Athletic Motion Golf- The Podcast · Mike Granato and Shaun Webb

Golfers Are Ruining Their Swings With This Trend (Wills Murray on Shallowing, Rotation & Fixes)

·20 min·1 clip

“The more they work on it the worse they get” describes a spiral many golfers never notice.

Wills Murray joins the podcast as AMG's newest certified instructor and talks from the Monterey lab. The hosts open by asking what he is seeing on the West Coast. One topic keeps coming up: golfers are too focused on shallowing. He is not saying shallowing does not matter. He is saying the way people chase it is usually backwards. Some players are already too shallow. Then they try to get the club even farther behind them. They also try to get the body more open. For a lot of amateur golfers, that just makes a bad move worse. Most of them are already cutting across the ball or slicing it. So asking for even more opening can send them in the wrong direction. The conversation then shifts to rotation. They agree that rotation is probably the hardest part of the golf swing to read accurately on video. Murray says players often think they need more turn than they really do. He likes to put a vanilla PGA Tour player on screen next to the student. The comparison usually makes the point fast. The golfer in the lesson is often more turned at every point in their body than the tour player ever is. That surprises people, and it also explains why some players think they should be hitting the ball farther. Murray uses the pelvis example to make the tradeoff easier to see. If a player turns the pelvis 55 degrees in the backswing, getting back to 35 open by the time the club comes down is already a big ask. At best, the player may only get to 35. The hosts keep circling back to the same idea. The shape people feel is often not the shape that matters. Gears helps because it gives the player something concrete to look at. Put the golfer beside a tour player and the information gets harder to talk around. Murray says buy in matters because a lot of lesson work disappears the moment the player leaves the room. The conversation closes on the idea that every swing seen in the lab teaches the coaches something too. Everybody in the room gets a little better from the next player coming through the door.

As heard by us

Shallowing is treated as a data problem, not a pose problem.

The piece keeps its attention on shallowing: what it is, why it gets misunderstood, and how pushing it too far can backfire for golfers who are already too shallow.

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Why you'd press play

If your swing advice has turned into a shallowing mess, this is the corrective.

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