The modern swing is all about using the bigger muscles in the torso – the stomach and the shoulders. Controlling the turning motion from here, the ‘core’, is the key to consistent ball striking. That’s what the strong young players coming out on tour have been brought up on. The key is to start from a good athletic set-up and focus on combining a dynamic turn with a positive weight shift for a simple and repeating backswing.

For me, the benefit of controlling your motion with the bigger muscles is that you don’t have to worry about what the hands are doing, which for too many golfers seems to have become something of a preoccupation. As long as you have a good grip and you set up to the ball correctly, you will find that a natural hinge is created as you turn and swing the weight of the clubhead. All this fiddly business of hingeing the wrists early and ‘setting’ the club with a conscious hand action is likely to have you picking the club up too early in the backswing, losing width and not turning your body properly.
Strong players today such as Tiger, Ernie Els, Charles Howell and Luke Donald all make a simple move away from the ball and continue on with a big turn. Of course, to achieve that you do need to be reasonably flexible, so within this article you will find a few simple exercises that will help you to develop your flexibility and make this simple two-step backswing easy to repeat with every club in the bag.