British Open 2025: Matt Fitzpatrick's golf swing was struggling. We can learn from his fix

Matt Fitzpatrick's golf swing felt lost.

"The Players this year, it was really bad...I couldn't find the face with the ball. It was just not good," Fitzpatrick said. "That's the lowest I've been, I felt, in my career. Statistically it could be the worst run that I've played as well. Yeah, I just didn't feel good or know where it was going."

Now he's battling the World No. 1 at the top of the leaderboard at the 2025 Open Championship.

It's been a relatively rapid transformation that has been brought about by some clever technical changes that Fitzpatrick and his coach, Golf Digest No. 1-ranked teacher Mark Blackburn, made starting at the RBC Heritage earlier this season.

What fixed Fitz

When Blackburn and Fitzpatrick began working together, Blackburn ran a physical assessment and found that Fitzpatrick had a bigger wingspan than most people his height.

With longer arms than most, Fitzpatrick's golf swing could tend to get excessively wide and unwieldy, which would cause him consistency issues, particularly with his irons. It's why he dropped to 116th and 127th in SG: Approach over his past two seasons. But he's jumped up to 85th now, and trending higher.

It required some specific changes to tailor his golf swing to how his body works best.

"I have really long arms," he said, "so that's got to be factored in to what we're working on."

Coach Blackburn explains the main changes:

• "We retracted his arms at address to manage his swing radius more effectively as his arms are so long."

Pulling Fitzpatrick's arms closer to his body at setup with a little more softness helped narrow his golf swing, preventing that excess width that would cost him with his irons. Amateur golfers often struggle with a variation of this, something Blackburn talked about here and here.

• "We also shortened his iron swing and steepened his shoulder plane to match his body-swing connection more effectively."

Steepening and shortening Fitzpatrick's iron swing, which you can see by his left shoulder working more down towards the ground at setup, helped give the 2022 U.S. Open champion better low point control which, again, was better for strike consistency. (Blackburn explains more on that here.)

Perhaps these specific lessons apply to you, but the general lesson here is that the best swing for you is the one that matches your own, unique body. Align your body and your golf swing, and you'll get the best of all worlds.