I’ve been working on a swing move that is really paying off. I mentioned it in section two (Second Fundamental) of one of my videos. It’s something I forgot about and am getting back to.

Swing the club with both hands.

Swing with both hands means there’s no right hand, no left hand. Your hands lose their identity. It feels like you’re swinging with one unit of hands–a clump of hands, as I said in the video.

This prevents the trailing hand, the dominant hand for most golfers, from trying to push the clubhead through the ball, a flaw that leads to every kind of bad shot.

Try it. It’s not hard to get used to, and you can see immediate results.

The motto of my blog is, Little Things That Make a Big Difference. Here’s a little thing that never gets talked about. I mean never.

What I would like you to do is stand up and raise your left arm to where is straight out in front of you and parallel to the ground. Rest your right hand lightly on top of your left shoulder.

Keeping your right hand at the same place in space, lower your left arm to your side. Has a gap between your hand and shoulder appeared? If so, that’s a big mistake.

When you raise your arm, there will be movement inside the joint, but that’s it. You do not raise your shoulder along with the arm. There is movement inside the joint, but the joint itself does not move.

Try the exercise again, but this time rest your right hand on top of the left shoulder to begin with, and then raise your left arm such that right hand does not get lifted up or press against your hand. That’s the feeling of your shoulder staying down. That’s the right way to raise your arm.

In golf, when you swing the club back, do not let your shoulders come up. The arms will rotate inside the shoulder joints, but the joints stay down.

You really can’t test yourself when you swing a club, since both of your hands are busy holding it, but you know what it feels like for your shoulders to stay down, so that’s good enough.

What this does for you is keep the arm-club lever the same length from takeaway through impact. You don’t have to go fishing in the forward swing to find the ball. The clubhead returns, all things being equal, to the same level where it was at address, which is a good thing.

There are three ways to play golf.

1. Do what you think you have to do to hit the golf ball.

2. Learn what the right way really is and do that when you swing.

3. Learn what the right way really is and mold it into a swing that feels like yourself.

Number 3 is best.

When you swing the club through the ball, you want the club to be approaching on a low trajectory. This is called shallowing out the swing path. It is something you should want to do.

You can go to YouTube and watch videos that take ten minutes of your life to explain something they could have said in one, but fortunately The Recreational Golfer comes to your rescue.

In Byron Nelson’s marvelous instruction book, Shape Your Swing the Modern Way, there is a little section that gets right to this point, so I’ll quote it in full:

“I can’t emphasize too much the fact that your lower body must lead the downswing while your head remains relatively still. You must create the sensation of swinging past your chin, of keeping your head back while your hips and legs swing past it toward the target. The best way I can describe the feeling is that you swing completely out from under your head. Your body moves clear past the point of your chin and your arms swing into the follow-through before your head moves.” [Nelson’s emphasis.]

Watch this video of In Gee Chun’s swing to see what Nelson means. Go to 1:50 and play the video. Put a toothpick or something very thin on your screen so it bisects her body at address from top to bottom in two equal halves.

Watch that through impact, her head stays in the same place, but her hips and torso are well ahead of the line you set up.

She is swinging completely out from under her head. She has shallowed out the swing path.

Width in the backswing is important. Real important. All that means is preserving the space between your hands and your chest that you have at address when you swing the club back.

There are lots of videos on YouTube that say why this is a good thing. I have no disagreement.

What I do disagree with is how they tell you to get it. My way works just as well and is much easier to do.

Take the club back by pushing your right hand straight back with your left hand. Lefties, push your left hand with your right. A gentle push, not a muscular one.

That, combined with your turn, gets the club up there where you want it to be, and at the width that everyone tells you that you need to have.

This move also sets up the speed of your swing, makes the flow forward to the ball almost happen by itself, and best of all for many of us, creates a swing that is easy on your lower back (at least it is for me, and my lower back talks to me right away if my golf swing is abusing it).

Practice this a bit until you get it to work. I promise you that you will hit the ball better.

Several months ago I published a post on gaining your maximum distance by swinging with relaxed arms. Let me more specific here about what that means.

In 1969, a British engineer named David Williams published a book titled The Science of the Golf Swing. In this book, Williams analyzed a stroboscopic sequence photograph of Bobby Jones’s downswing.

Among other things, Williams determined that the speed of Jones’s hands in the first part of the downswing, from the top of the backswing to hip-height, was 34 feet per second, and in that interval the clubhead moves from nothing to 50 feet per second.

From there to impact, Williams found that the hands continue to travel at 34 feet per second. They do not gain any speed. The clubhead, however, increases its speed to 165 feet per second, or 113 miles per hour. This change is not all due to the arm swing. The effect of a hinge and of centrifugal force count, too.

But the point here is that, since the acceleration due to gravity of a falling object is 32 feet per second, all you need to do is drop your arms from the top as a gravity move. You don’t need to add force of your own.

Relaxation? The more relaxed your arms are, the easier it will be for your hands to drop by the force of gravity alone.

None of this means that you let your arms go limp; that’s the wrong kind of relaxation. Your arms maintain the shape of the swing while letting them be pulled downward by an outside force. Once you get it, you might be amazed at how fast the clubhead is swinging through impact with so little effort on your part.

Bobby Jones gave us these two thoughts as the basis for building our golf swing.

“Very often, what a man feels he is doing is more important than what he does. The feel, the experience, is so much easier to remember and repeat.”

And what is that feeling?

“The downward or hitting stroke is intended to culminate in a well-timed, powerful contact between clubhead and ball. There is no way to argue that the successful accomplishment of this purpose is not the most important part of the stroke; but the backswing has for its purpose, the establishment of a perfectly balanced, powerful position at the top of the swing from which correct actions of the downstroke can flow rhythmically without the need for interference or correction. In the end, on the basis of consistent reproduction of the successful action, the preparatory movements become just as important as the actual hitting—the entire swing, a sequence of correct positions, following naturally and comfortably one after the other.” [emphasis added]

If you’ll allow me to be poetic, find a backswing from which your forward swing can flow through the ball like a clear, running stream.

Bobby Jones on Golf, p. 212 and p. 41-42.