Should I hold the finish on every swing?

Foy's drill asks for three to five seconds, and it is a useful test to keep. Hold it when you are working on something, and treat a fight to stay there as information about your transition and pressure shift rather than a finish to muscle into place.

Does a balanced finish mean I hit a good shot?

No. You can post up in a textbook finish after a shot that started right and stayed right. The finish reports weight and rotation. Where the clubface pointed at impact is a separate question. Treat it as one input.

Is a short, low finish always wrong?

Not on its own. Plenty of good players finish shorter with wedges and knockdown shots, and some full-swing finishes are simply lower. The warning sign is the direction of the lean: backwards, away from the target. The height of the hands matters less.

My finish is fine but I still hit it fat. Why?

A finish can be assembled after the ball is gone. If your weight arrives on the lead foot late, the end position can look right while the contact was already wrong. Watch the frames around impact, not just the last one.

The swing, position by position

What Your Golf Finish Tells You About Your Swing

The finish is the one position in the golf swing you can hold still. Read it properly and it tells you where the downswing went wrong, before you look at anything else.

A golfer held in the finish position, weight on the lead foot, trail heel raised and chest turned toward the target. Keith Allison, CC BY-SA 2.0

Why coaches look at the end first

The finish is the only part of the swing that lasts longer than a fraction of a second. Everything before it happens too fast to feel, so a coach watching you hit balls is often reading the end, not the beginning.

Four things to check on the final frame. Weight on the lead foot (left foot for a right-hander). Chest and belt buckle pointing at the target. Trail heel off the ground, only the toe touching. No wobble.

Nick Foy of Foy Golf Academy has a Hold the Finish Drill: stay in that position for three to five seconds. If you cannot, Foy lists four causes: the arms overpowering body rotation, pressure that never shifts, rotation stopping at impact, and poor tempo. All four happen before the finish, which suggests balance is rarely the thing to practise.

The finish that falls backwards

Stop your video on the last frame. If your weight sits on the trail foot and your upper body leans away from the target, the fall back did not start there. It started in the downswing and the finish is where it became visible.

This usually traces to a reverse pivot: the upper body tilts toward the target going back, then away from it coming down. The bottom of the swing arc then sits behind the ball, which is why fat and thin shots turn up in the same round. That is its own subject.

The finish that collapses

A different failure. Your weight got forward, but you are folded over: chest still pointing right of the target for a right-hander, arms low and across the body, spine bent.

That is one of the causes on Foy's list, rotation stopping at impact. The body quits turning and the arms overtake it. Golf.com's cue for a full finish is the opposite instruction: keep turning until the chest faces the target.

The arms then run out of room and swing left across the ball. A slice often follows, and that has its own guide.

Hear it

Three clicks: takeaway, top, impact. Start at the tour beat and move to whichever one you can actually swing to.

Where the evidence is thinner than the cue

The one difference that reached significance in Okuda, Gribble and Armstrong's force-plate study was rotation: skilled players turned the upper trunk less at follow-through, 43.3 degrees against 55.2 for the low-skilled group (p<0.01).

The weight numbers are untidy. Vertical force under the lead foot averaged 0.78 times body weight in low-skilled players and 0.68 in skilled ones, with more under the trail foot in the skilled group. Those weight-transfer differences did not reach significance, so read them as a reason to doubt the coaching line "all your weight on the front foot", and leave it there.

Balance is the same story. Donatelli and colleagues tested 23 LPGA professionals and found them most stable standing on one leg in the follow-through position, with no meaningful link between world ranking and balance scores. A held finish is a good sign. It is not a score.

Reading it on your own video

Film face-on, watch the last frame, and compare your head position with the one at address. Behind it means you hung back. Then look at the chest line and the trail heel.

Pebble Swing scores the finish as one of six sub-scores, reading joint angles from pose tracking that runs on the phone. However you check it, log which of the two failures shows up and how often. A pattern across ten swings is worth more than one frame.

Questions

Should I hold the finish on every swing?: Foy's drill asks for three to five seconds, and it is a useful test to keep. Hold it when you are working on something, and treat a fight to stay there as information about your transition and pressure shift rather than a finish to muscle into place.
Does a balanced finish mean I hit a good shot?: No. You can post up in a textbook finish after a shot that started right and stayed right. The finish reports weight and rotation. Where the clubface pointed at impact is a separate question. Treat it as one input.
Is a short, low finish always wrong?: Not on its own. Plenty of good players finish shorter with wedges and knockdown shots, and some full-swing finishes are simply lower. The warning sign is the direction of the lean: backwards, away from the target. The height of the hands matters less.
My finish is fine but I still hit it fat. Why?: A finish can be assembled after the ball is gone. If your weight arrives on the lead foot late, the end position can look right while the contact was already wrong. Watch the frames around impact, not just the last one.

Sources

Every number on this page comes from one of these.