A few weeks ago we asked our loyal listeners of our Golf IQ podcast for some questions they for host Luke Kerr-Dineen about the game. We selected 16 of them and turned the answers into a podcast, which you can listen (and subscribe) to below, watch on YouTube, or read below...
1. "How important is keeping the lead arm straight during the backswing? I notice that several of the longest hitters have quite a bit of bend. Is the conventional wisdom changing?"
LKD: This is a pretty sharp observation, and I do think the conventional wisdom is changing a little bit.
It used to be, probably between the 1920s and 1940s, that the left-arm-straight idea was a really big deal. The idea was and is that bending your left arm is bad because it cheats your shoulder turn, which is a real thing. People can't turn enough, but they feel like they should make a long backswing, so they cheat their turn by bending their arms.
But over time people started to rethink this, because there are some benefits to having a little give in your left arm, as Jim McLean shows below. A small amount of bend can lengthen your hand path slightly, and a longer hand path means more distance.
The bigger thing that's changed, though, is that people have started to hone in on the right arm instead. The guys at Athletic Motion Golf have been on the forefront of this: when your right arm bends too much, it stays too close to your body. You can get stuck; you get narrow; you get steep. So when you hear golfers talk about staying wide, it's not so much the left arm anymore—it's keeping your right arm away from your body.
2. "Changing grip for shot shape. Bad idea or ok? It seems to be working"
LKD: The number one rule in golf is that if it's working, that's fine. The sport is hard enough, the goal is to get the ball in the hole, and if something's working for you, keep doing it.
Personally, I haven't really heard too many pros talk about strengthening or weakening their grip to shape shots—maybe they're out there, but I haven't heard it. What I do think amateurs overlook is how often pros are changing their grip on a daily, weekly, monthly basis.
They're constantly monitoring their hands—sometimes they creap weak; sometimes strong. Mark Blackburn, the number one teacher in America, literally measures this with 3D, and he'll find that a struggling player's left hand has crept 10 degrees weaker. Humans are weird.
Some days, for whatever reason, gripping it a certain way feels better, and over time that creates issues. So the only way to stay the same in golf is to make constant little tweaks to keep it in a good spot.
3. What do players feel through their feet? Do they feel the weight in their heels, toes, balls of their feet, where throughout the swing at set up and transition etc.
LKD: The two things I hear players and coaches talk about most are loading and then pushing. Going back, they want to feel like they're loading deep into their right hip—twisting against the ground to turn against it.
Then on the downswing, and Mark Blackburn talks about this a lot, you want to feel like you're stuffing the toes of your left foot into the front of your shoe early in transition. You're really pushing into those toes, creating leverage, and then you jump back off it and turn on the way through. It shows up in the force-plate data, and it's a big feeling a lot of people talk about.
4. What's the difference between a "bump" swing system and a "rotational" swing system?
LKD: The difference is that there isn't really one, because all (good) golf swings have both a bump and a rotation. The question is whether you have too much of one or too little of the other. Amateurs tend to bump too far away from the target on the backswing and never come back. And when it comes to rotation, they tend to rotate too soon, which drags the club over the top.
Really good golfers have a combination of all of it, in order: first they shift toward the target, then they tilt, then they turn, then they jump. So I'd push back on the idea that there are two swing types. Every swing has a bump and a rotation—it's the order and the severity that matter.
Amateurs get the order all screwed up, and it causes them headaches.
5. Iron trajectory control
LKD: This wasn't really a question, more a demand, but here's what I'd say: amateurs undervalue the knockdown shot. On the bad days, when you're not hitting it well and just want to make ball-first contact and get out of there, the value of putting the ball back in your stance slightly, setting up a little more on your front leg, and hitting more down on the ball is a simple, effective shot.
You see pros do this a lot, especially abroad, but even on the bad days when nothing's going right and you just need to get it to the house. You're probably not going to set the world alight, but it keeps the ball moving in front of you, brings the trajectory lower, and makes everything consistent and predictable.
6. The dreaded yips: what, how, why, and how to deal with it
LKD: I've never had the yips, thank God. But the big thing to know is that the yips are kind of a mental block, and the way people get through them is by doing something so radically different that the thing giving them the yips feels like a completely different skill. That five-footer that gives you the yips has to feel like a new skill entirely.
One that works well is the reverse claw. A teacher named Mark Durland told me about that one and put it really well: it takes your right hand out of it and feels different enough.
Same idea with the long putter, cross-handed chipping, one-handed chipping, broomstick putting. The common theme is you've got to trick your brain into thinking you're doing something entirely different than the thing that was giving you the yips.
7. At what point does accuracy and distance cross over for various handicaps? At what distance is a 100% dead-center fairway shot still just worse than hitting a bit further with worse accuracy?
LKD: Wow, really good question. I don't have the exact stats in front of me, but a good rule of thumb is that the difference between being in the fairway and being in the rough is about 20 yards. So if I hit it 200 in the fairway and you hit it 220 in the rough, your extra distance off the tee is pretty much negated. If you hit it 230 yards into the rough, you're coming out a little ahead.
There's some noise here—the rough penalty is actually less severe for higher handicaps than lower ones, because lower handicaps lose more of their ability to get it close. But generally, it always lands in a position where further is better, because the downside of missing one or two extra fairways is outweighed by the distance gain. Getting a little longer proobably wont drop you from hitting eight fairways to hitting two. You may go from hitting eight to hitting seven, but you gain distance on all eight of those drives regardless of whether they end in the fairway. So you come out ahead.
Regardless: Right around 20 yards is your rule of thumb.
8. How can I add spin to my wedge shots around the green? Thanks man
LKD: Michael Breed has a video that I've linked below video on this that I thought was fantastic. Instead of grabbing your sand or lob wedge, he uses a gap wedge—something between your pitching wedge and lob wedge. You play the ball back, get really stacked forward, and that creates the spin-loft conditions that ramp the spin way up.
It makes sense: because the loft is slightly less, you can really chop down on it, and it comes out low and fizzy. It's a fun shot, especially for amateurs who can't deliver the club like a pro. When I need to trap it—really grab it onto the green—I'll often reach for the lob wedge, open the face ever so slightly, play it back, and focus on hitting down. Can't take credit for it, that's Michael Breed, but you can really ramp up the spin that way.
9. How to fix early extension directly
LKD: I early-extend my own golf swing, and I think one of the biggest causes is hip mobility.
Here's what happens: I sit behind a desk all day talking about golf, and most of us are in that position all day too. Your hips get tighter and tighter, and then when you go to swing and have to turn them back and through, they're locked up. If you can't turn, you start extending instead—that's where early extension comes from.
So one of the easiest ways to fix it is to improve your hip mobility. If you can turn your hips back and through and internally rotate them, that won't fix it entirely, but it's a big reason people early-extend in the first place. Work on that and it should help.
10. Club speed: how best to get it?
LKD: A bunch of things correlate with clubhead speed, but one of the biggest is hand-path length. The longer your hands swing during your swing, the more time the club has to ramp up.
As for how to get it, there are great speed-training systems out there—the Stack, designed by Sasho MacKenzie, is one I'd recommend. But something simpler that both Padraig Harrington and Stephen Jaeger have talked about: once or twice a week, or any time you're at the range, bookmark 10 golf balls at the end of your session and hit them as hard and fast as you can.
Don't worry about where they go. The biggest thing with speed, outside of strength and technique, is just getting your body comfortable moving quicker. So swing fast, swing a lighter object, swing anything to get your body used to moving fast.
11. How to adjust to different green speeds more quickly (i.e. playing a 12 stimp one day then an 8 the next)
LKD: I'm a member at Tamarack Country Club, and the greens run pretty fast there, so this happens to me when I travel—first-world problem, I know. I asked a top putting coach I do some work with named Bill Smittle about it, and he said the big thing is hitting multiple putts at consecutive distances. Three 30-footers will help, but hitting a ball 30 feet, then 35, then 40 will help more.
We've actually got a good stress test about this that mesures how good you are at this kind of thing. Ultimately, mixing it up gets you used to different speeds in a hurry.
12. How important is a good follow-through?
LKD: I'm not a coach, but from talking to a lot of them, the take seems to be that a follow-through doesn't directly matter—but it is an indication of what just happened in your swing. If a golfer finishes by hanging back on their right foot, they know they haven't transferred their weight. If they're falling over or can't hold their finish, maybe they've got a balance issue or their weight moved around too much.
Look at Scottie Scheffler—his follow-through is all over the place most of the time. So it doesn't matter directly. But if you can get over to your left side and hold that finish for even a few seconds, that's a pretty good indication you did something right during the swing. So it's important from that perspective.
13. "Fixing early extension" is becoming the new "how to fix a slice" in terms of popularity. Why do you think this is cropping up now, and what do you think might be the next thing amateur golfers start to look at?
LKD: I agree that it's blown up. Early extension wasn't a thing when I was a junior golfer, at least not by that name. But somebody came along and gave it a name that's catchy; that sounds bad, and all of a sudden everybody cared about it a lot. And for good reason—a lot of people struggle with it because of limited hip mobility, and it can cause a smattering of other bad stuff like getting stuck and two-way misses.
But people get so obsessed with it that they don't realize it can actually help some golfers. An older player with limited hip and shoulder mobility might early-extend because it's their only way of shallowing the club and hit a draw. They don't have the athleticism to swing like peak Dustin Johnson, but they may be able to play pretty good golf that way.
A junior who lacks strength might sling the club behind them and early extend through, and again, can time it up well enough to become a really good player. Context is so important with these things.
As for what's next: I'm always amazed how many American golfers have really strong grips—something to do with growing up playing baseball, they say. At some point the chicken's gonna come home to roost there, and people will start wondering why they're fighting all these big blocks and wicked hooks.
14. Hands. Talk about hands. Tiger always references his hands as why he can still play. A lot of people talk about eliminating the hands.
LKD: The hands are your only connection to the golf club—it's a cliché, but it's true, and your hands do a ton of work. If you look at closure rate, which is how fast the clubface closes at the bottom of your swing, Tony Finau's face is closing at over 3,000 degrees a second. Even Viktor Hovland, who they say barely moves his clubface around, is measured at about 2,400 degrees a second. So even with an aggressive body turn, your hands are doing enormous work, and you have to get them synced up.
One thing I find really interesting is matching your grip to your physical characteristics. I have limited shoulder mobility, so I tend to do better with a slightly weaker grip to neutralize my arm wanting to close. And Liam Mucklow is doing fascinating stuff on grip pressure—he found better players grip slightly firmer on the backswing, then loosen the right hand in transition and grip firmer again through impact. That's why you'll see Hovland do a drill with his right hand off the club on the downswing.
It shows up around the greens too: amateurs grip way too firm with their right hand chipping, while pros stay more 50/50.
15. Who is the best at making the decision to "go for it," swing 110%, and under what circumstances do they allow themselves to do it?
LKD: Good question, and maybe future video fodder.
One guy I've talked about before is Si Woo Kim—he's just hardwired to go for it, and he's really good at it. He told me he grew up doing it because he wasn't a big kid; lots of people hit it past him, but he always wanted to stay aggressive and get himself into scoring opportunities. He's got that driver off the deck he still uses, always trying to push his ball up toward the green.
I don't know the specific statistical rankings—those stats get noisy because they start valuing distance off the tee. But Si Woo stands out. He's an average-length hitter who's aggressive in his go-for-it rate, and he bears the benefits: he's won a Players and been great in the majors. It ties into one of the few clear correlations in golf—the closer your ball is to the hole, the lower your scoring average, at every level. Even if you can't reach a par 5, advancing the ball safely as far as possible is a hugely valuable and underrated skill. Here's a video about it:
16. How to hit a draw for people who are used to hitting pull-cuts—not the things that create a draw, we know this, but more things like the tour draw video
LKD: Pull-cuts are the stock shape on tour, so you're not working from a bad place. You already know the things that create a draw, so I'll skip those. If you're hitting pull-cuts, you're swinging left with an open face, so you need to shift your path out to the right.
The most effective thing I see pros do is just put obstacles in the way. If you're swinging too far left, set a water bottle just outside the ball—now your goal is simply to hit the ball and avoid the bottle, swinging around it. Justin Thomas told me this was really effective for him: you don't overthink your swing, you just react to what's around you.
Another one is sticking an alignment stick in the ground 10 or 15 yards ahead and working on starting the ball right of it and curving it back. Those are outcome-y drills—you think about the ball flight and work backward. And a final simple one: move your ball position back, which shifts your path more to the right and opens the face, then strengthen your grip slightly to close it. Two tweaks that complement each other, and suddenly you've got your push-draw.