Your golf takeaway, and what it does not decide

Where the takeaway starts and where it stops

0.1 mphClubhead speed marking the start of the takeaway in a 250 Hz lab

The takeaway is the stretch between the clubhead leaving the ball and the shaft lying flat, parallel to the ground. Coaches call that end point P2. In most swings the hands are around the trail thigh when it arrives, which is the landmark worth hunting for on a still frame, because you can find a thigh without drawing a single line on the picture.

Laboratories need a start a computer can find. Liu and colleagues, filming sixteen low-handicap men on a sixteen-camera system at 250 Hz, marked the takeaway as the frame where clubhead speed first reaches 0.1 mph. Bourgain's team, screening 517 publications down to 92 for a review of swing kinematics, found no such agreement: phases were detected from club position, from video judged by eye, or from body segments. Nobody owns the definition.

One piece, and the part that is actually moving

A one-piece takeaway means the move from address to shaft-parallel happens as one unit: chest, arms and club going back together, the wrists quiet rather than locked. Britt Olizarowicz's account on HackMotion is the standard one. The hands drift slightly inward rather than straight back, and the shaft, hands and clubhead line up when you look at them down the line.

Handsy is the other version. Golf Distillery puts the cause at the hands rolling over, which turns the face and sends the head inside while the body has barely started. Peter Krause, a PGA of America director of instruction, writes the same fault as a timing check: the wrist cock should blend with the turn. His first check is not motion at all. The butt of the club points at your belt buckle at address, so part of a takeaway is settled before anything moves.

Down the line, the hands and the clubhead overlap

Put the camera behind the ball on the target line and stop the clip at shaft-parallel. Golf Distillery's test is that your hands block the view of the clubhead. Jacob Watson at Golf Insider states the same overlap from the other end, the clubhead covering the hands. Krause reads it as a plane check: clubhead inside the hands is too flat, outside them too steep.

That overlap answers where the two belong relative to each other, and only this camera position can judge it, because the test lives along the axis running away from the lens. Golf Distillery calls it an inside takeaway when the butt of the club aims right of the target, then makes the argument every takeaway drill rests on: inside leaves you blocked, blocked forces a compensation, and the compensation comes over the top. Read that as reasoning, not measurement.

Face on, and the four clubfaces

FourPublished descriptions of the clubface at the same checkpoint

Move the phone to face-on and the same instant answers different questions. The overlap test is gone, because the depth it depends on runs straight away from the lens. What this angle shows is height and lateral drift: how far the hands have climbed, whether the head has moved off the ball, whether the trail hip slid instead of turning.

The clubface is where the sources stop agreeing. Watson says the toe should point at the sky, or mirror your spine angle. Krause says the face points at the ball. Olizarowicz says it points slightly down rather than straight up. Golf Distillery says parallel to your upper body, or slightly up. Four descriptions of one frame, from four sources that teach the game for a living. Treat the spread as the width of square.

What the first move actually decides

60.5° vs 70.6°Backswing plane tilt, driver against 7-iron, sixteen low-handicap golfers

Morrison, McGrath and Wallace captured four highly skilled golfers hitting 40 shots each with optical motion capture and fitted planes to four phases of every swing. Their first result flatters the takeaway. Trajectory variability rose from takeaway to the top of the backswing and fell again on the way to impact, so the start of the motion is among the most repeatable parts of it.

The second result is the one to keep. The correlation between the delivery plane angle and the other planes fell the further back through the swing the plane sat. Their reading is that changes to clubhead trajectory early in the swing can reach the ball, but the effect is stronger the later the change is made. The takeaway is real, and it is the weakest place in the swing to push if you want delivery to move.

One last reason the picture will not sit still. Liu's group measured the backswing plane tilting 60.5 degrees with a driver and 70.6 with a 7-iron in the same sixteen golfers. Ten degrees between two clubs in one bag means a takeaway that looks right with a 7-iron looks flat with a driver while nothing about you has changed. Pebble Swing reads joint angles out of the frames, which is what this checkpoint is made of.