Mike Rugg of the Steve Dresser Golf Academy at True Blue Golf Club in Pawleys Island, S.C. is here to show us how to avoid the “phony backswing” and, in doing so, help you generate more power off the tee.
Mike Rugg:
Hi, my name’s Mike Rugg. I’m one of the golf instructors here at the Steve Dresser Golf Academy, located at the True Blue and Caledonia golf courses in Pawleys Island, South Carolina.
And I want to talk to you about something we’ve been seeing a lot lately and, to be quite honest with you, I’ve seen over my years as a golf professional, we see a lot, and that’s the issue of making kind of a manufacture or phony backswing. We see people coming out and just more or less just picking the club up. And they blame old age or lack of flexibility for that, and really it’s what we’re trying to do in our backswing.
So how do you know if you have it? Well, the easiest thing is take the club back and if you can reach over and grab the club head, your width of arc is not wide enough. It’s too narrow. You’re manufacturing something.
So we want to make a winding motion on our back backswing, we don’t want to make a necessarily lifting motion. So one of the things that you can think of, is, if I had a shelf over my hands; I want to keep my hands underneath that shelf until we get to about hip high. Again, we don’t want any lifting.
There are some other drills that have been around forever, and I’m borrowing some from great instructors. One is just put another ball about 18 inches behind your ball and try to put your club over that. You can also put a barrier, a clone or something like that, again, getting the sense of stretch here on the backswing. And we want to maintain a softness of the arms, not a tightness in the arm. And finally the famous one of just pushing the two by four back. As you can see, I can’t reach and touch my club head now. Just to give you a little wider arc, give you a chance to coil better on the backswing and deliver more power.