The takeaway is, after impact, the most important part of the golf swing. As your first movement away from the golf ball, it initiates a sequence that will determine the quality of your entire golf swing — its power, accuracy and consistency.
A great takeaway doesn’t guarantee a great golf swing, but even the slightest errors here will lead to manipulations and compensations which will make the rest of the swing very difficult — difficult to perform with power and accuracy, difficult to repeat consistently, and difficult to learn.
99.9% of all golfers could improve their golf swing, most of them dramatically, just by correcting their setup and takeaway.
The good news is that the takeaway is, when done correctly, a very simple movement. You’re starting from a static position, and the movement is actually very small and easy when you learn to use the correct muscles properly.
The great news is, if you’ve been reading the articles in this section and working on the drills, then you’re already most of the way there. You have an intellectual understanding of exactly what the takeaway is and what each part of the movement is trying to achieve. You understand the faults caused by an incorrect takeaway, and how to avoid them. And, after working through the drills, you have a kinaesthetic awareness of the main movements in the takeaway — you know what a good takeaway feels like.
The bad news is, if you are like most golfers, then as soon as you pick up a golf club you completely lose the plot!
You probably have numerous bad habits, built and ingrained over time, based on a misunderstanding how the golf swing works, and not helped by the mountains of bad instruction out there.
You can probably perform Golf Swing Drill 205 – Takeaway: Turn with Shoulder Flexion fairly easily by now, but as soon as you try the takeaway with a golf club, you will instinctively become fixated on the movement of the club. You will forget to move your body correctly, but you won’t even realise it. That’s what you’ve always been taught; the position to move the golf club into. And the easiest, most natural way to lift the club into position is with your hands and arms — they are the part of you that is connected to the golf club, and they are the part of you that dominates your interaction with the world around you in your everyday life.
As we saw in Golf Swing 207 – Takeaway: Common Faults in the Golf Swing Takeaway, the natural dominance of your hands and arms will instantly destroy any chance you had of consistently making a great golf swing.
This drill will fix that, once and for all, and it will quickly put you on track to making the beautiful golf swing you’ve always dreamed of…
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…As with most things in golf, be aware that feel is not real. The intrinsic feedback that you receive from your body, your proprioception, will change as you improve. If you’re used to moving the golf club too far inside, then it will feel like you are moving it well outside when you first start moving correctly. But, once you grow the correct neural pathways, and the proper movement starts to feel natural, the “well outside” feeling will no longer be what you are looking for.If you think you’re doing it enough, it’s never nearly enough!
You learn the golf swing by building “feels”, training your proprioception, but these “feels” will need to be continuously retrained and refined. Keep working on this drill, and keep adjusting the “feels” that you are seeking in response to the augmented feedback provided by video and mirrors.
Your goal is to quickly get to the stage where you move correctly by default, without thinking about it, and any mistakes you make will feel “wrong”.
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Next, we’ll move on to completing the backswing, which is surprisingly simple once you can perform the takeaway correctly. You’ll learn how anyone can easily make a full and powerful turn, and how to get your body and club in a perfect top of the backswing position, every time.
