Swing Analysis: The “Hands-Out Move” Dominates the Tour

By Wayne | Videos: Swing Analysis

I like to go through the TV telecasts that I DVR, pick the interesting swings and load them onto my camera, then load them onto my computer and into my V1, then go through and attach names to them, and then (finally) watch all of them to figure out what kind of video I am going to do. Most of the time I will pick out one or two guys who are playing well and are on camera a bunch and do a swing analysis, or other times, like this one, I will find a general theme amongst the swings and try to identify it. I think it is fairly obvious that if you are watching the best players and analyzing their swings in real time and slow motion while they are under pressure that you can find some commonalities amongst them, and it is not a great leap to consider that if a large majority of good players are doing a certain thing then that thing would be a good thing to do. In this video you see the transition move of the players populating the top of the leaderboards in the first couple tourneys of the year, and what stands out in the prevalence of a “hands-out” move from the top as opposed to one where the hands drop straight down or even backwards. The hands- out move is a right elbow forward and in front of the chest move, one that encourages deep hips and aggressive body rotation. As far as I’m concerned this type of transition movement has replaced the conventional instruction to “let the arms fall into the slot” with one that says (as Hogan stated it almost 60 years ago) that the golf swing motion is closest to a combination side-arm and underhand throw. This more athletic movement would give way more people a chance to feel some athleticism in their own swings.