Early extension is a bad habit that will destroy your golf swing. It occurs when you straighten your body too early in your kinetic chain. Interestingly enough, most professional golf players have completely eliminated early extension from their golf swing.
If you would like to improve your golfing performance or to become a professional, then eliminating early extension is a must. Therefore, you may wonder: how to stop early extension in your golf swing?
In this article, we will tell you exactly how to stop early extension in your golf swing.
How To Stop Early Extension In Your Golf Swing?
To stop early extension in your golf swing, make sure you are rotating your upper body at the hips on the backswing and downswing. Rotating your hips will allow your arms to clear your hips, resulting in no awkward arm bunch up, and allowing for maximum power generation.
Read the additional tips down below in this guide to fully stop early extension in your golf swing. By practicing these tips and tricks, early extension will be a thing of the past for you.
Understand fully what early extension is and where it comes from, apply the suggested fixes, and you will see how much you improve your golf swing.
What Is Early Extension In Golf?
In golf, early extension is a bad and performance-damaging habit that less experienced golfers have in their golf swing. Early extension occurs when a golfer extends their body (stands up) too early, often due to not rotating their hips, which leaves no space for the arms to swing, and incites standing upright to make space for the swing.
Early extension is a bad habit less experienced golf players develop that happens during their golf swing. During a good golf swing, a golfer will rotate his hips during their backswing, and rotate them back the other way on the downswing before extending (standing up) their body.
A golfer whose golf swing is plagued by early extension will extend (stand up) his body too early, which is notably caused by not rotating at the hips during the backswing and downswing.
Instead of rotating the upper body at the hips, a less experienced golfer will just translate their weight to their back foot, or even worse, only use their arms to generate power.
Extension in a golf swing is good, but it needs to be done after the rotation of your hips; otherwise, extension is early extension.
The problem with not rotating your hips is that when you go for the downswing, your arms will be blocked by your hips, resulting in awkward technique, and less power than you could normally generate.
Since your arms start to bunch up around your hip area, you will feel like extending your body (standing up straight) early to free up some hip space. This is bad technique.
Read the tips down below to know exactly how to fix early extension in your golf swing, and how to improve your technique.
3 Tips To Stop Early Extension In Your Golf Swing
How do you stop early extension in golf? The tips down below will help you immensely. Look at every tip and film yourself to see which fixes you need to bring to your technique.
The correct golf swing technique, free of early extension, allows your hips to be clear of your arms. With space for your arms to swing, your kinetic chain will not be blocked. This correct technique ensures maximum power and technical ease.
Tip #1: Rotate your upper body during the swing
The first tip is to rotate your upper body during the golf swing. This goes for both the backswing and the downswing.
Beginner, inexperienced players commit 2 major mistakes when it comes to this:
1) some beginners think the golf swing power comes only from the arms;
2) some beginners translate their body weight to the back foot during the backswing for weight transfer power generation, but execute no upper body rotation.
To get a good golf shot off, you need to be using your entire body: your core, your legs, and your arms. Every part of your body needs to be perfectly in sync to get the best shot off.
During your backswing, rotate your upper body at the hips by using your back hip as the pivot point. Feel your body coiling up like a spring, ready to unload all the potential energy stored whenever you decide to.
Without rotating your hips, your hips will be facing forwards towards the ball, and become an obstacle in the swing path of your arms. With your arms blocked by your hips, early extension arises as a natural solution to make more space for the arms, but this is not optimal for performance.
By rotating your hips, your arms will be able to clear your hips without any early extension, as they are turned to the side where they take less space when your arms pass them. Remember to focus on rotation rather than weight transfer through translation, although weight transfer can also be beneficial.
Tip #2: Keep your head level until ball contact
Early extension in your golf swing occurs when you stand up straight too early. When you extend your body (stand up), your head also goes up.
So how can you stop early extension? Do not let your head raise until your club makes contact with the ball. Keep your head level until ball contact.
By keeping your head relatively stable, at around the same height during your back swing and the first portion of your downswing, you prevent early extension. Loosely checking the height of your head gives you an easy, foolproof way to check if you are guilty of early extension.
Tip #3: Do not extend until after hip rotation on the downswing
The final tip to avid early extension is to not let yourself extend until after hip rotation on the downswing.
Early extension is bad, but extension executed at the right time (after ball contact) is good.
Extension is useful to generate a good golf shot, but should not be done too early. Only after you rotated your hips on the downswing and after ball contact should you let yourself extend your body.
Conclusion
There you go! After reading this article, you have learned how to stop early extension in your golf swing.
Follow the steps in this article and film yourself in order to fix your technique, thus improving your golfing performance. Lower your scores and your handicap index thanks to these tips!
Are you performing early extension? How much better would your golfing game without early extension? Let us know in the comments down below!
