Jeff Ritter on Making a Solid Swing

According to Golf Digest, "Jeff Ritter is founder of MTT Performance, a Golf Channel Academy located at Poppy Hills Golf Course in Pebble Beach." Therefore he should know his stuff.

Jeff has an instructional article at golfdigest.com called Five Steps To A Solid Swing. It's a slideshow with five slides and commentary about what he considers the five main positions you should swing through if your golf swing is solid. For this post I want to focus on the third slide, the top of the backswing, because I noticed something a bit unusual -- especially since I've done several posts on shoulder turn lately.

Here's the slide:

Now the caption says, in part:

...Golfers hear all the time that it's essential to have a "wide swing arc," however that photograph on my own regularly falls short. A desirable concept to get and keep width is, Play preserve away. As in, hold your proper hand as some distance from your right shoulder as possible (pictured). Maintain that feeling throughout the backswing.

Take a good look here, folks. Jeff is NOT getting a 90? Shoulder flip! He's getting a good turn, with his hands quite a way from his trailing shoulder, but he's not stretching and turning so hard that he loses his spine angle from his address position.

Note also that Jeff is the usage of an iron in this photograph. I assume that is vital as properly. Typically your iron photographs are made with the ball resting on the floor. If you try to make your shoulder turn too big, it will become more difficult to hold your backbone perspective out of your deal with. As a end result, your higher body ends up transferring around and it's more difficult to make stable touch with the ball. Therefore you are much more likely to hit your iron shot fat or thin.

However, in case you're hitting motive force and your ball is on a tee, making strong touch isn't always as difficult. If you hit the ball a chunk low or high at the face, you may lose some yards but you could still hit the ball solidly. So running to get that larger shoulder turn -- and a doubtlessly much less accurate hit -- is a fair alternate-off to get the gap.

My factor is which you do not should swing full out on every shot. Your technique shots off the floor don't require pretty the shoulder flip that you try to get with the driver off a tee. Bear this in thoughts for the duration of your spherical and you may be capable of cut some shots from your score with none extra exercise.