The swing, position by position
What "on plane" at the top really means
By the end you will know what the shaft position at the top is telling you, why it came from a misread drawing, and why tour players who look nothing alike here all hit it well.
Two different checks, talked about as one
Filmed down the line, from behind you on the target line, stop the video at the top and look at where the shaft points. Left of the target for a right-hander is called laid off. Right of it is across the line. Along the target line is what most coaches mean when they say you are on plane at the top. Where to stand with the phone has its own guide here.
The second check is whether the shaft has reached parallel to the ground. That is a different measurement, about length, not direction. A short swing can point straight down the line. A long one can be past horizontal and still point straight down the line. People argue about both as if they were one position.
The idea came from one book, and it was misread
Ben Hogan's Five Lessons, first published in the late 1950s, drew a sheet of glass running from the ball up across the shoulders. Most of the plane vocabulary amateurs use starts with that drawing.
Hogan's instruction was to keep the lead arm under the glass going back. The glass was a ceiling for the arm. It was never drawn as a rail for the club shaft to ride, which is how most of the plane policing since has used it.
Your lead arm is allowed to bend
Stop the frame at the top and look at the lead arm. The old rule says it stays straight from address to the top. Some flex is common, and how straight it looks also depends on how far the shoulders have turned.
Bend going back only costs you if the width never comes back. Forcing the arm rigid usually costs you turn without buying you anything.
Hear it
Three clicks: takeaway, top, impact. Start at the tour beat and move to whichever one you can actually swing to.
Tour players are nothing like each other here
Adam Young's page on backswing length shows tour players stopping well short of parallel and others going past it. He calls the parallel position an arbitrary look with no performance relevance.
The teaching professional Andrew Rice pairs the two looks up: longer backswings should almost have an across the line look, and shorter ones need the clubhead more behind them, laid off. Read that way, the shaft direction at the top mostly tells you what kind of backswing you have.
How much it predicts
TrackMan calls face angle the most important number for deciding where the ball starts. That is measured at impact. The top is a long way upstream of it, and plenty of players who look wrong at the top arrive correct at the ball. Plenty of others reach a textbook top and then throw the club outward from there, which is the over-the-top move and has its own guide.
This is one of the most over-policed positions in amateur golf, mainly because it is the easiest one to see. It holds still for a frame, and a phone camera catches it cleanly. Ease of measurement is not the same as importance. Pebble Swing scores the backswing as one of six sub-scores read from your video's frames, alongside impact and tempo, rather than treating it as the verdict.
Questions
- Is being laid off at the top a fault?
- Not on its own. A shaft pointing left can make the face harder to square, which is why coaches flag it. It matters only if you cannot deliver the face square at impact.
- Do I need to get the shaft parallel to the ground?
- No. Parallel is a look, not a requirement. A length you can control and repeat beats a length you have to strain into.
- If the top matters this little, what should I look at instead?
- Impact and the change of direction into it. Those decide the face and path numbers the ball actually reacts to, and both have their own guides here.
Sources
Every number on this page comes from one of these.