This was part of a longer video for an online student about his mechanics, and how to approach making swing changes. The key discussion here is on the common mistakes that a golfer will make while going through this process. Enjoy! 💪
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My name is Shauheen Nakhjavani, Co-founder of Nakhjavani Golf. I have been a golf coach for 10+ years, I’ve given over 25,000 lessons in-person & online, and I have worked with many professional players; including Kevin Chappell, Stephen Ames, Darren Clarke, Calum Hill, Yannik Paul, Eddie Pepperell, Jeremy Paul & many others!
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Where you’re at right now is at the start of your down swing, you have too many steepening elements to the arm structure and too many shallowing elements to the body. And really, that’s kind of where you’re stuck between patterns because any change we try to make is going to push you to an extreme. I’ll give you an example. If I get to the top of my back swing and my back swing alignments are pretty solid, okay? And then right now what we’re seeing with you is an arm structure that kicks out really aggressively and a shaft plane that comes down way too upright. Okay? So the shaft intersects your neck practically by the time your left arm is parallel to the ground. So it’s a pretty steep position by all accounts. And then from here what we see is a lot of reacting from the body which is the shallowing piece that offsets this to try to make it work. So your body rotates okay but as you’re rotating you’re side bending a lot. you’re extending your spine a lot and we’re doing a lot of things that are pushing us out of posture by the time we get to the golf ball. When we do those things, it’s really easy for us to get stuck on our back foot because if I’m creating too much separation and I’m sidebending a lot, my upper body’s weight is falling backwards. So, I can get really flatfooted and when my spine extends a lot, I push my pelvis forward and I’m still not shifting my weight in the correct direction, which is towards the target. And so what happens is you’re stuck in a situation where the arm structure steepens the club and then the body shallows the club, right? And so any direction that you try to take your golf swing, whether that be fixing the way the body moves through impact or fixing the way the hands and arms are moving is going to get you to an extreme. And that’s where, in my opinion, a lot of golfers go wrong and they constantly get stuck back with their original pattern. In theory, if I actually take a golfer who has your pattern, steeper arms and then kind of the shallower body movements, and I start to now get them to learn how to shallow the arms independently, but their body still reacts the way it does, well, you’re stuck. And if you’re stuck very inside out, the misses are actually worse, more amplified, and worse than they were before. Why would a player want to go through that change? If you’re standing on the driving range and you’re trying to hit the ball to the target and you work on these changes and then the ball flight starts to do this, you’re going to stand there and say, “Well, there’s there’s 0% chance I’m ever going to be able to trust or commit to this on the golf course.” Which to some degree is true, right? But what’s important here in this entire process is understanding two things. Anytime a player has a lot of compensations, they typically will require two adjustments. the adjustment to the root of the problem, which is the hands, arms, and club steepening, and the adjustment to the compensation that was trying to fix the root of the problem, which is the body movements. If I just fix the root of the problem, but I’m still compensating, I’m in trouble. And if I just try to fix the compensation and I don’t fix the root of the problem, and now I get you to stop doing this, and I try to get you to stay in posture and turn, well, your hands and arms and club were really steepening the club. If I get you to rotate, that’s actually going to amplify that problem. then this the pattern starts to look like that and that’s obviously no good either. So any change this player in this world is going to make is going to either push them into a pattern where they’re way too shallow if I fix the root of the issue or if I fix the compensation I’m now way too steep because the compensation was the only reason you were avoiding being steep in the first place. And I’m relating this to your pattern specifically. And so we are in a situation now where you either need to do one of two things going forward. Either you need to make changes to the root of the problem and accept that in the short term there might be a very subtle amount of regression with a long-term focus in mind that is going to eventually really raise your floor and get you hitting it better. Because if we do fix the arm structure, but then I can also get you to fix the body movements with time. Well, now we’re not only relying on less timing with the hands, but we’re going to then neutralize the pattern a lot. And that can be very good for you long term. Your floor is going to rise dramatically. Or you have to simultaneously focus on the root of the problem and the compensation to always keep your pattern neutral. Meaning, we never want to work too hard on just one of those two changes because we want to avoid pushing your pattern to an extreme.
