swing, you lose all the good stuff, right? Feel like you’re trying to put the power on as late as possible. Like, you might, you know, like patient all the way to the ball. I feel like that always helps. Like, that’s my go-to pro-am tip. It seems to help a lot of people. All right, I’ll play you.”
And the longer you can keep it to the right, and the more you can keep it to the right, the faster it will actually go. And the easier it’s going to be for you to get your path and face to match up and hit straight shots. So, one point I want to make really clear is we’re not trying to keep our arms necessarily way to our right or behind us. We don’t want our arms to necessarily fall behind. In reality, the arms don’t move that far to our right to begin with. They might move a little up and a little to the right, like this. From here, I don’t want my arms to fall more behind me. We want to get the arms to move with us. So, you can see my arms here are kind of almost in front of me. They’re a little farther to the right than where they started, but they’re definitely not way back here, trapped. Now, what I see from a lot of amateurs is arms way behind them and a club that’s trying to get in front of them. They’ve got the whole thing flip-flopped. It’s backwards. We want to get the arms a little more in front of us and the club farther to our right.
So, if you’re an amateur player who’s really trying hard to get that golf club back out in front of you, most likely you struggle with pulls. You might also struggle with hitting some fat shots, watching yourself stand up and not knowing why. And those are all byproducts. You’ve got to do those things if you’re successful in getting this golf club out in front of you. I’ll demonstrate. The ball’s going to do that. And then, after I’ve done that a few times, now I’m going to stop rotating and start tilting and flipping in this way to get the ball to go straight. But boy, I just zapped my athleticism. I made myself into somebody who I can’t move anymore. I hit a pretty good shot, but boy, it just killed my ability to make speed. So, for those of you who are successful in getting that club out in front of you, it’s a massive power leak, and as long as you keep trying that, you’re swinging with a governor on. You’re never going to be able to just cut loose and let it go.
So, I always like to liken golf to other sports where I came from. I come from a baseball background, played some tennis, some racquetball. And in all of those sports, I would never try to get the implement back in front of me. When you hit a baseball, you don’t try to throw the bat back in front of you. You let the barrel fall in line with you and then you turn. And so, you actually contact looks more like this. So, the barrel’s over here, I’m facing the pitcher. Same thing in tennis. If I’m hitting a forehand at the camera here, I’m going to have my chest pointing at the camera or even left of it, and the racket’s coming along last. I don’t try to get the racket in front of me this way. So, why in golf would I want to get the club back in line with me? I want to let the club stay to my right so I can catch the ball just like I do in the other sports.
Okay, so now that I’ve demonstrated as best I can trying to get the club back out in front, let’s hit one a little more like an athlete, let the club trail me a little bit, and see if we see anything different. So, there you go. We’ve got a nice 7-iron that hit the center line. Path and face were about as neutral as I’m going to get them, you know, basically zeroed out. And I promise you, I was not trying to get that club out in front of me. I was trying to do the exact opposite. I’m trying to let this golf club stay to my right, stay to my right. I lower it, sure, but I don’t move it in front of me. I’m letting it lower as I turn. Boom.
So, I’m pretty sure I’ve gotten the point across. It’s way more dynamic letting the club stay to my right, turning into it. You know, the numbers show it. How do you do it? If you’re a player that really struggles with rotation, you’re a player that struggles with the club getting in front of you in reality, and you hit these pulls, you hit these fat shots, the governor’s on, what do we do? Well, first thing we’ve got to do is change our intention. What are we trying to do? So, what I want you to feel, we’re going to wind this club back. Big turn. Now, as we change directions, we’re going to feel like we fall down a little bit, a little stretch into our arms, and now we let this golf club feel like it’s lowering this direction. Not in front of me, it’s moving down, basically parallel to my chest, down the line, and then I can turn into it. So, we’re going to do that, and go slow. So, wind, down, and through the golf ball. And you can see immediately that helped my path go a little to the right. I’m not going to struggle (snorts) with the big pull. I can hit a ball that starts to the right. That is going to open up the pathways and free you to go ahead and be an athlete and turn through that golf ball aggressively.
I always say start kind of slow. You’ve got to learn the pattern. We walk with it a little bit, and then we jog with it. So, you can see I swing that one 67 mph, so pretty slow. Now, after we get good at that, now we’re going to let it go a little faster. And you can see, bingo, right down the line again. And that’s 88 mph, so for most people that’s going to be a really nice 7-iron. And then I’ve got a lot more if I need it. But you’ve got to learn how to train the overall shape of the motion and the intention. We’re not trying to throw the club in front of us. It will get there, but it’s going to get there at a different time and in a different way.
A couple of other ways to really get this point across and feel it would be throwing golf clubs. If I was going to take this golf club with two hands and throw it, I would never push it down behind me. I would allow that club to float. It’s almost going to lever more and then sling out, especially if I was going to throw it forward toward my screen. It would make no sense for me to push it down behind me. Okay? So, that’s a really good way you can practice feeling, throw the club that direction. And I actually like to go out where there’s an open field and throw some clubs. Make sure there’s no one around though. They don’t generally go where you think they’re going to go.
Then, another good feeling, some one-arm trail arm. If I put my right arm on, I would never push the golf club out in front of myself this way. I’m going to allow the weight of that golf club to fall in line and swing through. So, once you’ve really gotten the feel for one-handed swings, slinging that club like you’re going to throw it, then go ahead and put both hands back on and try to duplicate the same feeling. And there we go. We can see we get the same shot again. Now, that felt super relaxed. I really felt like I almost wasn’t swinging. And you can see I was swinging pretty fast.
So, hopefully this idea clarifies for you that, you know, even though some really good players throughout history have felt like they were putting the club back in front of themselves because of the dynamics of how their body moves, they don’t actually succeed at it. However, many of you at home do. And succeeding at that is a death sentence to your golf swing. You cannot have that golf club actually getting back out in front of yourself. You’ve got to learn how to let the club stay to your right so you can use your pivot to sling it out into the golf ball if you want to have good dynamics and be able to control the low point and the path. Hopefully you all learned something from this video, and if you did, we would really appreciate it if you hit that like and subscribe button. And we’d also love it if you come over and visit us at milolinesgolf.com where we’ve built a program specifically to teach you to swing like an athlete and giving you the tools where you have access to us coaches to give you personalized coaching and training that you need to play the best golf you’ve ever played.
