The Method That Ruined Baddeley’s Swing

Aaron Baddeley had one of the purest swings on Tour, until a swing method changed everything. In this video, I break down exactly what happened, why Stack & Tilt didn’t match his natural sequencing, and the real cause and effect behind his swing changes.

And here’s the part most amateurs don’t realize that over 75% of golfers watch YouTube methods, but almost none of them end up with a swing that actually fits their body. Baddeley’s story proves why. If you want to understand YOUR swing, not someone else’s blueprint, this one’s worth watching.

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Here’s the part nobody in the golf industry wants to admit. Aaron Badley didn’t become great because of a swing method. He nearly lost his greatness because of one. Because his story is one of the clearest, most brutally honest examples of why rigid swing methods fail 90% of golfers. And real quick, if you do like cause and effect videos like this, or the videos where I show how all golf swings are different and methods are mostly just systems sold to make money, consider subscribing. I’ve worked with amateurs for almost three decades and there are over 500 videos here. I try to upload four to five times a week to help you understand your swing and not somebody else’s blueprint. Before Stack and Tilt ever existed, Badley was already a star. He won the Australian Open as an amateur in 1999. He defended it in 2000. He led the Australian Order of Merit and he was considered one of the most naturally gifted young players since Adam Scott. And the swing that did all of that, it wasn’t a method. It wasn’t a system. It wasn’t a branded blueprint. It was just his swing. Athletic, fluid, neutral, and built on pure cause and effect. He didn’t chase depth. He didn’t force positions. He didn’t rehearse angles. He simply rotated around clean tilts, let the club fall into delivery, and hit the ball with the sequencing his body naturally preferred. He was a kid with a worldclass golf motion because he let his body move and not conform. Then came stack and tilt. And this is where the story gets real. He didn’t just try Stack and Tilt. He became the face of it. Their book featured him. Their system used him as proof. And for a brief moment, it worked. He won the 2006 Heritage. He won the 2007 FBR Open. He finished 10th on the money list. But here’s the reality check that nobody ever puts on the screen. Even if he goes straight to Stack and Tilt’s own materials, they only ever list a tiny handful of tour names. Aaron Badley, Mike Weir, Dean Wilson, Eric Axley, Will McKenzie, Charlie Wi, Tommy Arma III, and a few others. That’s maybe a couple dozen players total they’ve worked with over the years out of roughly 150 to 200 PJ tour members in any given season. And most of those guys either moved away from the method entirely, only kept pieces of it. In other words, even at its peak, stack and tilt never came close to being how tour players swing. It was a niche pattern used by a very small minority and the tour as a whole very clearly did not subscribe to any one swing model. But every method has a cost and the cost is always the same. The moment you chase the model, you stop playing like yourself. Stack and tilt fundamentally change badly’s biomechanics. His pressure shift changed. His natural trailside load leadside shift became a start forward stay forward model that killed the reactive lower body rotation that used to organize his delivery. His back swing path changed. His arms started working more inside wrapped around a fixed axis instead of loading naturally into the trail hip. Before stack and tilt, his tilt created shallowing for him. Under the method, he had to force it which introduces timing and face sensitivity and his rotation became restricted. More forward pressure plus fixed axis usually equals less reactive hip turn and more arm dominated delivery. Those are not opinions, ladies and gentlemen. This is real cause and effect. And the timeline matches his story perfectly. Once those mechanical changes settled in, the ball striking dipped, the consistency dipped, the timing window got smaller, and the swing that once felt natural now needed some maintenance. By 2009, he’d officially dropped stack and tilt and gone back to his longtime coach, Dale Lynch. The guy understood his original pattern, and two years later, he wins in the 2011 Northern Trust at Riviera. The media literally pointed out that he abandoned stack and tilt before returning to form. Not because he found a new method, because he finally stopped forcing one. That’s the part amateur golfers never hear. Badley didn’t fix his swing, he unfixed it. He peeled off the layers of someone else’s blueprint and went back to the sequencing that matched his body, his motion, his DNA. Now, zoom out from tour golf to regular golfers watching this on YouTube. We actually do have numbers here. Recent industry research found that over 3/4 of all golfers say they watch instructional videos to get better, and that jumps to 96% for their heavy usage users with YouTube as the number one destination. So millions of golfers are binging the one magic move, the do this with your trail elbow, the new system changes everything videos, but there’s no published data showing that any meaningful percentage of them actually adopt a single branded method long-term. In fact, newer biomechanics work is moving the opposite direction towards respecting swing variability and away from forcing every golfer into one ideal model. The science lines up exactly with what Badley’s career already told us. Individuality wins, rigid methods lose. Methods can help a small percentage of golfers, but they make most golfers worse because they don’t account for your mobility, your tilt, your natural load pattern, your foot pressure habits, your timing windows, your body’s preferred sequencing. Badley is not a stack and tilt success story. He’s a swing individuality success story. And the faster golfers learn that their best swing is the one that fits their body, not some branded template, the quicker they will improve. The tour already voted with their bodies. If one method really was the answer, you’d see 80 to 90% of players moving the same way at that level, but instead you see hundreds of different patterns built on the same principles. Tilt, rotation, pressure, all expressed through completely different bodies. So tell me in the comments whose swing chain story should we break down next because there are a lot more examples of methods doing more harm than good. Hope that helps you everybody. Until next time, pherohs and greens. [Music]