Why 90% of Amateurs Instantly Improve With This Move

You know, a lot of golfers who come in to see me struggle because they're off in one of two or both key areas. They're not able to get the club consistently on plane throughout the swing or they lose their body's inclination to the ground. Okay. I see good ball strikers are really able to consistently do two things. And we're going to show you loads of examples here. They get the club on plane throughout their swing, and they're able to keep their body the same distance from the ground. I think about 90% of golfers who come in to see me, we end up focusing or spending some time in one of these two areas. So when you're practicing, you're not sure, spend time on your swing plane and your inclination. Now I showed this to a recent student of mine who was really struggling. He came to me and said, Eric, I've got like 15 different swing thoughts. I'm all over the place. I need to really simplify this and I need to play some better golf. I was really, really struggling. And we focused on these two pieces. I'm going to show you exactly the feels and drills that we did. Now, the good news in order to keep the club on plane is that all we really need to do is learn how to move our lead arm correctly to get the club on plane. And all we really need to do to learn to keep our body a consistent distance from the ball is how to tilt our shoulders. A little bit of lead arm movement, a little bit of shoulder tilt. My student made massive improvements. Now you're going to see some pros on the screen here. You're going to see some of the swing coach app. If you haven't downloaded the swing coach app, go do that right now. Free 14 day trial. You pop your phone on behind you, automatically analyze your swing, tells you exactly what to do. Feedback on every swing. It's unbelievable. You'll love it. Go do that. But in terms of swing plane, when we look at good players, if we drew a line up the shaft at setup, and if you get your swing plane good, my promise to you, like my student, is like things are going to be simplified. The golf swing can get really, really simple when you get this part and these two pieces correct. Club on plane. We draw the line up the shaft. The shaft should be basically right in line with your belt buckle. That's about the height of it. Now we're going to watch good golfers in the app and good golfers on the screen here myself, where they're able to get the club ride basically right up or pretty close to that plane line during the takeaway. They're able to stay on plane until about halfway back. We'll just show you what that means. They do some different things at the top, but then by the time they get back down to hip high and when they swing from hip high behind the ball to hip high past the ball, they are remarkable at getting on plane. The bad news is high handicap golfers are equally as remarkable at being off plane. Okay. And we want to be on plane, on plane, on plane, on plane, never back. So when you're practicing, we draw that line up from the shaft, use the swing coach app, and I want the club head to ride back and down that. Let me just hit a little half line. And that should have basically rid road, whatever the word is, road, right up and down that line. That's what I'm always seeking right up and down that line. Imagine practicing at home and getting equally as good or better than you get by spending hours and hours, hundreds, maybe thousands of dollars in in-person golf lessons. Check this out. The new swing coach app uses AI to automatically detect the real root cause of your swing faults. Now here's what makes this revolutionary. You get immediate audio feedback after every swing. Hands at half down steep by one hands at impact close by one. It automatically identifies your root issue. It then tells you on a scale of one to 10, how far off you are from neutral. Imagine knowing on every single swing instantly, if you did it right or not and being able to adjust. And if you don't know exactly how to fix it or improve it, I'm right there in the app with you talking you through exactly what to feel and how much to do it in every single part of your swing. Get your free two week trial of swing coach today. The link is down below. I promise this is going to change how you practice golf forever. Now I said to you, you can control the angle of the shaft by controlling your lead arm. This is what I mean. My student who came in, who had the club anywhere, but on plane, we're kind of joking around. I said, man, you're doing a great job of being off plane. Okay. You're off plane everywhere. And all we want to do is get back on plane. We're just joking around. We focus on his lead arm movement. See he and a lot of golfers who come to see me in the backswing get off plane because their lead elbow points too far away. Now notice when my lead elbow points away or level to the ground, where's the shaft go way, way, way inside. I see a lot of this on the backswing. Then what he did from here through the is he would have his lead elbow point up towards the sky and never was the club on plane. Very inconsistent, frustrated. And I said, check this out. If all you do in your swing is learn how to get your lead elbow to point more down towards the ground in the backswing and more down towards the ground in the follow-through, all of a sudden you look a lot more like the pros. The club was on plane. See getting your lead elbow to point down on the way back and down slightly behind you, but also down on the way through gets the club on plane. What's on plane? Well, the first part, let me just put this in and give you a visual. The first part of on plane, I said, we draw the line up the shaft, right? And the club is supposed to go where? Right up it. A little bit outside, a little bit inside is okay, but try and go right up it. Hip high to hip high through the ball, try and get right on it. On plane, right, is right on it. And then by the time we'll see these players, you'll see a Hideki or Rory here, right on plane. And then by the time they get to about lead arm parallel, if we draw a line through the shaft, the butt of the club, you can kind of see the stick hang out here, should point right on that ball target line. So the stick back here, or slightly inside of it. So I've got a stick here in line with the ball on the target. Imagine that's like a line that goes forward and back forever. You want to get your butt of your club, the end of the club here, to point right at, or right inside that during the backswing, to that left arm parallel. And then when you swing through, you want it to point right back at that. My student would go elbow away, look at where that points, way outside of it. And then he'd go elbow up, look at where that points, back here. Good ball strikers on plane, try this out with me. Left elbow more down. You're even going to feel like it points inside of it a little. And then on the way through, left elbow more down. Okay, so we started to hit some shots like that. He started to get the club way more on plane. Now he was used to this, like a lot of my players that come in, elbow away. Now when he went elbow away, notice what happened with his shoulder as well. Where's the lead shoulder going? High. And when the lead shoulder's high, what happens to principle number two? We said two things good ball strikers do, two things golfers struggle with a lot. Club on plane, what was the second one? Losing their body's inclination or distance from the ground. Standing up too much. When he would go back and the elbow would go away and the shoulder goes high, now all of a sudden I'm way farther from the ground. Now I've got to re-find the ground. Chaos, like my friend JT says. And then he'd go elbow up. So here's the mantra. Elbow down during the backswing to get the club on plane, but I also want the shoulder down. In fact, what I said with my student when we started, we said shoulder down, elbow down, butt of the club down. The bad was shoulder up, elbow away, butt of the club away. Look at this, no good. Shoulder down, elbow down, butt of the club down. I said, you know what's going to be good here on the way through? You know right shoulder. How about still left elbow down? How about still butt of the club down? That's pretty nice, right? Nice and neat. That's simple as he called it. So we went from 15 thoughts to this thought. Shoulder down, elbow down. Shoulder down, elbow down. Shoulder down, left shoulder down, left elbow down. Right shoulder down, left elbow down. Getting the butt of the club pointing where? Always on the ball line. Always on the ball line. So we started to hit with that. So let's just start with the elbow movement. Feel the left elbow down on both sides. Elbow down, elbow down. We started doing that and he hit some really, really nice strikes. Now because he was used to the elbow going away, the club would go really flat. Try this with me. Notice when the club goes really flat, is it heavy or is it light? It's really heavy. When you go shoulder down, elbow down, the shaft's going to feel very light. It's going to feel more vertical. In the beginning, he had to feel like, and this is common. It might be for you too. We felt the shoulder down. We felt the elbow down and we felt the butt of the club down to the point where we were feeling like the butt of the club was pointed more at his toe line. As soon as we put a ball in, and this always happens, you lose like 50%. So we felt here, and as soon as there's a ball there, it was perfect right on plane. So you might need to feel that as well. We felt like the shoulder down. We felt the elbow was pointed towards the toe line, as was the butt of the club and the shaft was very light. Very light. But in reality, we want it right at the ball line. Shoulder down, elbow down, butt of the club down. And he hit some very nice shots from there. And I think for him, and for you, and for me, obviously we want to hit the ball well. But we also want to clarify, what are we supposed to work on? And then by definition, anything outside of those is not relevant. So if you're like a lot of golfers I work with, swing plane and body inclination, right? Spine stability. When you pull up the Swing Coach app from the down the line angle, put on spine stability, and you're going to see the players, if we kind of drew the line up the back line, they're able to maintain that distance from the ground by getting their tilts. Their left shoulder goes down during the backswing and the right shoulder goes down during the follow through. Okay, they're able to maintain the body's distance from the ground. The players who struggle are always farther from it, closer to it, farther from it, closer to it. Not height-wise this way. I'm talking like forward and back. That's chaos. Why don't I hit the middle of the face? Why am I off day to day? Why is it struggle? Why does one day it feels like I'm hitting it so good and the next I can't find it? Well, probably you got something way off and I'd be willing to bet it's either swing plane or your body's inclination. So that's pretty simple, would you agree? The lead elbow should point down on the way back, butt of the club on the ball line. It should point down on the way through. We show Roy from face on. Look at Roy split screen with me. On the way through, the elbow's down and back, and the butt of the club points back at the ball line. Not like my student, elbow up, butt of the club pointed behind him. Elbow down, butt of the club at the ball line. Elbow down. Left shoulder down in the backswing. We'll do one more. Left shoulder down in the backswing, right shoulder down in the follow-through. Now, just real quick, one thing I did show him, you know, we were working this drill. We put the sticks down the ball line. I put that little club in there, that little training aid. You can also put a little alignment rod on the club because this I'm going to have him do a practice, you know, for practice at home. He's going to have the swing coach app on, but also just to feel this. If I put an alignment rod down the shaft, you can actually stick it right in the end of the butt of the club. You really want to learn how to point that at or inside the ball line here, and then when you come through, point it at or inside the ball line there, just as a reference point. And then he asked me, he's like, Eric, okay, I get the tilts thing, but like I need more details. How much and when? I said, well, I learned a really easy one from my friend Craig Hansen, World Class Golf. If you put a second golf ball about a yard outside your first ball, about three feet, how should your shoulders tilt? If I put the club across my shoulders in the backswing, your left shoulder should tilt down to the point where the club points about one yard or three feet outside the ball. In the downswing, the right shoulder should tilt more to the point where it would point about halfway between the two balls. That's how much. A yard outside with the left tilt on the way back, inside of that on the way down. A yard outside with the left tilt, inside of that on the way down. Like, gosh darn it, if you practice that, is there any chance that you're going to play worse, that your swing is going to get worse by you getting on plane and controlling your inclination of the ground? That's what I asked my students. Like, heck no, there ain't no, I've never seen it. I've never seen someone get more on plane or get better at keeping their body's inclination to the ground and play worse. I've seen a lot go the other way. So I'd recommend the same thing. Look, I recommend the Swing Coach app. Obviously, we're involved with them. I'm helping design it. I think it's unbelievable. I think it's pretty soon going to be literally better than me standing behind you for 15 bucks a month. It's crazy. So try that out if you haven't. Download the app. Just literally, you pop it eight feet behind you, press go, and then it automatically records your swings, shows you exactly what to do. If you want to do today's lesson, do spine stability from the downline angle, shoulder tilt, and swing plane. And if you're off, it'll automatically have those come up. And then every swing, it'll say, good job, more or less, sooner or later. And there's videos of me teaching you how to feel and what to do within the app. So unbelievable Swing Coach app. If you have any questions about this stuff, leave me a comment down below. I go through all those. And as always, I appreciate you guys watching. If you want to watch more like this, check out this video next.