Your trail arm has three critical jobs in the golf swing — and most amateurs get all three of them wrong. In this video, I’ll show you exactly what the trail arm should be doing to create more power, better clubface control, and a more consistent swing shape.
If you’ve ever wondered why great players look so effortless while many amateurs struggle with speed, accuracy, and swing consistency… the trail arm is usually the key difference.
Small changes here can transform the entire motion.
In this video you’ll learn:
✔️ The trail arm move that adds effortless power
✔️ How the trail arm controls your clubface more than you think
✔️ Why your arm position determines your swing shape
✔️ The simple feels that separate pros from amateurs
✔️ How to train the trail arm for immediate improvement
Make this one change today — your whole swing will feel different.
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00:00 Introduction
00:42 Creating Easy Power
03:25 Become Deadly Accurate
05:38 The Perfect Swing Shape
08:00 Avoid This Mistake
What’s the biggest difference between the pros that we see on TV and the average amateur golfer that maybe struggles at the weekend when they play? My answer is often how the trail arm moves. Would it surprise you if I told you your trail arm is responsible for a lot of the power in your golf swing. It’s also responsible for controlling the club face, which is obviously key for direction and accuracy. And the arm is also really key for you setting the angle or the shape of your golf swing. So, it’s vital that we get it right. I’m going to teach you three really, really simple drills that are going to tick off those things. The power, the club face, and the shape of your golf swing. And then there’s a final point, which is really important to cover, which will be kind of the fourth bonus point we’ll call it. So, I’ve got a towel on the ground. You’ll see why I’ve got that there in a moment. So, if I just held it in my trail hand and I didn’t do anything with my body, I could use my trail hand and specifically my wrist and my arm to create a lot of speed in the club head. So, I could hit that towel pretty hard and create a bit of speed. You can see while the towel’s there now. Don’t want to damage the beautiful fairways here at Alzora. And I can create a little bit of speed. I can create a bit of energy. So, what am I doing there? Well, I’m using some wrist. That on its own is creating some leverage, which creates speed, but I’m also creating some bend in the arm. When I put the two together, I’ve got speed coming from the arm straightening and speed coming from the wrist moving down. And two together create a lot of speed. So, in the back swing, I want to be creating those two things. If I made a back swing where I didn’t bend the arm and I didn’t use the wrist, yeah, there’s some speed there, but there’s nowhere near as much. So, the first little exercise I want you to do is learn how to set those angles. Learn how to build or create that speed. You’ll notice I’ve got an alignment stick here outside the trail side of my golf ball. It’s maybe two feet. And I’m going to take the golf club in my trail hand only. And you can see that it’s obviously a little bit down the club. And I’m just going to place my index finger onto the top of the grip. And what I would love you to do is make a little back swing, but as you’re moving away, you’re going to basically push the grip down, as with your trail hand and arm, you work the club head up. And as you do that, you’re trying to get the golf club to basically point behind the alignment stick. So you can see as we look from the grip straight down, it’s the other side of the alignment stick. What that tells me is I’ve got some bend in my arm and I’ve got some bend in my wrist. That’s that power that we spoke about. Now, because I’ve added a bit of body turn, it’s sort of directed over here now. But we’ve created that power. It’s not that easy to get these two movements, but if you can do this, and you can just push down on the grip, because when we push down on the grip, it forces the club head up. We start to get this happening. This is setting the arm, setting the wrist. That puts it in a position where we can now create the speed. As we do this with our body turn, that directs the speed at the golf ball. We’ll come to that in a moment, but this first section is really about building that speed. Think about if you were going to I know you wouldn’t, but if you were going to throw your golf club, helicopter your golf club down the fairway, you would bend the arm, bend the wrist because you would realize that that is how you then helicopter the golf club down there. I’m sure none of you would do that. We also said the trail arm was responsible for controlling the face. Now, if you want to hit straight shots, you’ve got to control this club face. So, as I put the club into my takeway position, I can hold my forearm, but just with my wrist, twist the face, which would be open, and twist the face more closed. Open, closed, open, closed. That’s not my forearm moving. You can see that because I’m holding it. It’s my wrist going flat and extended. If I can extend my wrist as much as I can, that controls the face. So, what do we see at the end of the golf swing with high elite players? Well, what we see is that trail wrist is as extended as it can be. By extended, I basically mean my knuckles could not be any closer to my forearm. When I do that, that controls the face. This opens the face. This squares the face. So, one of the things that we have to do is we have to take our trail wrist, which as setup is going to have a little bit of bend in it, but we have to make sure we pull the knuckles back towards the forearm as we make our back swing. Now, I appreciate there’s lot of things going on here. I’ve just been thinking about setting the power. And these things all have to happen, which is why the golf swing is is not easy to perform, but basically, I can make my little takeway where I don’t really need to change my wrist angles too much. But as I set the angle, I want to be pulling these knuckles back towards my forearm. As I turn up, that puts my wrist underneath the club shaft, underneath the grip. That’s a key checkpoint. If the wrist gets more to the side of the handle, now there’s not many are going to be there, but the people who get close, face is wide open. And if the face is wide open at the top, we know the golf swing, we know the down swing is milliseconds. You have got very little chance to fix that. So, you’re going to be hitting balls way out to the right or you’re going to be making weird and wonderful down swing shapes to try and fix it. So, I really want you to be thinking about trail wrist pulling the knuckles back to the forearm to put what you feel is the wrist underneath the club shaft which is going to control the face. So, we’ve now got some power, some speed stored up, ready to use. We’ve got the face under control. We now need to set the delivery shape because it’s no good if we have that power if the club’s coming from over here or over here. So, we need to make sure the shape is good. What is responsible for the shape of the golf swing? It’s that trail arm. So, let me show you this. Let’s go into our sort of downs position. Let’s say we’ve got to the top and we’re moving into our downs. Notice how the grip is pointing pretty much at the ball. Give or take. That’s a great reference point. Give or take. That is what we’re going to see the best players in the world doing. The most common trait at this stage would be to see the club shaft too steep. Watch what happens if I change my trail arm position. Club shaft steepens. All I did was I move my elbow and I pointed my elbow more up and more back behind me. And suddenly we get the golf club into a very very different position. What we almost have to try and think from the top and this is a really really key movement is from the top I want you to have the sensation that this trail elbow is leading the hand is leading the grip is leading the club head and it’s working in front of you towards the golf ball. What we do not want to have happen is the arm or the elbow stall and the club and the arm start to move towards the ball. Why would that happen? Well, what’s going to hit the ball? Club head. What do we often think when we get to the top? We’ve got to get the club head to the ball. This is a great way to get the club head to the ball pretty quickly, but it’s not the most efficient way. So, what I want you to do, hold it just in that trail hand. Don’t have to take golf posture. Just stand up and just think about what you would do to put as much speed as you could in the club head by leading with the elbow. So, if I went back, if I led with the elbow, that would allow me to put the most amount of speed in the club. And look what’s happening to the shape. We get that perfect delivery because I’m thinking about the elbow and I’m thinking about that creating speed. And you think how natural that looks. There’s no reason why we can’t introduce that along with the first two movements. So we’d go set up, we would push the grip down, we set our right arm, the wrist goes under, we put the speed through. So we push the grip down, the wrist goes under, we put the through speed through. Now, we spoke about one kind of final thing, and this is really important because this is something I see golfers getting wrong all too often. So many golfers have over the years been told that they need to hold the lag. And what they do is they see this angle here, so between the lead arm and the club shaft, and they try and hold that for as long as they can, thinking that the longer they hold this, the more speed they’re going to get. That’s not necessarily going to help you because what you can do is you can hold this angle, but if the club goes this way, it’s way out of position. Even though, look at that. I’ve still got that angle in place. So, with your right arm, you’re setting the plane, storing the power. I want you to be thinking about holding the angle of the club shaft, not necessarily holding the lag. I would rather you hold the angle than you holding the lag. So, the key thing would be keep that club head behind you for as long as you can. You’re trying to hold on to the rotation. You’re not trying to hold on to the lag. So many golfers are in positions like this where they look at it from face on. That’s great. I’ve got that angle, but look where the club’s coming from. So, you’ve got to be holding on to the rotation in the arm, keeping the club behind you because then you can spin it out.
