In this lesson, Jeff Ritter shows you how to get a straighter, more consistent lead arm—without adding tension to your swing. You’ll learn how trail arm pressure, elbow connection, and wrist posture work together to maintain the perfect swing radius for solid, repeatable contact.
Jeff also demonstrates a few simple feel-based drills (you can even use a candy wrapper!) to help you create effortless extension and start striking the ball cleaner and more consistently.
If you’re looking for a smoother, more reliable swing — this is where it starts.
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Hey performance golfers, I’m Jeff Ritter. You know, a lot of golfers ask me about their lead arm. Specifically, should it be straight? And if so, how can I make it straight? A lot of folks are trying to do that. So, the first thing I want to do is talk about the importance of having a straight left arm because I think it is pretty important. It doesn’t have to be as straight as you might think, but the longer you can keep that arm throughout the swing, boy, you get some real positive benefits relative to contact. So, think about your golf swing as a circle. That circle has to touch the ground. Where that circle touches the ground, we call that the low point. The way we get the circle to touch the ground is by number one having our spine tilted forward and maintaining that axis. So if I’m going up and down with my spine, boy, it’s really hard for the club head to collect the ball off the ground. Assuming that we have a stable axis to go around, we just need to make sure that the lead arm from my shoulder down to my wrist down to the club head that represents the radius of the circle. So if I have a stable axis, I maintain the radius, then you can see how this club is going to clip the ground right through the impact zone. If I am changing my axis or if I am changing my radius, purpose of this tip, it’s going to be hard to make good contact with the golf ball. So, we do want the lead arm to be nice and long, especially through contact. But in doing so, we need to make sure that it’s not stiff or rigid or stifling a nice athletic fluid swinging action. So, when people get this wrong, what they’re doing is they’re making a back swing and they are using their muscles to try and lock out their joints into a straight alignment. So if I am straightening my arm through muscle activity, I create tension in my forearm, my elbow, and my shoulder joint. And tension will always adversely affect your golf swing. So how do we get our lead arm long while also keeping it soft and athletic in motion? Well, the secret and what you need to understand is that the lead arm is being pushed straight through the activity of the trail arm. Yes, it is your trail arm that is responsible for lead arm length. And the reason that that is the case is because as we swing back, this trail arm should be pushing away from you as you put pressure from your trail palm on top of your lead thumb. So, if I’m creating pressure from my palm on top of my thumb, in essence, trying to keep this trail arm as long as I can, not bending it beyond 90°. Well, by virtue of that support from the trail arm, now this lead arm can be really relaxed and can be soft, but I can still maintain the length of the radius. I’m not even holding this club with my hands. And you can see how I’ve got a lot of softness in my arm because it’s my trail arm that’s stretching the lead arm long. Hey guys, if you’re watching today’s video and you enjoy the tips, but you really want to take your game to a whole another level, my friends here at Performance Golf are hosting beautiful two-day immersive golf schools with the best golf coaches in the world all around the United States. You know, I find a lot of golfers come in to see us and they’re really not able to identify and fix their real root cause. And usually there’s like four or five main swing issues we have, but finding the real one main root flaw that can domino effect and fix all the rest of the pieces is really the thing that makes or breaks someone’s improvement. So if you want to make like one or two years worth of improvements in two days, I highly recommend you check out my friends at Performance Golf, these golf schools down below. Click the link down there. See if there’s still a spot left in a location that works for you. could be the thing that transforms your game. Look forward to you have an awesome experience. So, the first thing I want you to try to feel this is to take your setup, take your trail palm and just put it right on top of your lead thumb. Notice how I’m not wrapping my fingers around the grip. I’m actually keeping my palm open. As you swing back, I want you to feel like your palm is staying connected to your thumb. And then as this club head starts moving above the handle, I want you to start push push pushing away to try and maintain that lead arm length. So you don’t even need to have your fingers wrapped around the grip. As long as your trail palm is connected to your lead thumb to start feeling some of that nice easy extension of that radius through that trail palm pressure on that lead digit right there at the top of your swing. I like the idea of playing keepaway. See how far this shaft is away from my shoulder. If the shaft is collapsing to my shoulder, it’s because my trail elbow is folding. And if my trail elbow folds, the lead elbow folds as well. The next thing I want you to do is take a little piece of paper or candy wrapper or a gum wrapper. I had a coach back in the day that used to have me put a little candy wrapper right on my thumb like that. And I would take my grip and as I would make my swing, I would have to keep pressure from that trail palm on the lead thumb as a means of again keeping that arc nice and long. So if I keep pressure throughout, the radius stays nice and long through contact. As long as my weight is forward, the divots’s forward, radius management gives me a nice clean strike of the golf ball. The next thing we need to do right here is make sure that we keep a little bit of pressure in between our arms throughout the golf swing. If your elbows are getting farther apart, then you can see at any stage of the swing, we’re shrinking or shortening that radius. So, in my address position, if I can just take my elbows and give them a gentle pressure together, just like that, and keep that pressure throughout, that pressure between my elbows, well, that also keeps that lead arm nice and long. All kinds of training eds out there. You don’t even need to buy one. You could take a party balloon that you might have for a kids’ birthday party and blow it up about the size of a large grapefruit. Put it right between your forearms. This is of course bigger than a grapefruit. But if you do that, you should be able to squeeze, squeeze, squeeze, squeeze, squeeze, squeeze, squeeze, squeeze, squeeze. Maintaining that pressure. Again, maintains the radius and gives me more solid contact. From here, I want you to understand how your wrist postures are also supporting your lead arm length. So in my back swing, if this lead wrist is cupped in a little bit and my elbows are getting apart a little bit, I’m adversely affecting the plane of the swing. And of course, I’m affecting this radius. Again, so at the top of my swing, I need this lead wrist flat, the trail wrist bent back, and that club shaft on about 45°. You can see how as I change the wrist posture, it changes the shaft angle and my arms get closer together. So, this is one of my favorite drills to feel that. Take your setup, put the club in front of you, and what I want you to do is I want you to raise your hands up right in front of your chest, right in front of your sternum. And as you’re doing that, I want you to flatten your lead wrist as you bend your trail wrist back. As you change those wrist postures to lead wrist flat, trail wrist bent, you’re going to feel like it’s easier to get those elbows together. So, I’m creating basically a 45 degree angle if I’m looking into a mirror. Well, if I rotated my body into my back swing from that position, again, you would see the perfect plane to the swing. 45° elbows together, lead arm length maintained with the radius, flat lead, bent trail wrist. Let’s do that again. Here’s my setup. pressure between my elbows, raising my hands in front of my chest, flattening the lead wrist, bending back the trail wrist, 45 degree angle, and I rotate to the top. So, now we’re learning how to position our arms, how to feel some pressure from the palm against the thumb, how to use our wrist posture with those elbows squeezing just a little bit to maintain the radius and also support the shape of the golf swing. The final thing I want you to understand is how important it is to blend a little bit of early wrist hinge into the movement of the club up to the top as a means of maintaining the arc or width of the swing through that longer lead arm. And what I see a lot of players do is they might get their elbows together, but as they swing back, they don’t have any wrist hinge. They’re trying to create this big wide arc, and as they get to the top, their wrists start to hinge and then their arms start to collapse and the club moves back close to their body, right? And so they lost all the width that they had because they weren’t adding some of the movement out of the wrist to support the swinging, the hinging along with the arc maintenance. So if you think about your swing as a little pendulum motion like this, if I start with my hands over top of my lead foot and start swinging back, while my hands go from my lead foot to midbody, as they pass midbody, they go over top of my trail foot. And what I want to feel as my hands are going from my lead foot to my trail foot with the movement of the handle is a little bit of hinge in the back of this trail wrist right here. Right? So it’s more of a backward hinge. It’s not a vertical hinge. And as I start to do that, as my hands get over top of my trail foot now, I start to feel like I am pushing, pushing, pushing with this trail arm all the way to the top. So look just like this. starting forward, moving the handle, pushing, pushing, pushing as I’m hinging, hinging, hinging. Now I’m at the top of my swing and I’ve got my width a little bit later as opposed to trying to create all of it early and then losing it at the top. Let’s try that again. Starting forward, travel the handle, feel the hinge in the wrists. Starting forward, travel the handle, feel the hinge in the wrists. as the wrists start to hinge. Now, feel that trail palm pushing, pushing, pushing, pushing all the way to the top. There’s that lead arm long, but still soft. I’m maintaining the radius and I’m creating better contact. So, when you put it all together, it’s really important to number one, get those elbows together. Number two, it’s important to feel like we’ve got some nice wrist postures. Number three, it’s important to feel like we are pushing from the palm on top of that thumb as a means of creating lead arm length through trail arm action. You put it all together, you maintain the radius of the circle, you create a very predictable low point, and you increase the consistency of your golf shots. So, I hope you enjoyed this lesson. Hope these tips made a lot of sense. Hope you know now that a straighter lead arm is pretty important, but it can’t be stiff. A little softness is okay as long as it’s getting stretched out at the point of contact, but boy, if this arm is folding up and is too variable throughout the swing, making good contacts going to be really challenging, and that’s why I think these tips are really going to help you. So, if you enjoy this video, do us a favor, subscribe to the channel, give us a like, leave those comments below. Until next time, best of luck with your game.
