Tour pros love these feels to dial their swings

0:00Alright, so think about golf swing feels as a kind of passport. Golf swing thoughts are all the stuff that you want to change in your golf swing, all the stuff you want to do. Like I want to turn more, I want to load more or whatever it may be. But you can't be thinking about that stuff when you're out on a golf course. You'll go insane or play terrible golf along the way. So the way you bring that stuff to the golf course, so you can actually make improvement in a way that you can actually play and have fun is through feels. You want to find a feel that matches the thing that you want to do. And that's what a golf swing feel is. And that's why they're so important. Pros think about this stuff all the time when you see them on the range, that's often what they're doing. They're trying to find a feel that will help them play well that week. And throughout this season, this has kind of been a bit of a hobby horse of mine. I've been going around asking lots of pros and some coaches, okay, what are some feels that you just love? You'll kind of go to golf swing feels. And that's why I wanted to do an entire episode about it. I also wrote an article about it on golf digest.com. You should go check it out and let's get into it right here.

1:10Let's just run down the list. I found 10. I've got lots of these. I might do a follow up article at some point because I've got so many of them. But I picked 10 players here. They tend to be more high profile players, all just feels that I thought were particularly interesting. So let's just run down the list. And the first one was Rory Macro. I asked him this right before Memphis, which was actually a good time to ask him because he didn't play that well at the FedEx in Jude in Memphis. But he had just come off a three week vacation, well, the serve vacation. And so his mind, his focus was very much on finding a golf swing feel that he could use on the golf course to get him through this kind of closing stretch of the season through the playoffs. And here's what he said. I kind of asked him, what's a, you know, I saw him working on stuff on the range. I said, what's going on there? And what's a feel that you're using to just kind of improve it? And he said that he liked the feeling of being able to release it, to release the club. He said, so rotating enough of my lower body and then being able to feel like I shake hands with the target.

2:12Sometimes if I don't turn enough, my right arm thrusts out of the way, instead of down the line. So just making sure my body rotation is enough is so that I can feel like I shake hands with the target on the way through. And there's a lot of video I captured him doing it. But basically what Rory is saying and he's, he said that he says variations of this stuff a lot where he's like, I remember one time in the US open, I talked to him after his round and he said that he liked the feeling of turning so much that he feels like he's hitting a fade because he's turning his body so much. But actually when he looks up, he sees like a one yard draw. And I thought that's kind of interesting. But basically what he's saying is that he when he feels like his body stops turning, his right arm goes from behind his body and flips out to the right. And when that happens, the club based closes, it can turn into blocks or over draws or hooks or all sorts of nasty ugly stuff. So his feeling is he likes to feel like on the way down, he turns so much

3:14that his right arm releases out towards the target, not to the right of it. It doesn't thrust out to the right. It releases out towards the target so much that he feels like he's shaking hands with the target on his release. So that's his go to swing thought that as he gets down, he wants to turn and shake hands with a target on the way through. That's a pretty good intuitive one. Now, Ludwig, I wouldn't say this one similar. I mean, it's a little similar, but when I asked him, you know, it's interesting. Ludwig and Rory actually profile quite similarly in terms of how they drive people, they both hit these high low curve straight is shots that tend towards maybe a little draw if anything. Really, that's just high straight bombs and they're both elite drivers because of it. But because of that, I mean, that they have to really focus on keeping the misses within the guard rails because if they start hitting two way misses, little too much, all of a sudden, the stats stop working. So this is like really high priority for them and they both do it incredibly well. But the feels they used to do it at kind of different.

4:16So Rory says he likes to feel like his turns and shakes hands with the target. Ludwig says he likes to feel like his right arm. You know, I'll just read the quote before I paraphrase. He goes, I like the feeling of a strong club face, meaning a close club face. Like my right palm is pointing down towards the ground during impact. This helps me get to my left side on the downswing. And when I don't do that, I stay back and have to flip my hands. And he says sometimes I even do a paddle draw where I keep my right hand open. And I feel like I can get my palm down. So I guess a little like almost like a full hand in tennis, but the key feeling for Ludwig is that on the downswing, he likes to feel like his right hand is pointing down towards the ground on the way through. And when he does that, he gives his hands a little head of the board, helps get his weight more to the left side. And it just prevents this kind of excessive rolling of his hands and his wrists. And when that happens again, similar to Rory, that's when it goes into being blocks

5:19or over draws or left and all sorts of ugly stuff. So basically, keeping that right palm down for him gives him that feeling of compression, feels like it keeps the club face stable and just allows him to kind of squeeze everything down towards the ground, squeezing just being again, and not a feeling I'm putting words in his mouth. But that's how I can imagine it feeling. If you're pushing your right palm down towards the ground, feels like everything's moving down instead of hanging back and flipping, which is what he doesn't like the feeling of. He doesn't want to feel like he's turning and shaking hands with a target, even the Rory likes that. He wants to feel like he's staying down and really pushing his right palm into the ground, which is an interesting one. You know, I might give that a go. It feels like that would be especially good one for wedges. Anyway, I got Ricky Fowler on the side of the range too at the FedEx. I said, um, let's just have a quick chat about your golf swing. And he seemed kind of into it. So any gave a good answer. He, you know, our hands, there's our hands are only connection to the golf club. So it's interesting that you're going to see so many pros gravitate towards feelings

6:22that help them keep their hands just in sync with the club. And Ricky's is he feels like if I can get, he's, this is quote, he says, if I can get the club right on my hands and close to my body before impact, we're sitting in the club parallel to the ground, once his hands close and this club right on his hand, I feel like all I have to do is turn through. If I can get the club in a good spot from there, I can just turn and I'm good. Again, this feeling of turning is something, you know, I've interviewed hundreds of pros about this stuff. And this feeling of turning is such an important one. But the key here is the person who ever feel like they turn from the top because this is a classic flaw that a lot of amateur golfers is a lot of us. We do this. We get to the top and we immediately think turn. And when we think that we don't transfer our weight to our left side, we're hanging back all of a sudden. We're turning before we're doing anything else between the clubs coming over the top, swing to the left, slices, all sorts of bad things. Turning is good, but you need to time it correctly.

7:24And the common theme, at least in my experience, when I talk to pros about this and they start talking about turning, what they start talking about is turning late in their downswing. That's the kind of the common thread here, right? Ludwig talks about, oh, I want to get to my left side early and then feel palm down. Rory says, I want to feel like I get in position and then turn and shake hands with the target through impact. And Ricky says the same thing. I want to get the club right here, right on my hands, close to my body, right before impact and then I want to turn. There's always a something and then turn, whereas pro is amateur's, excuse me, they seem to gravitate towards things where I want to turn and then stay down or whatever it may be. But the order of this is correct. You know, we talked about sequencing a lot on this golf IQ podcast, but you know, this is again, this is a common theme that I see pros talk about. They want to do something like Bryce will talk about, I want to drop my hands down to my right pocket and then turn. There's always something before and then turn, but the turn is really important.

8:26Ricky, it's a slotted and then turn through. If you can get in position where you can turn aggressively late, you're probably in a good shape. It comes to your golf. Now, Scotty Schaeffler had an interesting one. He was one of the few golfers I asked, I asked this in a press conference at the travelers. And Scotty was one of the few golfers who when he talked about feels, didn't say anything about his body or his hands or really anything. All he talked about was the club head. Now, I'll read his quote. He says, my thing is if I can get a feel for where the golf club is, I can do what I want with the golf ball. So if I'm having trouble getting a feel for where the club is, I make a little judgment to try to feel the club. And that's why I talk about getting back to neutral and seeing and creating shots because my goal is to always have a feel for where the club head is and then use that feel to curb the golf ball different ways. For me, it's very simple in the sense that I can just feel it. Then I'm in a good spot. And if I can't, we're just trying to figure out how to find it essentially.

9:26So you know, a lot of golfers when they think about feels, they think about body parts or they think about external stuff. Like, so I want to stretch up towards the sky or I want to feel like I'm turning and shaking hands at the target. Again, you've got to find what works for you and that's all fine. I just find it so interesting that Scotty Sheffler, who's statistically is the best ball striker since Tiger Woods, been one of the most dominant players of the past few years. There's runnies on his incredible. And when he talks about feels, he's not talking about anything in his body. Sometimes we'll say vaguely that I want to feel athletic through the ball, but he's talking about feeling the club. This is a high priority for him. I want to feel where the club is on the downswing because if I can feel that connection with the club, if I can feel where the club is, then I can manipulate it in a way where I can hit different types of shots. And if I can't feel where the club is to a very specific degree, then that's a problem. Then I'm immediately going to go to the range and I'm going to figure out, I'm going to tweak my grip. I'm going to tweak my stance. I'm going to talk to my coach, whatever it may be, in order to get myself in a position where I can feel the club.

10:28And I just find that so interesting that there's a good lesson for the rest of us. Instead of us just being so bogged down in our own thoughts about what we want to do with our body parts and our body parts. Remember that this is a simple sport in this essence that this is a clubhead on golf ball sport. You're trying to do one thing. You're trying to hit that golf ball well. And you do that through the golf club itself, feeling where the golf club is should always be kind of your primary goal through all of this and everything else is a means to an end. As long as you can deliver the club face square onto the golf ball, you're in pretty good shape. And again, Scottish shape is just has a certain genius where he never seems to forget that stuff. These first principles, right? He understands that doesn't matter what the golf swing looks like, necessarily at all that matters is if you can deliver the club head on the golf ball in a consistent way. And he does that better than anymore. Now let's pat trick. I asked him this at the British Open this year. Now Alex is obviously Matt Fitzpatrick's younger brother. He's really funny, fun guy is always really insightful. He's kind of outgoing.

11:28He's kind of totally different than Matt, even though I really, really like Matt too. But yeah, he said an interesting thing. He said, I asked him about his golf swing because he loves to cut. And he said, I'm good friends with Cam Young. And one of the things that my coach might walk and I looked at with him is that he pauses a lot at the top of his backs. It felt like up to seeing him. That was how he kept his left arm in on the downswing. So I basically copied him. I started to pause more at the top and that helped keep my left arm close on the downswing, keeps him more connected. And that seems to work the trick. So in a nutshell, Alex Fitzpatrick's problems that his arms, he said tends to get too out. And when that happens, he tends to get, you know, a little steep and the cuts get a little wipey. They get a little severe. So what he wants to do early in the downswing wants to feel like his left arm stays a little closer to his body. And the way he feels like he can do that is with his driver swing, especially to feel like he pauses for longer at the top. So that's kind of his feel. A Cam Young inspired pause.

12:29If I feel like I pause, then I can keep my left arm close on the downswing. And then I can turn through again, a common theme here. You want to do something and then turn through. But this was Alex Fitzpatrick's left arm calls at the top, left arm close, turn through. Matt Wallace, he had an interesting one. Matt's really thoughtful guy when it comes to not just his own golf swing, but what amateur golfers can learn from just golf swings in general. And I asked him about his golf swing feels and he said, he kind of pushed back on the question in a really good way. He said, you know, for amateur golfers, it's not about what I feel. He goes for amateur golfers tempo is probably more important than positions because amateurs often don't get in the right positions. Now, obviously you want to work to improve the positions, but on a day to day basis, this is his quote, I would work on rhythm and the feeling of letting the ball get in the way of your swing, rather than just trying to smack it. And that's, there's just, there's a lot of insight there from Matt, because he's saying, listen, your golf swing isn't perfect.

13:31We all know that, right? My end goal swing is a perfect. Your goal swing is a perfect rule. Amateur golf is for a reason. So while you of course want to improve your golf swing, you also need to play well tomorrow. You got to play well the next time you tee it up, which is probably in a couple days and how you're going to do that. You're not going to be able to fix your golf swing by then. So he says, good rhythm is what's going to help you paper over the cracks. That's what's going to get you through this next round as you're kind of constantly work on the swing. And that's why he says the feel that he would suggest is not trying to smack the ball. It's trying to swing through the ball like swing and let the ball get in the way. There's some wisdom there. And I think some useful stuff too. And now Davis Chatfield is a rookie on the P2 to one of the most accurate players in golf. We did a swing sequentially with him earlier this year in February. And we asked him about his, he's got a really interesting story by the way, because he taught himself how to play golf. He got a few one off lessons along the way, just teach him the basics, but he's his own coach and he taught himself how to swing a golf club. He's got really good golf swing. He taught himself how to do it just through YouTube videos, which again, just fascinating.

14:35And when we asked him for a swing field, he said that quote, I flare my hips out and really focus on the feeling of sinking into my right hip on the way back. I do that and get through onto my left side on the way through. The word sinking for me is a really good one because you know, when a lot of us, a lot of us amateur golfers, we have bad hip mobility. We struggle to load properly. And when we struggle to load and we don't get into our right hip, what ends up happening is we either slide too much over to our right foot or we don't move it all. We don't get over to our right side at all. We end up kind of reverse pivoting. And then once you're in either those positions, you just have a lot of work to do to get out of it. So what I like that Davis said is he likes to feel like he sinks into his right hip almost like he's sitting back into it. Yeah, I'm going to work on, I'm going to work on that right. I like that sinking into your right hip. It just it has a good feeling of it's just a good way to describe the idea.

15:37Just almost like sitting into it. Like you're not just trying to get into your right hip, you're trying to go down into your right hip. And once you're down in there, then you can explode off it. Two more here. Look, three more, excuse me. Jake Natt. This is a, this is one from I think a year ago we did another secret trip with him. He said he likes to feel like he makes a putting stroke on the back. So his junior coach, John O'Teiger, is a fantastic putting coach on California. And he said, I feel like I've had my whole life is that on the takeaway, I feel like I'm making a long putting stroke. Feel like the club head stays low to the ground for as long as possible. Like you're pushing it away from the body. His feeling being that I don't want to snap it away with my wrists. I just want to feel like I'm as I'm making like I'm making a putting stroke. I have a little wrist action, of course, but I'm really I'm just using my body to just kind of get the club going on the way back. And I'm not snapping the club away narrowing quick that I'm making a wide, long, smooth putting stroke in order to start my golf swing.

16:37And again, that's what his golf swing kind of looks like. If you look at his takeaway, it's so smooth and therapy, it does kind of look like he's kind of making just a big putting stroke. So that could be good one. And there is one more. I said those two more, but there's actually one more. It's from Max Homer. I can't remember when I got this one was from a while ago, but I just liked that. I want to bust it out of the right moment. So I feel it would be a good one to end the article on here. He says that he wants to feel like he catches the club in transition. He says, quote, I almost feel like I'm catching the club in transition. I get to the top. Then as I start down, I let the club drop and catch it as I swing through. Now that's pretty simple. The idea being that once he gets to the top, he doesn't want to just jam it over the top. Again, Max likes to cut something a lot of us can relate to is that when there's cuts start getting too squirly and wipey and slicey, nobody likes that. So the feeling of getting in the slot again, making that first move on the downstream before you turn, he likes to feel like the club drops, he catches it.

17:40And then he turns. So anyway, a little buffet of swing thoughts, that is just, excuse me, a little buffet of swing feels there from some of the best players on tour, some of the best players in the world. Hopefully there's one there that can help your game. There's certainly a couple here that I'm going to tinker around with the next time on the range. And remember, the key thing here is that swing thoughts are good. Swing thoughts is how you make progress in your golf swing, but you shouldn't be jamming your head up with a ton of swing thoughts when you're on the range. You want to be feeling something on the range. You want to find a field that will help you do the swing thought that will help you play better golf. Fills is how you translate your range game to the golf course. And that's what these pros focus on.