How the Loop Move Works

Yesterday I left you with a struggling weekend player who had an ‘over-the-top’ swing, and I said the problem is an instinctive attempt to make a looping movement they already use in other areas of their lives. Did you guess what that looping movement is?

If you’ve ever driven a nail with a hammer, or swatted a fly with a rolled-up newspaper or flyswatter, then you’ve used a single-plane loop. It feels natural, and it makes sense that we would try to use it to make such a similar move with a club. (In some cases, we even call it ‘driving,’ don’t we?)

Let’s look at the stages of the loop; we’ll use a flyswatter in our example.



You can understand why our frustrated weekend golfer is struggling, can’t you? The ‘pause’ felt at the change of direction in the modern swing causes the wrists to cock at the top of the backswing, rather than midway down as they do in this familiar swatting motion. The cocking of the wrists as they start down, right after the ‘pause,’ feels very much the way they feel after making the loop when swatting flies or driving a nail; as a result, the instinctive thing to do is ‘snap’ the wrists when the modern downswing starts. The result is an over-the-top move.

In the next post we’ll see how to adapt this loop move to a golf swing.