Practice Your Takeaway

Everything that wants a good ending needs a good start.

Arnold Palmer once said that if you take the club back the right way for the first eighteen inches, not much else can go wrong after that.

Well, maybe if you’re Arnold Palmer, but the importance of a good takeaway cannot be ignored. A mistake here can ruin a swing that has barely begun.

A good takeaway has these characteristics:

  • The club starts back slowly. A golf swing is not a drag race.
  • The club goes straight back for the first foot.
  • The clubface stays square to the clubpath.
  • No tension enters your body, anywhere.

Get a club, set up, and practice this over and over and over this winter. Every day. Just the first two feet or so of your swing.

You cannot practice this too much, and you cannot practice anything that will have a bigger payoff.

One thought on “Practice Your Takeaway”

  1. Good tip, Bob. Doing this ” takeaway check” works for Justin Thomas, for example — and he’s pretty good. It couldn’t hurt for us to do this as the last part of the (short) pre-shot routine — the last thing to “check” before the full takeaway — to then strike the ball (in the center of the club face, of course!).

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