Dana Dahlquist (Bryson DeChambeau’s coach) shows why he is ranked the #9 golf instructor in the US. Join us as we break down common misconceptions that golfers often believe are essential. Dana, along with Josh Koch, tackle these myths with insightful analysis and practical demonstrations. Many of these myths have some aspect of truth in them, but properly applying the message they try to convey is the challenging part.
Check out https://www.HITBOMBS.com/ where Dana and Josh lay out an entire blueprint for the golf swing (it’s suitable for every skill level) and give the most effective, practical drills to apply the concepts.
Interested in 1 on 1 lessons? Check out https://hitbombs.com/coaching to learn from Josh or https://danadahlquistgolf.com/coaching to learn from Dana.
CHAPTERS:
0:00 – Intro to Golf Swing Myths
0:44 – Golf Lag Technique Explained
2:23 – Understanding Swing Depth
5:18 – Head Movement in Golf Swing
7:28 – Hip Depth Importance
11:50 – Debunking Top Golf Myth
17:50 – Final Thoughts on Golf Techniques
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I’ve been really blessed over the years to have a lot of great mentors and people that I’ve learned from in terms of my golf Journey my teaching Journey but there’s definitely one that has played a very very big role and that is Dana doest a lot of you know Dana he recently was named the number ninth teacher in America which I was super excited about because I’ve seen Dana’s Journey from you know going back 15 years to now and and how he’s evolved as a coach and I have a lot of respect for how he’s gone about doing that I recently traveled out to Long Beach and I asked him a question Dana what are your top five myths of the golf swing let’s see what he has to [Music] say all right Dana so you’ve been teaching for a while now and obviously collected a lot of knowledge over the years we’ve seen the industry go in and out of different phases talk about that process a little bit and what you’ve kind of observed from that yeah so it’s really interesting Josh because um I think the a way to get a good sample size of the industry is to do lessons it’s not necessarily just jumping online I mean that is one facet but looking how students actually interact with maybe the internet and what they see online I get a lot of questions that come in um a lot from students like hey Dana I saw this on the internet does this pertain to me and I think that’s good because that means that we’re actually reaching out and touching people um in a good way but there are some problems with that and we’re going to go into that awesome well uh let’s start backwards let’s start with number five what what do you think yeah I think the big one is number five would be lag okay so there’s a right way to do it and there’s a wrong way what’s interesting is lagging the club independently with just my wrists or pulling on my arms is going to cause some conflict with the student with contact and face control in their golf swing show us what you mean by the the face control yeah so if I go to the top of my swing and I start to let’s say pull on wrist angles okay where I’m actually pulling down on the Club it starts to potentially open the club face and you can see my left wrist starts to open when I start to pull down independently and when that happens my brain knows that the face is starting to lay wide open okay probably not going to want to rotate so what’s the what’s the correct way to create leg Yeah so the correct way um is as the club’s going back and it’s reaching the top of the back swing I’m actually changing directions in my body and when I’m changing directions that means that the club’s still going back as my body’s going the other way when that starts to occur I’m actually create creating an X Factor stretch okay The X Factor stretch is going to allow the body to create separation that’s actually the definition of that and when that starts to happen I’m producing a force which is causing torque in my system that torque is allowing the arms to change direction and then the wrist change direction which is actually going to allow the face to change direction as well as a result and who would you say does a really good job of this on tour well I think the the one that I like to watch the most do this is Rory mroy so he’s a good example of a draw player that does it all Dana love that number four yeah number four um is actually getting depth on your back swing okay um so we know that getting depth on your back swing is important okay I’m not going to argue that there’s a lot of different ways to skin that cat um there’s examples of Scotty shuffler like Scotty shuffler his hands go in okay how they go in is really important um and then conversely you have other players that get depth at the top in other Fashions but we have to be careful with that we have to identify what you do and what you don’t do in order for you to get depth the reason why players may want to get depth on their back swing is because their hand path is coming out on the downswing and they’re hitting let’s say deflected Cuts or poles um and this is pretty doable if you just film your golf swing and you see your hand path is working out if that is the case you want to kind of explore depth but you want to do it right way what you don’t want to do and this is for the masses is you don’t want to take your left arm in your setup and start pulling the butt into the club in early around you and the reason for that is you’re actually taking your left arm across your chest very very early and it’s shutting off the actual rotation of how your body loads um it doesn’t mean that the hands don’t go in good example of this would be like Dustin Johnson so Dustin Johnson’s one of the best at we would say a rotational golfer mhm um and and guys like him when they take the club back the club gets thrown more or less down the line and then further as the player moves from let’s say Club shaft parallel to lead arm parallel the left arm starts looking more in and that’s because of the body’s rotation not because they start pulling the arm across the chest early so I’m going to play devil’s advocate here real fast so I think the player you’re describing would kind of be like a Matt coocher correct someone that takes his hands um having success at a high level but ultimately what are the downsides to that well one of the big downsides is potentially your path starts to work more out okay as doing such so the more that I pull the arm more across the chest early it’s going to probably go up and out on the downswing unless I did something you know mysteriously wrong um the other thing that’s very very interesting is it really is hard on speed production okay more the left arm pulls across the chest early you’re not loading your scap appropriately at the right time so when things don’t load and unload as dynamically as possible yeah so Matt’s obviously great player uh but doesn’t hit it far so that that’s where a potential limitation could come from that yeah so um another one would be like Bryson so like Bryson has a lot of depth at the top but if you look at Bryson he actually takes the club down the line on the back swing and then loads it more through the transition I.E that’s why he hits it so when he’s getting that depth is really important 100% love that all right Dana so what’s your number three myth yeah number three is the the the conversation about keeping your head still you know there’s a lot of ways we can go about this um I think it’s important to note that some of the best swings that we like to look at have head movement um it doesn’t mean they’re all the same um but I think the big thing is just don’t keep it completely still your neck is one of the most mobile parts of your spine and your head’s attached to it we don’t want to lose our balance either right so if you move your head too much you actually have to try to stabilize to keep your balance so it’s kind of like a fine line I think if you look at most good golf swings uh look at Dustin Johnson on his back swing his head actually rotates to the right and that’s one of the reasons why he has very good mobility and range of motion but the same token like you don’t want to move it so much that you lose sight of the ball either yeah I played in a pram the other day and the golfer I was playing with would would hit shots and literally try to keep his head down you know 3 or 4 seconds after it left the so I think there’s a big Mis understanding there from an AM amateur level of of what the head is actually doing um but on the flip side you know obviously we know the more the head moves the more speed you could potentially create um what’s kind of that sweet spot for you of of a little bit of head movement but not too much yeah you want to think of it from more of the sequence right so like if I was moving my body in the back swing okay so the club’s gone back I’ve rotated when I get to in range of motion I might let my ey line move slightly to the right and the same is true after I get to the lead side on the downswing and I start to rotate as I come through the shot I let The Head release so it’s part of the whole system movement um we don’t want to ever have limiting factors that are kind of staring Us in the in the face whenever we look at our golf swing yeah and actually if you watch Dustin Johnson hit a wedge as he he turns through his head is already looking at the Target reminds me of anuka David Duval right those those are players that you know obviously disprove that that that myth but yeah you know and then the other thing it seems like you’re talking about is not only the left to right movement not only the up and down but but the tilting of how the ey line is actually working correct all right Dana number two yeah so number two is kind of a I call it the muddy water one um it’s hip depth in in golf instruction over my 25 years of teaching and looking at golf swings from a teaching perspective um there’s always been an argument between these two fact of teachers that say either turn your hips or don’t turn your hips and you know what they’re both kind of right you know you have to kind of look at the middle ground and who you’re talking to so hip depth is if I was looking at a perfect situation A Perfect Situation would be a player that actually gets pressure to to go to the right side and then as the club’s being taken away you’ll see most the best ball Strikers right off the ball their hips are actually pretty square that means that they’re activating their TR side and as as they activate activate their Trail side and they start to wind up they start to get hip depth to the point where the right leg starts to lose flex and create leg extension but they don’t lose their Trail glute that would be a perfect situation but not everybody can do that so you get a most demographic of golfers that are you know the amateur players that like me for that matter that don’t have time to practice a lot if I got in there and I said I was losing range of motion just start increasing hip turn and let your right leg extend but that’s going to happen to a diminishing return at some point where you’re like hey I’m hitting the ball correctly I’m I have a pattern but I want to create more speed well the elephant in the room is start to load your system so you can allow the loading of the trail hip and the trail glute and that’s what’s kind of posed to the industry so we have two issues here one is I think it starts with the player who doesn’t turn their pelvis and doesn’t create rotation of back swing so then the correction you see to that is people just start going crazy and turning their pelvis obnoxiously right and you’re basically saying hey there’s there’s a point of diminishing return with that we got to make sure that yes we’re turning our pelvis but it’s sort of following a process correct so that being said let’s let’s talk about the rates of of how you want to see it sure happen in the back swing yeah so there is a rate in a perfect world if a player gets pressure from left foot to right foot that’s that’s the precursor okay and they throw the club back on the back swing I’m actually feeling that there’s a pressure build underneath the right foot when there’s a pressure build underneath the right foot not weight but a pressure build under the right foot then what starts to occur is I start engaging the trail leg to accept that pressure that’s a natural response to like an athletic Mo movement okay so once that occurs then the rib cage is actually rotating more than the hip that’s going to create a nice separation piece between the rib cage and the hip and as the momentum of that object going back I.E the club and I start to rotate you start getting a bigger gap between those two systems to a point where maybe at lead arm parallel here and you go to the top the hip actually starts to increase its range of motion which allows me to get enough depth in the pelvis so you see more of a late reentering move I think I know you love Rory swing Rory’s got that really late push correct that re reenters his p it’s not just spinning from the start no 100% I think that’s the misconception so you get the guys that you know you look at Xander he does this you know this is kind of like his signature this is Rory’s signature and this is what kind of makes them who they are if they if they lose that they’re no longer that player and it becomes manual and this is one of the problems when we look at mechanics as a whole mechanics are kind of representations of good ground force reactions and good kinetics at the Forefront so what what happens if a player doesn’t have the range of motion or Mobility to kind of do what you’re saying then we have to look at other avenues so that’s where we we look ourselves in the mirror as a coach and go okay if this player is not able to do these things then we’re going to have to curtail them by increasing range of motion early so this is where a player might actually turn their hips with the rib cage more at the same time and maybe the hand path Works a little more in than what’s desirable but those things are going to make the player more accurate more consistent over time and it’s not a bad Avenue to go through so not ideal but definitely could maybe be a work around there 100% all right Dana we’ve made it what is the number one myth that you’ve seen in the golf swing yeah so the number one myth and I attach myself to this for twofold um it is a down string related thing okay and we would call that hip turn on the down swing okay um hip turn on the downswing should be a byproduct of what you did on the back swing okay and there’s a lot of ways to skin this cat there’s guys that have made Millions upon millions of dollars with different aspects of their downswing so we have to not just look at our golf swing video and go oh I don’t have my two cheeks showing on video like that’s probably the number one thing guys come in and they they want to have this massive looking hip turn and to be honest um some of the best players in the world don’t have that and nor have they ever but the principle of rotation is what we have to understand the rotation on the downswing is is a byproduct of good loading on the back swing first I call it the domino effect so if a player comes in and they don’t load up and they have maybe because of that a hand path that’s out and they have early extension obviously they’re not going to be able to facilitate more rotation because they’re just going to slice the ball off the planet but they spend an exorbitant amount of time trying to manually create this open pelvis look with disregarding that they didn’t load their system on the back the first place so conveniently a lot of the lessons that I do never even objectively talk about hip turn we we talk about like using the ground differently which I.E influences that anyway it may give you that look but like I said it’s a dangerous thing to start talk about so I think they clarify being around you for a while now you do like to see the knees squared up by P5 and you do like to see the pelvis open at impact you want to demonstrate that real fast and just kind of show what we’re talking about so at 5 um when the lead arm is parallel to the ground and the club basically is already finished changing direction and it’s loaded I’d like to see that the knees are actually square and the hips might be 5 de open at that point that would be kind of if I was saying I had kind of a a picture of something that’s what it would look like and then at impact I would probably see the hips were more open you know upwards of you know at least 38° or more um for everyone okay but and even more than that for the best players in the world but that’s kind of a representation of good separation so that’s where we’re kind of getting towards if a player is not able to do that on the back swing they’re probably not going to be able to do it on the down swing so interjecting manual application which I.E is just spinning the hips um is probably not going to create separation so I get a lot of players um who try to do hip turn and their arms and chest match up and they’re really spun open or sometimes they get players that never get to their lead side and their pressures back and they’re open is feeding a lot of pull Fades constantly so what we want to try to do for the most golfers is still allow them to kind of get things to be either straight or a draw especially for the masses and in order to get the proper hip sequence getting the back swing right getting your pressure to land appropriately and getting separation and then pushing through the ground to open you up will actually facilitate the right pitchure that you’re looking for so curious why you have this at number one if everything else is back swinger well I see a lot of it on the internet right so I see a lot of um a good example is you see a lot of the young guys coming up that have this look of a lot of rotation and a lot of side bin like let’s say Walkin Neeman but we’re looking at outliers right like players that actually have exceptionally good ground force reaction and players that have a lot of mobility and they actually load really well and if you don’t do that there’s no potential way for you to get open and I see a lot of Juniors coming in and they the first thing they say is you know I want to look like Sam Bennett where I’m really really open and I’m like well look like let’s get the back swing loaded first before we even attempt to go down that road all right Dana so that being said how should the average Joe attack this myth yeah so I think the average person I think if you put more emphasis on through the transition getting your pressure to land into your lead side first um and through that transitionary period are the arms and hands shaft I.E body in the right place and then see where the dominoes fall from there you’re probably going to react a lot better and you’re going to be open enough okay I think it’s all always going to be a case of three factors do you have enough vertical and enough push up and back and open to circumvent good contact and good distribution of ball flight if you don’t and your pressure’s back and everything’s working at the same time probably not going to be a good idea to start chasing pictures this is where I see a lot of people do manual things like the arms are too far out the shaft’s too flat the pressure is too back and the only thing it does it feeds the Beast of them hitting more pull Cuts so the number one thing I would say whenever you’re faced with this adversity of I can’t get open get the precursor done right get your pressure to get down and left earlier and get a better sequence through the transition special thanks to Dana for taking his time and and dropping those knowledge bombs uh I’m going to be curious to ask him the same question two or three years down the road and see if anything is the same or if anything has changed if you’re interested in getting more of mine and Dana’s content head over to hit bombs.com we have laid out an entire swing blueprint starting from the setup all the way to the finish and everything in between we appreciate all the support we’ll see you next time
2 Comments
Dana is fucking awesome. Great video.
Amazing golf coach, i.e. Dana Dahlquist