I spent year upon head-clanging year “pulling” my golf swing with the leading arm, and am just now getting comfortable with a purely trailing arm swing action.

I mentioned in my last post that I have set my swing aid to a difficulty setting that simply will not snap unless I’m swinging with a pure trailing arm motion.

The reason for this is that I realized a little while back that, despite the transition from a left-dominant to right-dominant swing action, I was still employing too much “pull” in the down swing and was likely unconsciously setting up to do so.

I actually captured the desired action years ago while in California shooting the “MCS – Ultimate Leverage” video in early 2015 – nine years ago now and can you believe it’s going on 14 years since my first video project?

What happened was, I was holding a club in my left hand while shooting the intro to the video and was forced to pantomime a stable-headed Classic Golf Swing action with just the right arm:

In fact, I know that the above gif. will look suspiciously familiar to some WAX netizens, which would be due to my having employed the above action as a swing model gif. in the years since:

Now, I know fully well that one swings a golf club with two hands holding the club and therefore with both arms – the key is that the leading arm should only be aiding the trailing arm in leveraging the club down and through.

If you feel yourself pulling the club down from the top of the back swing, then you are swinging leading arm dominant.  A trailing arm dominant swing should feel exactly as though you’re swinging the club with the trailing arm only, as demonstrated in the above gif.

And that means having the proper stance, ball position and grip to perform this action (Fundamentals Trifecta, anyone?), and this is all I’ve been doing the past couple of weeks.

When performed properly, you will get a trailing arm action that absolutely whips the club down and through the swing bottom with in this manner:

Now, the counter-intuitive part of all of this – the real source of power is not the isolated trailing arm action itself, but the hip and leg action.

Jack Nicklaus’ prodigious length came not from his trailing arm action, it was his hip and leg action.

Even in his youth, you can see a very strong hip and leg action on the pivot, and look at how his club just blazes down and through the swing bottom with his “leading foot stomp” action, a phrase I coined back around 2010 in my Mike Austin/Dunaway study days:

The only swing “flaw” in this entire action is the Reverse-C finish, which would have been fixed very simply with a step-around finish.

You’ll notice as well the absence of any lateral movement in young Jack’s swing – it is a pure “up” then “down” action.

A glorious action no longer seen in professional golf, sadly.