In this video, we analyze the swing changes that Rickie Fowler and his coach, Butch Harmon made to turn Rickie’s career around! We go through a fowler Rickie Fowler swing analysis, including a breakdown of changes he made to his set up, takeaway, and transition!
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Ricky Fowler is one of the most notable figures in all of men’s professional golf we all know him as being in the mix at many major championships he’s a six-time PGA Tour winner but as recently as 2022 we saw him really struggle with the golf swing he ended the year W 103d in the world golf rankings and missed all kinds of big tournaments but we’ve seen quite a big comeback from Ricky in the past year so last year he finished out 2023 23rd in the world golf rankings he won last year top top five at a major great season so in this video we’re going to be breaking down the steps that Ricky Fowler took to improve his golf swing to really get his Swagger back on the golf course and contend once more in the PJ tour we’re going to be breaking down not only what Ricky changed in his golf swing but what you can learn from it if you’re working on your own swing or want to become a better golfer so for some quick instructional context here Fowler was coached by Butch Haron for many years some of his most successful years from 2013 to 2018 Ricky was working pretty consistently with Butch Harmon and Butch was touring with Ricky in 2019 Ricky decided to make a switch and went to John Tillery now tiller is an excellent coach but sometimes player and Coach philosophies just don’t really seem to blend and that seems to be what happened between Tillery and Fowler as after that switch in 2019 is really when we started to see fowers play really digress and see the golf swing kind of go in weird places seeing some unathletic moves and a lack of Confidence from Ricky So in 2020 after after a little bit of deliberation he switched back to seeing Butch Harmon and that’s where the progress really started to be made so let’s start off by talking about the first thing that the two of them tackled in reconstructing Fowler swing which was the takeaway now while the takeaway is certainly not the most glamorous part of the golf swing it is absolutely imperative to nail the takeaway before working on anything else so the issue with Fowler’s swing is that his takeaway is pretty off track and by that I mean that his hands were coming inside but the club face or the club head rather was kind of continuing outside and and that created a pretty dangerous dichotomy for him however what he and Butch Haron did which was very smart is they didn’t decide to reconstruct the takeaway altogether they just decided to make some subtle changes to the setup he worked on keeping his shoulders more square and more importantly he and Butch really worked on keeping that trail arm for Ricky that right arm that right elbow kind of pressed into the ribs a little bit more in that takeaway position which really helped him so those are those are just a few things that Ricky did within the setup again we’re not talking about Reinventing the wheel here and that’s a really important note that I want people to hear at home is that if you want to be making changes to your swing you want to see better results you don’t always have to just overhaul everything you’re doing start off by changing grip and setup these are simple things to do obviously they’re not easy things to do but it’s much easier to conceptualize uh how you step up to the ball how your hands grip the club then completely changing everything about your golf swing so if you’re looking to make some some adjustments if you’re looking to see some better Play Take a page out of Ricky and Butch Harmon’s book and see if you can make some adjustments to that setup now let’s talk about the transitionary move which I think if you look at Ricky Fowler back in his really young days with the long hair and the orange outfits you you can really notice how flat that golf swing was that left arm at times even at the very top of the back swing that left arm kind of looked parallel to the ground which is a very very peculiar move but at the end of the day Rick’s a great athlete and he managed to play pretty well with it but the issue is that kind of created a lack of consistency when his low Point control and his ball striking was in a little bit of an odd spot that kind of very flat golf swing couldn’t really bail him out very much so that was the next order of business for Butch Harmon and his pupil Ricky Fowler they wanted to get that left arm a little bit more vertical and Ricky wrote an article with Golf Digest where he said a good image ey developed is my left arm sliding up my chest as opposed to stretching across it to me it feels more up and down now this is a really interesting way that Ricky describes this feel and it is just that this is a swing feel now if you look at Ricky’s golf swing down the line especially with driver in hand you probably don’t really see that left arm completely sliding up his chest as he says but again that’s his feel the feel versus real is very is very different so for someone like Rick I bet his swing felt incredibly vertical once he started working on this with butch but that’s because it’s compared to a very very flat golf swing so it’s important to note that the feel versus reel is going to be so different when actively working on swing changes it is equally important to note that when we’re talking about this transitionary move and we’re talking about getting high hands or getting more vertical in the golf swing that is in my opinion and from what I’ve heard from many golfers who are trying to hone in their swing it is one of the most difficult things to work on in the golf swing so I commend Ricky and Butch for taking on that kind of task and obviously once these swing changes were worked on and even implemented the results don’t come quickly they they take time and and we really saw that with Ricky he would have a few good weeks you know maybe a top 10 and then he’d miss a cut or two and it was probably frustrating but he certainly knew to trust the process because what he did with his golf swing if you look at his golf swing in 2024 and compare it to two years prior it’s an entirely different Beast he CH the setup the takeaway the transitionary move everything is different so it took a great deal of work and and a great deal of patience from Ricky and his team uh and it clearly paid great dividends now a final aspect of Ricky’s swing that he wanted to work away from was occasionally his he let that club get a little bit too far behind him that’s pretty common for having a flat golf swing so what I mean by having that club get too far behind him is those hands just kind of lag behind the rest of the golf swing so if you have a little bit of hip turn turn but those hands don’t come through the hip turn then your hands are going to just be late to the ball and you’re going to have probably a little bit of an open Club face and you’re going to get a lot of pushes that’s especially accentuated with driver so if you’re pushing your driver a lot even a little bit of a baby uh kind of a push fade which is a pretty frustrating miss it could be because your hand your hands just aren’t catching up with the rest of your body now you can do two things in order to correct this one you can shorten up how far your hands go back in the golf swing but uh obviously understand that would likely come at the detriment of losing some distance however you might be a little bit more controlled by having a shorter back swing guys like Tony fow and John ROM saw a great success from doing it the other way that you can approach working away from getting those hands too far behind you is what Ricky and Butch Haron decided to do which was add more hip turn by adding more hip turn and lower body action to your golf swing you’re giving your hands more time and the more time those hands have the more time they have to uncoil and go towards the ball and another benefit to adding hip turn in the golf swing is that you get a little bit more swing speed a little bit more distance off the T we’ve recently seen Ricky hitting the ball a little bit further out there off the te which for someone like him gives him a huge Advantage you know he’s never really been known as one of the crazy long drivers on tour he has a pretty worldclass short game but getting those drives out there has certainly helped him out a little bit now in an article that Ricky wrote to Golf Digest he said that one of the most important things that Butch Haron did for him was actually not related to the golf swing at all it was instilling inside of him a level of self-belief and Ricky has said that that level of self-belief means more to him than any of the changes that he’s he’s made to the golf swing and now that those results have come in and he obviously broke through for that sixth PGA Tour win last year at the rocket mortgage I think that that self-belief is fully there and a lot of Ricky’s best golf remains ahead of him I’m really excited to see what he can do with all of these new mechanics if you have any questions or comments on anything that I mentioned in this video please leave them in the comment section down below I hope you all learned a thing or two about what Ricky did in order to tweak his golf swing I find this stuff super fascinating if you want to see more content like this like this video so that I can uh get a better feel for what content you guys want to see in the future as always I thank you all very much for watching play well and take care
