golf swing pictures & players

In teaching the one plane golf swing, by far the most difficult task I have found is helping golfers "unlearn" everything they already "know" about the golf swing. The second most difficult task is finding the balances by not over exagerrating certain movements in the swing. The ideas I present below are a blend of what Jim Hardy calls a one plane swing and how I teach the swing. Interestingly enough, with all the buzz around this idea of a one plane swing, Jim Hardy openly admits that his one plane swing is a more difficult swing to learn as it requires more athleticism.

For the serious golfer who wants to be as good as possibly can, the Rotary Swing Tour is the only model to follow.
What I am writing below goes completely against helping you learn the swing and is not even close to how I teach the swing. It is meant strictly as a reference and is for all those super technical golfers out there who want to know way more than they need to about the golf swing. If that's you, read on as you'll be able to completely overwhelm yourself with the technical detail below and ensure that you won't be able to swing the club to save your life :-) After writing this, I had to put my clubs down for a week until I "forgot" everything I wrote. For those of you who want to actually learn how to do the one plane swing and not read about the details, click the link below.

Hardy firmly believes that there are no interchangable parts between the two swings, he calls them oil and water. However, if this were true, every golfer on the PGA Tour would neatly fall into one or the other and strictly follow Hardy's fundamentals. Of course, this is simply not the case and almost every golfer on tour is more of a hybrid than anything else. If you are looking for the purest demonstration of Hardy's ideas of a one plane swing, I highly recommend you study Peter Jacobsen's swing, as well as Scott McCarron. Of course, you will notice that not very many other golfers' swings look like Jacobsen or McCarron's, but if you want to follow Hardy to a "T", that is where you should look.

Compare the two photos below of myself and David Toms. Note how David swings the club above the shaft plane he established at address very early in the swing. He keeps the club outside of his hands in order to keep it from coming too far inside. This is a commonly taught position in today's modern teaching and David performs it perfectly. You can already see how his arms are separating from his torso in an effort to create width. In a one plane swing, too much width is a bad characteristic according to Hardy, so the arms swing more to the inside and across the chest. Hogan also talked a great deal about his arms swinging across his chest and the connection he maintained of his upper arms to his chest throughout his swing.

The rotation of the arm in the one plane swing allows the left arm to more naturally swing across the body. If you stand up and make a baseball swing, you will notice that there is some clockwise rotation of the left forearm. If you do not allow the left forearm to rotate, the club will be "maneuvered" onto a more upright plane rather than being allowed to "swing" on it's natural, more "around" plane. This is not something that you will concsiously do if you allow yourself to make a natural swing, it is something that will happen on its own. I simply point it out here because you have likely heard not to allow the left forearm to rotate, which is true for a two plane swing, but not true for a one plane swing.
As I mentioned, Hogan talked about this in his book, Five Fundamentals. Both arms stay close to the body to decrease width and give control of the golf club over to the torso, removing the responsibility from the much more difficult to control arms. This allows you to use the big muscles of your body to swing the club because the arms are a completely unreliable source of power and control. This swinging motion happens naturally because the arms are simply being led by the rotating body and are being allowed to swing back behind the chest similar to a baseball swing. You can clearly see here that David's arms are continuing their very upward movement whereas mine are swinging more around behind me. A simple way to look at this is that in a one plane swing the arms and body are more in sync, with the arms naturally swinging with the rotation of the body on the same plane.