The flying right elbow, and when it is a fault

Where the elbow goes, and where to look for it

The Titleist Performance Institute files this under swing characteristics rather than faults, and defines it as the trail elbow leaving the trail side during the backswing. Coaches call it a flying right elbow. The position it is compared against has the elbow tucked under the club, close to the ribs and pointing roughly at the ground: the connected arm of the textbooks.

TPI also says where to stand. Film from the target line, stop at the top, and look at whether the trail elbow points behind you. One honest limit sits inside that instruction: the direction an elbow points is mostly depth, which a single lens infers rather than sees. Height and the gap to the ribcage are what the frame gives cleanly, and Pebble Swing reads joint angles out of those frames.

The width argument, and what Nicklaus did with it

Clinton Shum, writing on TPI's site, says the flying elbow is not necessarily a fault and that many good players have carried one, Nicklaus most famously. He also explains why the elbow moves at all. The backswing asks the trail shoulder to rotate outward, and that rotation is what sets the clubhead where the player wants it.

Jon Tattersall, a Top 100 Teacher writing for Golf.com in 2022, puts the weight elsewhere. What mattered in Nicklaus's action, he argues, is that the elbow worked in front of the rib cage going back and lowered on the way down, timed with a large shift onto the lead side before the body rotated.

Brady Riggs, another Top 100 Teacher, went further in 2020. Any player without tour-level flexibility and speed, he wrote, ought to consider letting the elbow fly, because a higher and more powerful position at the top becomes easier to reach. His condition is narrow: the shaft parallel to the target line up there rather than crossing it.

Furyk, and the amateur with the same top

17 wins, one majorJim Furyk's PGA Tour record with that backswing

Jim Furyk built a career on the position. The shaft goes almost vertical, the trail elbow flails outward, and the club finishes across the line. David Feherty's description of it, repeated by Golf.com, was "an octopus falling out of a tree". Seventeen tour wins, one of them a major came out of that anyway.

The useful part is a pro-am. Golf.com's Zephyr Melton watched Furyk play the Honda Classic alongside a partner whose backswing looked like a copy, and for a moment it seemed the man might shallow it coming down. He did not. He came over the top, while Furyk looped the club from across the line into line with his trail forearm, hips turned so far by then that the elbow was nearly behind him. Two swings shared a top and separated completely below it.

The bill falls due at one frame coming down

T. J. Tomasi, Director of Research at Keiser University College of Golf, states it without hedging. A basic of a good downswing is that the trail elbow lines up with the trail hip at some point; if it does not, the clubhead is trapped behind the hip and cannot get into position to release. His deadline: by the time the lead arm is parallel with the ground on the way down.

So find that second frame. Lead arm parallel, coming down, trail elbow against the trail hip. Level with it or in front of it, and the fly has been paid for. Still outside it, and the club is arriving from wherever the backswing left it. Tomasi warns against buying the position by tilting the spine away from the target, which drops the trail shoulder too far and sends the clubhead into the ground behind the ball.

When it is mobility rather than a technique choice

55-85° against 95-125°Trail-arm bend at the top: tour players, then amateurs

TPI lists physical reasons the elbow leaves the side. Mobility restrictions in the shoulder girdle limit the range available there, thoracic spine limitations shrink that range indirectly, and without stability at the scapula-thoracic junction, Shum writes, you cannot rotate the shoulder and hold the elbow under the club at all. An elbow flying for any of those reasons is the body taking the exit it has.

Both TPI pages are careful about the cost. Shum says the position can move the club off plane and across the line, and the characteristic page says it can create sequencing issues on the backswing and the downswing. Neither calls it a fault.

The soft spot is the evidence. No published study measures trail-elbow height at the top against handicap, strike or ball flight. The trail-arm variable that has been measured is fold. Shaun Webb and Mike Granato of Athletic Motion Golf report nearly all the tour players they captured at 55 to 85 degrees of bend at the top, and most amateurs at 95 to 125 degrees: a more folded arm, not a higher one.