The Swoosh at the Bottom, Part 1

Part of the Route 67 series

I originally intended to start talking about upright swings and the upper body power source today, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized I should cover this first. This swoosh is what we're trying to do, regardless of which power source we focus on, so an understanding of this may make it easier to understand how the power sources themselves work.

Just what is the swoosh at the bottom of the swing? To put it simply, the swoosh is the primary cause of clubhead speed -- and therefore of distance. Learn to swoosh properly and you really can gain a huge amount of yardage with very little effort. In fact, if you drive the ball less than 200 yards, I don't think it's unreal to expect anywhere from 20-50 extra yards when you learn how to swoosh. (That goes for the women as well as the men. There's certainly an element of physical strength involved, but once you learn the technique you're 85% there.)

Teachers and pros are notorious for "teaching" the swoosh without really giving you anything useful to learn from. The most common method is to take hold of your driver by the head and swing the shaft, trying to make a swooshing noise when the grip is near your feet. "If you hear the swoosh higher in your backswing," they'll say, "you've uncocked your wrists too soon." They are precisely correct... yet the explanation rarely helps, does it? There are other things they sometimes say -- things connected to the swoosh -- but they don't make sure you connect them, and they describe them using language that is correct from one point of view but misleading from another.

Today we start learning about the swoosh -- not just what it is, but how it's done, how it feels, how you can know if you've done it correctly, and how to repeat it.

Defining the Swoosh
First, forget the backswing. The best way to learn the swoosh is to focus on the very bottom of your swing -- if your arms were the hands of a clock, we would be focusing on the 7:30-8:00 position. (That's the position of your left arm; your right arm if you're a lefty. The other arm will bend as you cock your wrists, so it may appear to be at some other angle.) That's the top of the swoosh; forget about the rest of the backswing for now, but allow yourself to swing all the way to your followthrough as you learn how to swoosh.

Take a driver or 3-wood and hold it properly -- by the grip, with the head down where you want it to be when you hit the ball. Put something on the ground (a tee works fine) and push it down where you won't hit it; you just want something to mark where the ball would normally be. We'll be using it later.

First, I want you to "putt" with your driver. Just swing the driver back until your arms are at that 7:30-8:00 position we talked about, then forward "through the ball." Nothing fancy, just let the driver shaft stay straight, in line with your arms, as if you were putting. It feels like your hands kind of glide to a stop, then glide forward, doesn't it? It's nice and smooth, the way a putting stroke should feel. For a few of you, this is pretty much the way your driver is moving when you hit the ball. It's no wonder the ball doesn't go very far, is it? There are uses for this kind of movement -- it's not very different from what I call a punch shot -- but getting distance isn't one of them. Make a few swings like this, just to get a sense of how it feels.

Now, swing your driver and arms back to that 7:30-8:00 position again, but this time let your wrists cock so the driver shaft gets roughly parallel to the ground, then swing back "through the ball"; your wrists should uncock to their original position, so the club is pointing straight as it passes the "ball." This is the feel of a short pitch shot, and I think this is a really good move for an approach shot as well, where you want to control how far the ball travels. It doesn't take a lot of effort; that's why it's easy to control the distance.

The problem is, for the vast majority of us, it's also how our drive feels when we hit it. This is NOT the way to get distance! Make this swing a few times though, and mix it in with some of those "putting" strokes we did earlier. Can you feel a difference in how your wrists behave during this short swing? Telling the difference between these two is a lot of what the pros call "feel"; it's just a sense of where your wrists are (and consequently, where the club is) during the swing.

Now it gets interesting. Let's make the same swing again, back to that 7:30-8:00 position again, but this time let your wrists cock as much as you comfortably can. Even with your arms down in the 7:30-8:00 position, the head of the driver will be as high as your head or higher! You'll feel pressure against your wrists -- it's momentum from the weight of the clubhead as it swings back. The second that pressure eases off (it takes less strength if you wait till you feel it ease), I want you to swing your hands and arms back "through the ball," straightening your wrists so the shaft of the club is pointing at the "ball" as the head passes it, just like you did with the pitch shot. It may take you several tries to do it properly; that's ok. Work with it until you find a rhythm where you can make that short swing, fully cocking your wrists, then getting the club back to your address position. It takes some effort to get the clubface back to square, and I'd be willing to bet you can't stop the club from going to a full followthrough when you do this.

I'd also be willing to bet that very few of you feel that sensation when you normally swing a club!

Let me explain what you just did in "golf terms":

• You loaded the shaft (that's what caused the pressure you felt in your hands and wrists)
• You felt the change of direction (that's when the pressure in your hands and wrists eased off)
• You swooshed the club (that's when the club returned from its fully-cocked position to the address position as it swung through the ball)

I bet it felt like that club was really flying when it reached the bottom of the swing, didn't it? That's because it was -- look how high the clubhead was when your wrists were fully-cocked, and how quickly it traveled from that height to the ground. Do you think you developed some clubhead speed with that little move? You betcha you did! That baby WAS flying... and you weren't really even trying! You were just focused on trying to straighten your wrists.

You may not realize it, but the vast majority of your clubhead speed comes from this short bottom part of the swing. Your hands traveled only one-third to one-quarter of your entire backswing length, yet the clubhead traveled farther than it would travel from the top of your backswing to its position at the start of the swoosh.

That's enough for today. Spend a little time working on your swoosh, and we'll take the next step tomorrow.