Rickie Fowler is doubtless one of the most well-known and in style golfers in latest historical past.
The story of his golf swing is an interesting one. Because he’s an incredibly gifted participant. One whose profession has introduced him huge wins, prestigious data and hundreds of thousands of dollars, compelled to confront the identical drawback that so many golfers do. The problem of what feels natural, and what is most constant, and how to steadiness between two.
You can watch the total video breakdown of Rickie Fowler’s swing under.
When they first take up the sport, plenty of junior golfers usually be taught to swing with golf equipment that are barely too long and heavy. Rickie, a self-taught participant from a middle class town in California, nearly actually did, too.
And identical to we see the consequences in Brooke Henderson’s or John Daly’s lengthy backswing. We can spot the identical results in younger Rickie Fowler’s homegrown one-of-a-kind backswing too.
Perhaps the simplest approach to perceive what was occurring in Rickie’s outdated move is to look at carefully how the clubhead moved during his swing. The clubhead is the heaviest part of the the golf club, every golfer moves it round in barely different ways because of how they’re built.
Young Rickie begins his swing by dragging the clubhead outside his arms utilizing the larger muscular tissues in his chest and torso. It gives the early a part of his backswing an identical, albeit much less exaggerated, look to Matt Wolff.
But whereas Wolff makes use of the muscles in his arms to begin lifting and tilt the club extra vertically during the second part of his backswing, Fowler kept turning the membership round him. It’s what gave Rickie’s outdated swing its recognizable flat and laid off have a look at the top.
Like many junior golfers, when Rickie was young he lacked the arm energy. So as an alternative, he just saved turning, and his arms followed the club. This brought on the load of the clubhead to drop really far behind his body, and the clubhead stayed again there whilst his arms began his downswing. A bit like how the load of the ball causes a pitcher’s arm to lag behind the rest of his physique.
Over time that move turned engrained in his swing, at the identical time as he obtained greater and stronger.
This course of landed Rickie in what many teachers call a prototypically “stuck” position on the downswing, which is what occurs when your arms get too far behind the remainder of your physique.
Many coaches say that when golfers get their arms ‘stuck’ up to now behind them like this, they generally need to rely closely on their hands to get the membership again out in entrance of them shortly to avoid missing pictures out to the proper.
It’s one thing lots of good young players wrestle with, together with a younger Tiger Woods.
It required Rickie to keep plenty of totally different plates spinning on the same time. If one thing went incorrect, so did the others.
It’s why younger Rickie tended to be a streaky ballstriker. Some years it was good, different years it was less good. When his scorching putter started to cool off, that’s when his outcomes did, too
But that’s beginning to change because of a some new feels that present up in his backswing, as he advised Sports Illustrated earlier this yr:
“For me it’s really all takeaway-based. If I get the primary half of the takeaway in a great place it kind of sets me up.”
Whereas in Rickie’s old takeaway the clubhead would transfer outdoors, he wants the membership to really feel more “connected” to his physique, so it tracks parallel to his goal line. From there, as a substitute of rolling the membership open and around him like in his outdated swing, Rickie wants to move the membership more vertically up, towards the sky. This lands his proper arm in a better spot on the prime of his backswing, which helps his arms monitor more in entrance of his physique on the method in which down.
Put simply, Rickie needs his golf swing to maneuver extra up and down, and fewer around. That creates, in Rickie’s own phrases, “cleaner lines” in his golf swing for extra consistency.
The problem nows taking that change from the range, to the course. It doesn’t all the time really feel comfy, Rickie says, but it’s getting higher and higher.
It’s a course of we can all relate to. Overriding some of your pure tendencies doesn’t occur overnight, and requires plenty of hard work. And with a little extra time, it won’t be lengthy until Rickie takes his range swing to the golf course, and enjoys some nice results due to it.