We do a lot of game improvement content here at GOLF.com and GOLF Magazine, and we’re proud of all of it. It’s our bread and butter, the thing we’re most proud of. Golf is a fun, but endlessly difficult and complicated game. If we can make your lives a little better by making the game simple — and easier — we’re happy.
Our bigger Game Improvement packages usually start in the pages of our magazine, and we had a lot of them this year, from our 60 essential tips every golfer will always need package, to our stats-fueled smart-players guide to dropping 10 shots. But there was one that caught like wildfire when it hit GOLF.com: Shaun Webb and Mike Granato take on what they consider the 10 biggest golf swing killers in golf, which you can read about in full right here.
Webb and Granato run Athletic Motion Golf, and use their GEARs technology to analyze the common traits of some of the best players in the world. Not all teachers will agree with their conclusions, but even the harshest skeptics would admit it acts as a good starting point for golfers troubleshooting their golf swing.
I’d suggest reading all of them, but one that I found especially interesting was the “trail arm collapse” — a common fault among recreational golfers that costs them power and consistency.
Nearly all the pros Webb and Granato studied measured between 55 and 85 degrees of right-arm bend at the top of the backswing. By comparison, most of the amateurs they’ve captured fall between 95 and 125 degrees. That’s a big power leak. Your right arm is a major acceleration source at the start of the downswing, and the straighter you keep it on the way back, the more likely you’ll increase your shoulder turn (another power source). Webb and Granato report that students who worked on keeping their trail arm straighter picked up an additional 30 degrees of shoulder rotation — even those aged 65 and older!
