Time for a backswing check. If it's too long, it's hurting your consistency

A fundamental I always stress in the backswing is rotating over a braced trail leg. It's the way you create coil and set up a powerful downswing. Many golfers fail to generate coil because the torso stops moving while the arms keep swinging back. That awful photo of me above? That's what this fault looks like.

While you might recall that major champions such as Bubba Watson, Phil Mickelson and John Daly have had great success with extra-long backswings, it's important to understand that those golfers are outliers. For the vast majority of players, especially amateurs who don't hit hundreds of practice balls a week, the guiding principle should be that a long swing is much harder to control and repeat than a shorter one.

You can check your backswing in a number of ways (video, mirrors, a friend's eyes, etc.), but you probably already have a good idea of how far you take the club back and what kind of consistency you have as a ball-striker. If you sense you're falling victim to a "runoff" with the hands and arms after your body stops rotating, I've got a great drill for you.

Grab a 7-iron and get into your setup. Keeping your upper arms against your torso, soften your elbows and hinge your wrists to raise the club up into a vertical position. From a downtarget view, it should appear that the shaft roughly matches your spine angle (below). From a side-on view, the club would be angled to point to about 11 o'clock on a clockface (bottom).

From this position, simply rotate and coil your torso into a full top-of-backswing position. When you can't rotate any farther without coming out of your posture, your backswing is complete (below). So all I did here was hinge my wrists fully and then coil my upper body to set the club at the top. Whatever that looks like for you, that's your gold standard for the backswing.

It should feel like you're taking the club back with some energy, but everything is nice and compact—your arms-and-club swing now linked with the coiling of your body. Once you repeat this move several times, you can start hitting shots this way. When you do, think about starting your downswing a fraction earlier with your lower body. That will really help you transfer this efficient and easy-to-repeat backswing into what you do on the course.