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Retract the shoulder not the elbow

Golfers who struggle with a chicken wing often avoid using the shoulder correctly and bend the elbow instead. Training some slow-motion follow-through movements can help you feel what it's like to keep the left arm straight into the follow-through. You may also experience more body rotation in order to keep the lead arm straight. At first, this movement can feel "stiff" but with some practice it will feel more stable, connected, and controlled. This likely helps with better ground contact and face control for golfers who battle the chicken wing.

Tags: Chicken Wing, Follow Through, Drill

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This drill is retract the lead shoulder, not the lead elbow.

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So this is a drill to help with golfers who tend to have more of a chicken wing or more

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of a really strong arm shoulder pull on the way through.

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So that will typically look like on the way through, the elbow is going to bend the wrist

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might re-hinge or it might not, but the arc narrow is very quickly on the way through.

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That can be a company of variety of different pivot issues, but what it almost always does

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is it causes the club face to close and the path to get left.

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So you'll hit a lot of pull shots and you'll tend to hit a lot of thin fat shots.

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You'll have some contact issues and oftentimes you'll have a lot of toe shots because you're

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narrowing everything.

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So to get used to this arm staying straight, we're going to work on some shoulder blade retractions.

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I'm going to turn this way so that you can kind of see from this perspective here.

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So now I'm just going to practice reaching my shoulder blade and then retracting my shoulder blade.

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And I want to do it, that was a bad one where the elbow bent.

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I want to do it without bending the elbow and without moving my spine.

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So I don't want to do this.

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They're getting initiation or getting momentum from the body.

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So I'm going to try to not move my body.

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I could actually have some players do it seated at first.

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And then I'm just feeling that shoulder blade retract.

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Now the advanced version I'm going to add a little thumb pointing to it as I'm retracting like that.

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So now what I'm going to try to do, I've got this feeling of the shoulder blade retracting

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all that elbow stays straight.

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Now I'm going to do it wall the thumb points and I'm going to add some body rotation.

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So that's going to help me get into this L position.

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Now it's not going to be retracted maybe as much as I possibly can so that the shoulder blades are

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squeezing all the way into the spine.

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But it's just moving from a place where I've been kind of reaching,

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to pulling back more towards the neutral or a little bit past that.

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My big emphasis there is I don't want you to feel like it's the maximum shoulder squeeze that you

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could do.

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It's just more of learning to move the shoulder without moving the elbow.

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Okay, so now let's demonstrate few working through kind of some tenditudes and into four swings.

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I'm going to focus on this elbow staying straight.

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I'll often have golfers do this as a single arm if they're okay with doing a left arm

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only swing.

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So now I'm going to do a 9-3 where I focus on that shoulder pulling, but the elbow staying

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straight and the thumb pointing out.

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So it's a combo movement.

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We'll do another one there.

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That was a pretty good one.

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And then I'll have them put the trail arm on and they'll usually say, wow it feels like I got a ton of

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width, but hopefully that shoulder pull helps it feel like it's somewhat connected or stable.

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So now we'll do both hands on the club trying to get kind of a similar feel.

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Kind of like that.

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And this is just emphasizing that the shoulder can move while the elbow stays straight.

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If you are used to having more of a chicken wing pattern, then oftentimes even on the short ones,

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you will want to pull the arms in or pull on the grip.

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Usually to throw the club head down at the ball, kind of like that.

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So this gets much more quiet or even stiff feeling in the arms.

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While more of the movement is happening in the body pivot or in the hips and in the shoulder blade.

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So we can add more and more speed to it until we get it closer to the full swing.

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So let's do a 10 to 2.

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Kind of feeling there.

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And once you get past, I usually say chest height.

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Then you're going to have some arm or some elbow bend.

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But the goal, the intention here is that the shoulder is moving

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independent of the elbow bend.

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So I'll try to do a better 10 to 2 where I keep that going even later.

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So there, kept it all the way up until hands were pretty close to the head height.

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I don't think I could have gone into much more of a finish without letting the elbow bend a little bit there.

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So this is a really powerful drill for golfers who tend to have more of that arm pull.

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That could either be more of a chicken wing issue or that could be more of a stall issue where the body

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appears to stop it impact. This drill is really helpful for smoothing out and keeping with

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during the release and into the follow-through.

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