I would like to present to you a matter that isn’t emphasized in golf books or online, but which is a pretty important part of a golf swing. It concerns how you treat your elbows throughout the swing.

Your elbows are fairly close together at address, and you want you keep them that way when we swing. The major disconnection is the right elbow pulling away, either on the way up or on the way back into the ball.

The problem this causes is that the club wanders away from its address orientation. The shaft goes off in a different direction, or the clubface gets twisted out of square, or a new club path gets created.

When and how the elbows get “separated” doesn’t matter. Just keep the address feeling of spatial connection between the elbows the same throughout the swing and you have it.

But don’t listen to me. Ben Hogan, in his book, Five Lessons, and Mickey Wright, in her book, Play Golf the Wright Way, both advocate strongly for this point.

Hogan says, on page 48, “The closer you keep your two arms together, the better they will operate as one unit, when they operate as one unit, they tend pull all of the elements of the swing together.”

Wright says, on page 47 of her book, that a square clubface is an essential element of her swing and she attains it by, “maintain[ing] the relative position of my arms and elbows to each other throughout the swing. The tendency when we swing just let everything fly including our elbows. We want elbow control.”

Since elbow control as she calls it is a feeling, and not a technique, I can’t say how to do it. But when I do it, I feel that my elbows are connected in a way at address and they never leave each other’s company at any time during the swing.

Neither Hogan or Wright mentioned another benefit of swinging with the feeling of your elbows staying together, because I don’t think they had this particular problem, but in my experience it goes a long way to suppressing the hit impulse that ruins so many shots at the last moment.