Tip Tuesday: Takeaway Series, Part 1

In the first of a three-part series, Dustin Johnson Golf School Director of Coaching Allen Terrell demonstrates how your setup at address dictates the takeaway of your swing. Check out Allen’s video to see some simple, core techniques for ensuring you get your swing off to the proper start.

Allen Terrell:
So we’re going to do a series on why the takeaway is important for a functional golf swing.

Okay, so step one is going to be how the setup dictates a takeaway. So, probably around 90 percent of how the club moves and the body works in the takeaway is really influenced by how we set up to it.

Here are a few checks that I would like you to do. One, we’d like for our arms to rest a little more on top of our chest here; we don’t want our arms on the side, because that’s going to create some issues in the takeaway, so we’re going to try to get our arms fairly close together. You don’t have to lock your arms, but fairly close.

The other part is making sure that our hips are under us at address. We don’t want to be set up with a lot of hip hinge, our rear end too far back, a lot of knee flex, real squatty. We want to feel like our hips are under us, soft knee flex, and then if you look down the line, we want to make sure that from the shoulder to the elbow is fairly straight down, more or less about 90 degrees to the ground. If we get too far away, if we get too close, that’s going to really dictate how the club’s going to move.