Your swing felt good from a distance, but when you watched the video, your hips were moving toward the ball, your chest was rising, and your stance was disappearing, just when you needed more space. This is early extension and can break contact in a hurry. The good news is that this problem usually improves when you stop looking for random adjustments and start using exercises that teach your body how to move best.
What is early extension??
Early extension is the moment when your pelvis moves towards the ball instead of staying back and rotating. When this happens, the room you had for your arms and club starts to disappear. Your hands get crowded, the club is thrown out, and you end up hitting thin, heavy shots, heel side or across the face of the club.
The important thing is that early elongation is usually a compensation, not the root problem. Many golfers aren’t just standing for no reason. They often lack depth in the backswing, lose pressure on the back leg, or never learn how the pelvis should tilt and rotate during the kick. This is why yelling at yourself to stay down rarely works for long. With my students, I keep coming back to exercises that create proper movement rather than forcing a band-aid fix. These three are the ones I use most often, and they reflect some of the best ideas from other instructors whose work I really admire.
Exercise 1: Wall Exercise (done right)
The wall drill from Top Speed ​​Golf is still one of the best ways to get the feel right. It’s also one I’ve relied on with my students because it gives immediate feedback without turning the pace into a science project. Get into your golf stance with your back lightly touching a wall. Then sink slightly into the club and take a few steps forward so that your hips are just off the wall. From there, take a back turn and feel your trail hip or trail pocket, turn toward the wall as you turn.
Now try it transition. As you start down, feel your lower body relax and rotate instead of driving toward the ball. Let the club work down the wall as your lead hip begins to clear. By the time you move into the backswing, the glute of the lead should be the side interacting with the wall. This is the great lesson of coaching. You are not trying to lift your hips. You are learning how one hip works again on the backswing and the other cleans on the downswing.
Start without a ball and take it slow. If the wall misses you immediately, this is a useful feedback. Once you can move from hip-deep to lead-thigh-deep without heading for the ball, add a few half-swings. The wall gives you a simple checkpoint to stay in position while still making a true turn.
Workout 2: Early Push Recovery Workout
The Athletic Motion video makes a smart point that many golfers miss: many golfers try to fix early extension with a bad version of the chair drill and only get more stuck. For reference, the chair drill is a simple practice move where you lay on your back lightly touching a chair at address to help train the depth of your hips and keep your pelvis from moving toward the ball. Pinning the butt in place is not the answer. The best feeling is to learn how the pelvis can stay back, tilt correctly and rotate quickly. Get into a golf position with your arms across your chest or hold a club over your shoulders and practice slowly without the ball.
As you lean back, let the trailing leg work behind you. Then, starting from the bottom, feel the pelvis sink in slightly as the lead thigh begins to sweep back and around. Think less about pushing the belt buckle on the ball and more about creating space. Your chest stays bent, your knees continue to work, and your hips roll instead of snapping toward the ball. This is the difference between an athletic move and a panic move.
This is where many golfers finally understand why the old advice on golf swings can be misleading. Good players don’t just keep their backs on the line and hope for the best. They create depth, then use the tilt and rotation of the pelvis to maintain that depth long enough for the club to shallow and deliver. If you repeat this slowly in front of a mirror, you’ll usually see the problem more clearly and feel the fix more quickly.
Do 10 to 15 slow repetitions, then swing to the waist with the same feeling. If your hips talk toward the ball, stop and reset. If they stay back as the lead side clears, you’re moving in the right direction. This workout is about getting your body moving better, not about holding a pose.
of Eric Cogorno and Trevor Salzman’s video adds a really helpful pressure hint. I really like this because it’s simple, it’s measurable, and it’s helped a number of my students who need a better feel for where the path should work in the backstroke. Place a golf ball under the foot of the trail toward the outside of the front, around the side of the big toe. The idea is to not balance there forever. The idea is to use that pressure point as feedback so that the trailing hip works again instead of the whole pelvis moving towards the ball.
Do a few slow backbends and feel the pressure under that part of the leg as a platform to push the hip of the track behind you. If you roll it or it swings badly, you’ll know right away. From there, swing and let the pressure move naturally, but keep the feeling that the track piece created the first depth. For many golfers, this feeling makes early extension much more difficult to do because the hips finally have somewhere to go besides the ball.
Start with practice swings, then switch to half-speed shots. You can also do small fist swings at first. If the contact improves and the club stops charging you, this is your proof. This drill gives you an easy way to feel a better back load, better hip depth, and a more focused movement right away.
The simple truth
The early extension is disappointing, but it is not accidental. Usually, your body is solving a problem in the wrong way. The wall drill teaches depth and rotation. Early push-back training teaches you that holding back doesn’t mean stalling. The footstep press drill teaches you how to create depth from the ground. Do all three together and you’re no longer just trying to stop a bug. You are building the movement that makes the mistake less necessary in the first place.
