Once You Understand This Concept The Golf Swing Becomes Effortless

So last week out here in Southern California, we had a great time at our golf school. I had six amateur golfers. Interestingly enough, they all had the same problem in their golf swing. At some point during the motion, whether it was back or down or through, they broke the swing plane. And we all know what swing plane means. Ben Hogan was the first person that ever talked about it, but I guarantee you've not understood it like this. Once they actually understood what the laws of swing plane mean, we saw some huge transformations in their golf game. Real quick, before we get into it, if this is your first time watching a Zach Allen golf video, please consider subscribing. We put out videos like this every week that are helping thousands of golfers. Let's go ahead and jump into it. So one of Ben Hogan's biggest breakthroughs was the visualization of swing plane. Like before him and Five Fundamentals of Golf, the book that he wrote, his second book, was him picturing exactly what swing plane looks like. But today it's taught differently. We think more about this shaft plane at address. But the way he visualized swing plane, he put the constraints of the plane above him, so you had to stay below. So he visualized a plane of glass, which I've kind of rudely constructed here, with his head sticking through the middle. And that's really important because now I've got to stay below this plane the entire time to the top, down, and then exiting through. Which is very different than what we see on a daily basis of people breaking the plane as they go back, going back, breaking the plane up here at the top, or breaking the plane as they start down. The way that he described it, he said, my left arm swings across my chest on the backswing. Most people, they think the secret is in the right arm, but in his very own words, he's like, it's my left arm that does it. I think part of why it's really gotten not gotten very much attention is people thought he had a flat golf swing. When you look at these videos, he's 5'7". He wrote a book called Power Golf, so he still hit it extremely long. But people said he had a flat golf swing. And when Hogan would hear that, his quote was, the flatter my swing gets, the fatter my wallet gets. Okay, so that swing plane and him staying below this imaginary plane of glass is really part of why he had that machine-like consistency. And it's something that I'm trying to work with so many golfers on a daily basis, and even in my own golf swing. You'll see this video of me hitting driver, my arms get too high, and then I start to pull my arms down. You'll see a lot of the tension that's happening there in my lead arm. That's getting my swing to be a little too arm dominant. We want the golf swing to be a pivoting motion with the club swinging freely around our body, where there's no pulling or tugging with the arms. Okay, whether it's pulling this way and breaking the plane out there, or pulling this way and breaking the plane up here. It's something where we should not be using our arms in that fashion. So when you hop in this swing plane, the first thing that I kind of start to feel is my left arm, right from here back to the top, it does swing across my chest, and my right arm folds very nicely. Okay, most people think the secret is in your right arm, but actually a lot of it is in your left arm swinging across your chest to the top, which Hogan talked about quite a bit. Now as I come down and through, you can see the club is just perfectly slotted, because I'm in such a good spot at the top. If I break this plane, I've got to do a lot of rerouting and fixing to even really have a chance to hit a great shot. So what I like to have a lot of golfers do is a very simple drill to get that feeling. You could always put some long alignment sticks in the ground and get underneath it, keep your swing underneath it back and through. I'll do that from time to time, but if you don't, one of the best things you can do is first set up to a ball, stand straight up. So I've gone from my posture, I've just gone straight up and down, you fold your trail arm to a 90 degree angle, my left arm and shaft are at a 90 degree angle. Now the club just works around my body in a circle, my left arm swings across my chest. This doesn't look like a golf swing yet, until I just bow forward. Now I'm on a perfect plane to hit this shot. So you can really get a sense there of exactly how the arms swing in the golf swing. We're not pulling this way, we're not lifting up, our elbows are not separating like that, this left arm is just going right around us in a circle. That's what allows the golf swing to be more centrifugal or more of a circular motion. We're making this circle around our spine angle. The only difference from here is just me bending forward some. Now the golf swing hits the ground, but I'm still not breaking those principles of getting my arms away from me and starting to pull and tug. In order for this arm to move its fastest, it needs to be on or below the plane of my shoulders. As soon as it starts to get up here, I'm going to start to pull my arms down. And that's when we get that dominant swing that we see so often. We get these steep angle of attacks, we get left club pass, we get all those things that feel powerful, but they're really not powerful at all. The power comes from moving your body and having the club follow, and then orbit and release. That's kind of an intermediate to a slightly advanced drill, but boy does it give you the feeling of the club orbiting in a nice circular fashion around your body. So different for so many golfers. A little lower hanging fruit drill would just be to go cack-handed or cross-handed. So for me, right now my left arm is below my right hand, and you can just make practice swings at first, but you will for sure feel your left arm swing across your chest. I feel a good athletic tension underneath my lead arm, and then I feel my right arm just externally rotated in a nice stretch. If you're really brave, I've seen Brooks Koepka, Matt Fitzpatrick, I've seen a number of different tour players that hit balls like this. We'll try and hit one. So remember the goal of these is I'm not hitting either one very hard, I'm just trying to assimilate a feel that I can eventually take back to my normal grip and setup and feel right where that club is supposed to be. And it's definitely going to be down, not breaking this plane of glass. So I'm hoping a lot of the golfers that have worked with this in person have seen some huge breakthroughs in terms of just shallowing out their golf swing, returning the club to a consistent angle at impact. I've seen much better driving of the ball. Same types of things that Hogan was talking about in terms of the breakthrough once he visualized this plane and staying underneath it. I think the same thing would happen to your game. If these tips help you out, or if you have any questions, get in the comments and let me know. Other than that, don't forget to like or subscribe. If my videos have helped you out in the past, I love doing them for you. Give me a little pump up though. I'd love to see it. Other than that, I'll see you guys next video. Have a fantastic week.