Early Extension Overview
Early extension in a golf swing can be categorized in the following ways:
- Excessive drive from the lower body
- Pushing trail leg in toward the golf ball
- Standing up to avoid hitting the ground
- Common way of generating force in other sports
- Weight moving into the toes during the downswing
- A way to avoid hitting the ground with a scoop release
The frustrations of early extension
Early extension is one of the more frustrating of the swing patterns because of the inherent inconsistency built into it. Golfers who struggle with inconsistency almost always complain about having trouble making solid contact with irons off of the fairway, and in particular frequently struggle with wedges. The pattern is characterized by a standing up of the body or a movement of the hips in toward the golf ball during the downswing. This movement is accompanied by an early release of the arms and hands. Golfers who early extend will frequently describe themselves as a “picker” style of golfer. There are a number of issues with this problem that make it difficult to solve and we will attack them here one by one.
Power- for many golfers who early extend, doing so makes them feel powerful and makes them feel like they are able to hit the ball hard. This is because a forward thrust of your hips/pelvis is a movement associated with jumping and deadlifting (picking up a heavy object off the ground). These two movements are very explosive and powerful for the average person. If this is the reason that you early extend, then the toughest battle will be learning to feel rotational speed as a dominant force producer.
Not hit it fat- for many golfers, the first few swings are a scary thing. With lack of using the body, it’s hard to create a flat enough swing plane. So if they are tentative, and just used their arms, then the ground can be quite a shocking thing to hit.
Standing up will prevent you from hitting the ground and spare your body the shock and jolt especially if the timing of your arm straightening is off.
Pushing through the ground- This can be a third barrier that is similar to the power production thing. When you early extend, you push through your feel like you are sprinting, or jumping. That means you push the ground away from the ball and you end up with more of your weight up toward your toes. If you watch the feet of most tour pros, you will see that they tend to work their way more toward the heel. In order to do this, you are going to feel like you push the ground toward the golf ball. I have had a number of players do this movements and say, “how do you create power like that?” This is usually more of a mental barrier to a feeling of power because if you do this, the club speed will rarely go down significantly, and often times, it will go up even though it doesn’t “feel” like it.
Path- Early extension is one of the best ways to move the path of the club out to the right. Almost every golfer that I've ever seen who struggles with hooking the ball has the early extension tendency. Frequently, early extension is a support move for an overly steep arm motion during transition.
Face- Early extension is one of the fastest ways to get the clubface to rotate through impact. If your clubface is open at shaft parallel to the ground, then you will almost always use some form of early extension to get the face to close quickly down at the bottom of the arc.
For information on how to fix your early extension, check out the pro vs am analysis video and see which pattern best matches your swing.
Early extension in a golf swing can be categorized in the following ways:
- Excessive drive from the lower body
- Pushing trail leg in toward the golf ball
- Standing up to avoid hitting the ground
- Common way of generating force in other sports
- Weight moving into the toes during the downswing
- A way to avoid hitting the ground with a scoop release
The frustrations of early extension
Early extension is one of the more frustrating of the swing patterns because of the inherent inconsistency built into it. Golfers who struggle with inconsistency almost always complain about having trouble making solid contact with irons off of the fairway, and in particular frequently struggle with wedges. The pattern is characterized by a standing up of the body or a movement of the hips in toward the golf ball during the downswing. This movement is accompanied by an early release of the arms and hands. Golfers who early extend will frequently describe themselves as a “picker” style of golfer. There are a number of issues with this problem that make it difficult to solve and we will attack them here one by one.
Power- for many golfers who early extend, doing so makes them feel powerful and makes them feel like they are able to hit the ball hard. This is because a forward thrust of your hips/pelvis is a movement associated with jumping and deadlifting (picking up a heavy object off the ground). These two movements are very explosive and powerful for the average person. If this is the reason that you early extend, then the toughest battle will be learning to feel rotational speed as a dominant force producer.
Not hit it fat- for many golfers, the first few swings are a scary thing. With lack of using the body, it’s hard to create a flat enough swing plane. So if they are tentative, and just used their arms, then the ground can be quite a shocking thing to hit.
Standing up will prevent you from hitting the ground and spare your body the shock and jolt especially if the timing of your arm straightening is off.
Pushing through the ground- This can be a third barrier that is similar to the power production thing. When you early extend, you push through your feel like you are sprinting, or jumping. That means you push the ground away from the ball and you end up with more of your weight up toward your toes. If you watch the feet of most tour pros, you will see that they tend to work their way more toward the heel. In order to do this, you are going to feel like you push the ground toward the golf ball. I have had a number of players do this movements and say, “how do you create power like that?” This is usually more of a mental barrier to a feeling of power because if you do this, the club speed will rarely go down significantly, and often times, it will go up even though it doesn’t “feel” like it.
Path- Early extension is one of the best ways to move the path of the club out to the right. Almost every golfer that I've ever seen who struggles with hooking the ball has the early extension tendency. Frequently, early extension is a support move for an overly steep arm motion during transition.
Face- Early extension is one of the fastest ways to get the clubface to rotate through impact. If your clubface is open at shaft parallel to the ground, then you will almost always use some form of early extension to get the face to close quickly down at the bottom of the arc.
For information on how to fix your early extension, check out the pro vs am analysis video and see which pattern best matches your swing.
Video Transcript
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In this concept video, we're going to discuss the early extension swing pattern
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.
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Now, early extension is one of the most common and kind of pervasive swing
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patterns, both
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with professionals as well as amateurs.
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We typically use video to define it, or how we define it on video, is basically
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losing
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this spine angle on the downswing.
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So the loss of posture was losing it on the backswing, early extension is
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losing it on
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the downswing.
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It's typically characterized by a thrust of the pelvis in towards the golf ball
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or a
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backing up of the upper body away from the golf ball in excess.
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So it's a little bit of a vague term because most golfers go into extension of
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the spine,
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but early extension is typically going to happen either early or very, very
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quickly.
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Later during transition, we talk about that left shoulder down regaining your
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flex before
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you go into this right side bend with extension.
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Early extenders will typically just, either from the top of the swing or early
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in the
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downswing, start going into this extension move.
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The problem with early extension is that movement by itself does three really
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good things for
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a lot of players.
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Helps create speed, it helps create a shallowness to their path, and it helps
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to square the club
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face.
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So let's talk about those so that you understand this pattern a little bit
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better.
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A lot of other sports and a lot of other activities, like if I'm pushing, if I
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'm running,
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I'm going to go from my heels to my toes and I'm going to go this way.
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I'm going to go heels to toes, like if I was jumping, if I was lots of other
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sports would
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allow me or encourage me to have my force going that way.
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Well, if I stayed in my posture and I went heel to toe, I would fall over.
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So a writing mechanism is going to be, as I go in towards my toes, I'm going to
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stand
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up.
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So a lot of golfers who have their weight moving in towards their toes, the
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stand up move helps
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balance that back out.
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Also some of the most powerful movements that we do, one would be kind of the
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vertical jump.
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Another would be a deadlift, like if I was lifting a really heavy suitcase, I'm
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going
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to get a lot of speed or a lot of power to lift it just from extending my hips
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and my
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lower back.
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So this movement helps create speed, mostly in the legs, allows for speed in
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the shoulders,
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but weakens the ability to create speed in my trunk, because it's very hard to
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create
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kind of some of this oblique rotation while I'm going backward.
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It would really make it hard to make solid contact.
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So from a power perspective, it's an overuse of the lower body, possibly an
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overuse of
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the arms, but an underuse or an underuse of your core and your rotational
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muscles.
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So that would be power.
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Now let's look at path.
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This early extension move, the more that I stand up and get vertical, the more
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that
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the path of the club is going to swing out in front of me, kind of like if I
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was playing
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baseball, it wouldn't make a whole lot of sense to set up to the ball like so.
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So because the golf ball is on the ground, I'm going to be bent forward from my
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hips
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and from my spine slightly.
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If I stand up, that will help me bring the club from the inside, or if I have
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the tendency
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to cast and get outside or have an upper body dominate its wing where I tend to
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come over
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the top, this early extension will help shallow it out so that it's not as
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severe outside
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it, so it can be a good way of helping your brain organize this path and when
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you do it
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too much, it tends to get it too much into out.
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So the path, if I'm not doing the right shallowness with my arms, if I'm not
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doing the right stuff
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with my body, I can fake it and I can do this stand up move to quickly create a
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shallow path
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from the inside.
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And thirdly, is early extension helps to close the club face.
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So the more that I get everything to kind of line up like so, you can see that
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that's
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going to cause this club face to get very, very vertical.
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So even if I have the club face in a very open position, kind of like so, when
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I stand
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up, that's going to cause the club face to close very, very quickly.
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Some of the highest rates of club rotation that I've seen at impact are with
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golfers
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who do this late early extension.
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So the problem with early extension helps create speed, it helps create a
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shallow path
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and it helps close the club face.
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If you are going to try to get out of early extension and learn how to do it a
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little
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bit more effectively, there's a couple of things you're going to have to combat
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.
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First, because of all this force going in because it's kind of thrusting
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jumping force,
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to not early extend for most golfers feels very weak at first, doesn't feel
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like you're
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going to create nearly as much speed, but your impact alignments will be better
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until
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you'll transfer more of that speed to the golf ball.
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Secondly, you're going to have to get used to being closer to the golf ball.
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What I mean by that is if I'm set up to the golf ball, kind of like so, if I'm
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set up
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to the golf ball and you were just measuring the distance between my shirt
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buttons and
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the golf ball, if I were to early extend, that increases the distance between
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my shirt
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buttons and the golf ball.
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Well, as this increases, you can see that if I take my normal grip, now, let's
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imagine
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that's kind of my early extension position, there is absolutely no way I can
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get my hands
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ahead because I've taken up all the slack because my arms are straight and my
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body
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is straight.
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If I was to bring myself closer to the ground, so I'll exaggerate it and get
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real close to
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the ground, now I can bring my hands way ahead.
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Unfortunately, if I did nothing else, this club is just going to stick in the
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ground
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and so that's not going to work either.
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What's going to happen and what I teach in the early extension section and in
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transition
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is how to create some of these new shallows because the two things that you're
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going to
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have to do is you're going to have to learn how to create more of the shallow
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from kind
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of axis tilt or from hip slide and you're going to have to learn how to square
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the club
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face sooner.
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Now, the early extension pattern by itself is characteristic of picking the
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golf ball,
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trouble with wedges, typically battles hooks and snap hooks and big blocks.
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Because an early extender typically already has the fear pattern of hitting a
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hook and
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usually if you've struggled with hitting massive hooks, almost 100% of time
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early extension
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is at least a big part of the reason why you're hitting hooks.
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To tell an early extender that you need to square the club face sooner is
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really, really
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scary because they feel like they're just going to hit more hooks but here's
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why you
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have to do that.
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The more that I get my handle ahead, the more that it opens up the club face or
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another
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way of saying it, the more that I get the handle ahead of my body, the more it
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delays
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how close the club face is at impact.
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So while during this transition, I'm trying to close the club face because I'm
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closer
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to a golf ball and can get my hands ahead more, it's going to cancel it out and
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it's
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going to effectively prevent you from hitting hooks.
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But if you were to close the club face and then stand up and now the shaft is
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vertical,
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that club face is going to be really, really close and you're going to hit
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massive, massive
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pull hooks.
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So there's a little bit of this dance of trying to figure out how to square the
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club face,
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how to create speed and how to re-manage that shallowness if you're going to
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take out this
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early extension, which I think is in the long run, having too much early
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extension to rapid
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early extension is just one of the biggest recipes for inconsistency.
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And so I recommend, if you have the time to work on it, to improve your ability
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to early
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extend, because it'll help you a lot with your consistency and overall
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enjoyment of the game.
Have questions?
Ask Mulligan for helpEarly Extension Overview
Early extension in a golf swing can be categorized in the following ways:
- Excessive drive from the lower body
- Pushing trail leg in toward the golf ball
- Standing up to avoid hitting the ground
- Common way of generating force in other sports
- Weight moving into the toes during the downswing
- A way to avoid hitting the ground with a scoop release
The frustrations of early extension
Early extension is one of the more frustrating of the swing patterns because of the inherent inconsistency built into it. Golfers who struggle with inconsistency almost always complain about having trouble making solid contact with irons off of the fairway, and in particular frequently struggle with wedges. The pattern is characterized by a standing up of the body or a movement of the hips in toward the golf ball during the downswing. This movement is accompanied by an early release of the arms and hands. Golfers who early extend will frequently describe themselves as a “picker” style of golfer. There are a number of issues with this problem that make it difficult to solve and we will attack them here one by one.
Power- for many golfers who early extend, doing so makes them feel powerful and makes them feel like they are able to hit the ball hard. This is because a forward thrust of your hips/pelvis is a movement associated with jumping and deadlifting (picking up a heavy object off the ground). These two movements are very explosive and powerful for the average person. If this is the reason that you early extend, then the toughest battle will be learning to feel rotational speed as a dominant force producer.
Not hit it fat- for many golfers, the first few swings are a scary thing. With lack of using the body, it’s hard to create a flat enough swing plane. So if they are tentative, and just used their arms, then the ground can be quite a shocking thing to hit.
Standing up will prevent you from hitting the ground and spare your body the shock and jolt especially if the timing of your arm straightening is off.
Pushing through the ground- This can be a third barrier that is similar to the power production thing. When you early extend, you push through your feel like you are sprinting, or jumping. That means you push the ground away from the ball and you end up with more of your weight up toward your toes. If you watch the feet of most tour pros, you will see that they tend to work their way more toward the heel. In order to do this, you are going to feel like you push the ground toward the golf ball. I have had a number of players do this movements and say, “how do you create power like that?” This is usually more of a mental barrier to a feeling of power because if you do this, the club speed will rarely go down significantly, and often times, it will go up even though it doesn’t “feel” like it.
Path- Early extension is one of the best ways to move the path of the club out to the right. Almost every golfer that I've ever seen who struggles with hooking the ball has the early extension tendency. Frequently, early extension is a support move for an overly steep arm motion during transition.
Face- Early extension is one of the fastest ways to get the clubface to rotate through impact. If your clubface is open at shaft parallel to the ground, then you will almost always use some form of early extension to get the face to close quickly down at the bottom of the arc.
For information on how to fix your early extension, check out the pro vs am analysis video and see which pattern best matches your swing.
Early extension in a golf swing can be categorized in the following ways:
- Excessive drive from the lower body
- Pushing trail leg in toward the golf ball
- Standing up to avoid hitting the ground
- Common way of generating force in other sports
- Weight moving into the toes during the downswing
- A way to avoid hitting the ground with a scoop release
The frustrations of early extension
Early extension is one of the more frustrating of the swing patterns because of the inherent inconsistency built into it. Golfers who struggle with inconsistency almost always complain about having trouble making solid contact with irons off of the fairway, and in particular frequently struggle with wedges. The pattern is characterized by a standing up of the body or a movement of the hips in toward the golf ball during the downswing. This movement is accompanied by an early release of the arms and hands. Golfers who early extend will frequently describe themselves as a “picker” style of golfer. There are a number of issues with this problem that make it difficult to solve and we will attack them here one by one.
Power- for many golfers who early extend, doing so makes them feel powerful and makes them feel like they are able to hit the ball hard. This is because a forward thrust of your hips/pelvis is a movement associated with jumping and deadlifting (picking up a heavy object off the ground). These two movements are very explosive and powerful for the average person. If this is the reason that you early extend, then the toughest battle will be learning to feel rotational speed as a dominant force producer.
Not hit it fat- for many golfers, the first few swings are a scary thing. With lack of using the body, it’s hard to create a flat enough swing plane. So if they are tentative, and just used their arms, then the ground can be quite a shocking thing to hit.
Standing up will prevent you from hitting the ground and spare your body the shock and jolt especially if the timing of your arm straightening is off.
Pushing through the ground- This can be a third barrier that is similar to the power production thing. When you early extend, you push through your feel like you are sprinting, or jumping. That means you push the ground away from the ball and you end up with more of your weight up toward your toes. If you watch the feet of most tour pros, you will see that they tend to work their way more toward the heel. In order to do this, you are going to feel like you push the ground toward the golf ball. I have had a number of players do this movements and say, “how do you create power like that?” This is usually more of a mental barrier to a feeling of power because if you do this, the club speed will rarely go down significantly, and often times, it will go up even though it doesn’t “feel” like it.
Path- Early extension is one of the best ways to move the path of the club out to the right. Almost every golfer that I've ever seen who struggles with hooking the ball has the early extension tendency. Frequently, early extension is a support move for an overly steep arm motion during transition.
Face- Early extension is one of the fastest ways to get the clubface to rotate through impact. If your clubface is open at shaft parallel to the ground, then you will almost always use some form of early extension to get the face to close quickly down at the bottom of the arc.
For information on how to fix your early extension, check out the pro vs am analysis video and see which pattern best matches your swing.
Video Transcript
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In this concept video, we're going to discuss the early extension swing pattern
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.
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Now, early extension is one of the most common and kind of pervasive swing
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patterns, both
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with professionals as well as amateurs.
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We typically use video to define it, or how we define it on video, is basically
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losing
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this spine angle on the downswing.
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So the loss of posture was losing it on the backswing, early extension is
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losing it on
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the downswing.
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It's typically characterized by a thrust of the pelvis in towards the golf ball
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or a
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backing up of the upper body away from the golf ball in excess.
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So it's a little bit of a vague term because most golfers go into extension of
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the spine,
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but early extension is typically going to happen either early or very, very
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quickly.
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Later during transition, we talk about that left shoulder down regaining your
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flex before
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you go into this right side bend with extension.
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Early extenders will typically just, either from the top of the swing or early
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in the
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downswing, start going into this extension move.
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The problem with early extension is that movement by itself does three really
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good things for
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a lot of players.
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Helps create speed, it helps create a shallowness to their path, and it helps
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to square the club
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face.
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So let's talk about those so that you understand this pattern a little bit
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better.
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A lot of other sports and a lot of other activities, like if I'm pushing, if I
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'm running,
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I'm going to go from my heels to my toes and I'm going to go this way.
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I'm going to go heels to toes, like if I was jumping, if I was lots of other
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sports would
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allow me or encourage me to have my force going that way.
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Well, if I stayed in my posture and I went heel to toe, I would fall over.
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So a writing mechanism is going to be, as I go in towards my toes, I'm going to
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stand
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up.
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So a lot of golfers who have their weight moving in towards their toes, the
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stand up move helps
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balance that back out.
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Also some of the most powerful movements that we do, one would be kind of the
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vertical jump.
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Another would be a deadlift, like if I was lifting a really heavy suitcase, I'm
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going
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to get a lot of speed or a lot of power to lift it just from extending my hips
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and my
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lower back.
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So this movement helps create speed, mostly in the legs, allows for speed in
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the shoulders,
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but weakens the ability to create speed in my trunk, because it's very hard to
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create
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kind of some of this oblique rotation while I'm going backward.
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It would really make it hard to make solid contact.
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So from a power perspective, it's an overuse of the lower body, possibly an
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overuse of
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the arms, but an underuse or an underuse of your core and your rotational
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muscles.
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So that would be power.
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Now let's look at path.
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This early extension move, the more that I stand up and get vertical, the more
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that
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the path of the club is going to swing out in front of me, kind of like if I
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was playing
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baseball, it wouldn't make a whole lot of sense to set up to the ball like so.
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So because the golf ball is on the ground, I'm going to be bent forward from my
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hips
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and from my spine slightly.
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If I stand up, that will help me bring the club from the inside, or if I have
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the tendency
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to cast and get outside or have an upper body dominate its wing where I tend to
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come over
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the top, this early extension will help shallow it out so that it's not as
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severe outside
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it, so it can be a good way of helping your brain organize this path and when
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you do it
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too much, it tends to get it too much into out.
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So the path, if I'm not doing the right shallowness with my arms, if I'm not
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doing the right stuff
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with my body, I can fake it and I can do this stand up move to quickly create a
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shallow path
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from the inside.
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And thirdly, is early extension helps to close the club face.
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So the more that I get everything to kind of line up like so, you can see that
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that's
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going to cause this club face to get very, very vertical.
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So even if I have the club face in a very open position, kind of like so, when
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I stand
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up, that's going to cause the club face to close very, very quickly.
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Some of the highest rates of club rotation that I've seen at impact are with
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golfers
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who do this late early extension.
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So the problem with early extension helps create speed, it helps create a
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shallow path
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and it helps close the club face.
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If you are going to try to get out of early extension and learn how to do it a
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little
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bit more effectively, there's a couple of things you're going to have to combat
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.
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First, because of all this force going in because it's kind of thrusting
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jumping force,
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to not early extend for most golfers feels very weak at first, doesn't feel
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like you're
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going to create nearly as much speed, but your impact alignments will be better
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until
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you'll transfer more of that speed to the golf ball.
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Secondly, you're going to have to get used to being closer to the golf ball.
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What I mean by that is if I'm set up to the golf ball, kind of like so, if I'm
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set up
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to the golf ball and you were just measuring the distance between my shirt
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buttons and
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the golf ball, if I were to early extend, that increases the distance between
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my shirt
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buttons and the golf ball.
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Well, as this increases, you can see that if I take my normal grip, now, let's
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imagine
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that's kind of my early extension position, there is absolutely no way I can
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get my hands
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ahead because I've taken up all the slack because my arms are straight and my
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body
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is straight.
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If I was to bring myself closer to the ground, so I'll exaggerate it and get
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real close to
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the ground, now I can bring my hands way ahead.
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Unfortunately, if I did nothing else, this club is just going to stick in the
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ground
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and so that's not going to work either.
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What's going to happen and what I teach in the early extension section and in
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transition
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is how to create some of these new shallows because the two things that you're
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going to
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have to do is you're going to have to learn how to create more of the shallow
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from kind
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of axis tilt or from hip slide and you're going to have to learn how to square
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the club
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face sooner.
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Now, the early extension pattern by itself is characteristic of picking the
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golf ball,
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trouble with wedges, typically battles hooks and snap hooks and big blocks.
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Because an early extender typically already has the fear pattern of hitting a
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hook and
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usually if you've struggled with hitting massive hooks, almost 100% of time
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early extension
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is at least a big part of the reason why you're hitting hooks.
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To tell an early extender that you need to square the club face sooner is
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really, really
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scary because they feel like they're just going to hit more hooks but here's
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why you
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have to do that.
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The more that I get my handle ahead, the more that it opens up the club face or
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another
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way of saying it, the more that I get the handle ahead of my body, the more it
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delays
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how close the club face is at impact.
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So while during this transition, I'm trying to close the club face because I'm
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closer
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to a golf ball and can get my hands ahead more, it's going to cancel it out and
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it's
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going to effectively prevent you from hitting hooks.
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But if you were to close the club face and then stand up and now the shaft is
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vertical,
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that club face is going to be really, really close and you're going to hit
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massive, massive
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pull hooks.
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So there's a little bit of this dance of trying to figure out how to square the
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club face,
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how to create speed and how to re-manage that shallowness if you're going to
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take out this
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early extension, which I think is in the long run, having too much early
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extension to rapid
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early extension is just one of the biggest recipes for inconsistency.
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And so I recommend, if you have the time to work on it, to improve your ability
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to early
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extend, because it'll help you a lot with your consistency and overall
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enjoyment of the game.
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