One Armed Drills Are Some of the Most Important

Being stuck at home during the Coronavirus pandemic is giving me time to write and reflect on some of the drills that both Danny and I feel are the most helpful when you’re practicing your “Gravity” Golf swing. Although they may be difficult initially, one-armed drills are among the most beneficial of all of our training techniques.

Remember that your body is in a weakened state when you have to control the swing with only one hand on the club, regardless of whether it’s your right arm or your left. Your brain becomes super-sensitive to any technical malfunctions in your sequencing, swing-path control, and power application. One-armed drills can quickly teach you how to correct any of the issues in the proper way. The following is a short list of some of the benefits that occur when you are practicing with either arm in a normal backswing mode.

● You learn which muscle groups set the swing properly into motion.
● It becomes easy to feel the correct amount of firmness in both the arm and the grip because the club will not go into the proper plane otherwise.
● It is also easy to feel the proper intensity for the heave and the timing of the first release, otherwise the change of direction becomes problematic.
● You become very sensitive to being in your ideal plane because it becomes very difficult to regain control once you lose it in a one-armed mode.
● Learning the importance of starting the downswing with gravity becomes apparent because you will jump plane if you do it with muscle.
● One-armed drills teach a free wrist-release through impact, otherwise it is difficult to control the flight of your shots.

If you are a right-handed player, you will probably have better path control initially with your right arm than your left, but you should remember that we play golf with both hands on the club. If you can’t control the club with your left arm, keep working on it. You can have a perfectly trained right arm, put malfunctioning left arm on the club with it, and the bad arm will pull the good arm out of the perfect plane. Any body parts that go onto the club, need to know how to function correctly. You don’t want a high-quality right arm carrying a “sick” brother into battle. When you get each of your arms to function properly, let them get “married” (both on the club) and see how well they get along! Together, they must function as a single unit. There is an ideal right-arm plane, an ideal left-arm plane, and an ideal two-arm plane. A fully trained player can hit properly struck draws and fades in each of the three planes, using any club in the bag!

Go to the practice tee and get busy!