Shane Lowry - 2 Keys to lag

We are back with this week's tour analysis on the 2015 WGC-Bridgestone Invitational champion, Irishman Shane Lowry. Congratulations to Shane for picking up a big win this past weekend. This week we are going to be focusing in on lag. I'm going to be showing you guys a checkpoint that you're going to be looking for in your back swing that in turn is going to lead to another checkpoint in your down swing that's going to help you get a lot more lag and a lot more speed down in the hitting area.

                Okay, guys. As I said in the opener, we're going to be focusing in on a couple of checkpoints this week in the back swing and in the down swing that are going to help you understand if you're doing things properly in your down swing sequence to in turn help you build more lag into your swing, which you can then eventually turn into more speed down at the bottom. What what we're going to be looking for here ... This is a good tool to use on the site, guys. This is the self analysis tab. You can load in swings, face on and down the line. You can load as many swings as you want. You can compare them to our model swings, or you can just do some simple analysis, like I'm doing here today. This is a really valuable tool for those of you guys that are getting to work on your swing here.

                What I'm going to do here, I'm going to draw a few lines here. These lines will make a little bit more sense as I go further into the review. This is just one of these angle tools that we on the site. You can see the number changing. Now I've got it zeroed out. You can see that his foot line here, the camera's actually pretty level to the ground. When we start to look at this first number what we're going to be looking for ... Now his lead arm is now parallel to the ground. You can see how these numbers start to change. Okay. We're going to get it back to zero. We're going to just assume that that's perfectly parallel to the ground at this point.

                Now, the first checkpoint that we're going to be looking for in your gulf swing is this one right here, is the position of the club shaft as we get the lead arm parallel to the ground. You can see that were almost at a 90 degree angle here, almost a perfect 90 degree angle. The club shaft, we don't have an excessive amount of wrist set. We don't have the club facing out in this direction. We want to look at when the lead arm is about parallel to the ground. We want to have roughly a 90 degree angle between the club shaft and the forearm. All right?

                I can move back down here into a takeaway position, and you can see when the club shaft is parallel to the ground there's just enough wrist set just to support it. Okay? That's a very, very good point here is that you don't want to have a ton of set here. You don't want to see 90 degrees of angle when your hands are just outside your trail thigh. That's one of the big misnomers of the golf swing is that a lot of instructors tell you to set your wrist very early, but that's getting the golf club to move a good amount of distance, and it's getting your wrist and your arms to be the first thing that are loading up. Your goal is that you want to load your body up first. You want to get things moving in the right direction. You want to start to build up some power. Then eventually you're going to transfer that into some speed.

                At the completed checkpoint what you're going to be looking for, or completed part of the takeaway, I'm sorry, is you're going to be looking for the club shaft to remain parallel to the ground, so that's just enough wrist set here just to support the club. If we didn't have any wrist set here, the club would be kind of lagging down in here, and it would feel a little bit uncomfortable. This wrist set, it's sort of a natural kind of an occurrence, but again, if you've noticed on camera that you've had too much or you have too little, then try your best to use this as a checkpoint to get it pretty parallel to the ground.

                Then as you're working up into the top part of your golf swing by rotating more and adding a little bit of flexion, now as you start to get your lead arm here parallel to the ground you want to have about 90 degrees of set here. Okay? You want the club shaft to be more vertical. Again, you don't want to see much more than this. If you see that you have a ton of wrist set here, to where you've got this angle's now down to 45 degrees, then you're going to run the risk of starting to throw the club very early. What I mean there is that, going back to loading up muscle groups, if you load up a muscle group to its fullest range of motion, it's going to want to try and fire very early. All right?

                Plus, the big thing is that if we save ourself some room in our wrists and we don't get them fully set or fully cocked, you're going to have some space to create some down cock when you start to shift your weight. Now, that's providing that you keep your wrists very supple and very relaxed. That's what he does very well here. You're going to see this move now. As he starts to finish his golf swing you're going to see his wrists continue to set just a little bit more. He's going to get them almost fully maxed out here, but you can see his weight is starting to shift over to his lead side here. You can see the weight starting to shift over to the lead side.

                As he's going to start to sit left and he's going to get his lead arm back to parallel to the ground you're going to see a big increase in angle here, so between the club shaft and ... Let's actually measure it, so you guys can see the difference now. Let me get that off the screen for us. We'll measure it. This is now the new angle. You can see now we're down to about 43 degrees, so less than half of where we were when we were going in the back swing. This is now we've increased the angle. The hands and arms are starting to be pulled down into the hitting area by the lower body. This is a great way to start to build lag into your golf swing is that understanding where you need to have the positions of the golf club early on in the swing, and not have things over done, and allow yourself to be able to increase the amount of angle on the way down with weight shift and supple wrists.

                We've got a great video on the website that can help you out with that, guys. It's actually called The Down Cock and Pump Drill. I know a lot of you have probably heard me talk about that. It's not a drill that I want you guys to over cook. You still need to have a lot of those things in place. If you haven't seen the Using the Wrists Effectively and Efficiently video, that's another good video that can give you some of the terminology that I talk about in some of these analysis. These videos are going to be over here to the right hand side of the video player on the website. Just go ahead and click the recommended videos tab. Those will all populate.

                Then Move Three, The Downswing. Those three videos together are going to give you a very good you understanding on how you're going to build a very sharp looking angle right here, I'm sorry, like Shane Lowry has done. In turn he bombs a golf ball. He was averaging well over 300 yards this past weekend at Firestone. Congratulations to him again for a big victory. Also, I wanted to point out one thing I found funny when I was loading this video. I know that a lot of us have been to golf events in the past, and they always tell us to put the cameras away, but this guy back here got my attention. You can see that he was told to put his cameras away and sit down, and he waits, and then he takes a picture. It's funny to see some of these people, how excited they are to see some of these professionals. Anyways, that's are game plan this week is we're going to be focusing in on lag.

                Now you've got a couple of good checkpoints that you can use. You're going to focus on making sure that you've got enough set at the takeaway just to keep it supported to where it's parallel to the ground. You are going to, when you see your lead arm getting to about parallel to the ground, you're going to make sure that you've got about 90 degrees of angle there between the club shaft and the forearm. Then you're going to allow for a little bit more set as you start to work, and complete your back swing, and allow your transition to create more angle to start your downswing, and you'll be well on your way to having more lag and more speed than you ever have before. All right, guys. Get out there, put it to use, and make it a great day.