The Advice That's Secretly Ruining Your Swing!
Golf Podcasts · 8/18/2026 · 7.9K views · 196 likes
In today's Athletic Motion Golf podcast, Mike Granato & Shaun Webb discuss one of their biggest realizations from years of 3D data: your bad golf swing is much closer to a great one than you've been led to believe. Almost every move golfers think of as a major fault (the flip, the shift off the ball, the trail leg thrusting forward) is actually the natural, athletic movement done at the wrong time, not the opposite of what good players do. The problem is that the instruction industry has spent years teaching the opposite. Take a player who flips and shaft-leans back, then tries to fix it by shoving the hands forward into 14 or 18 degrees of shaft lean, and you've sent them further from the truth, not closer. We get into why zero (or even 2 degrees back) is closer to the tour average than the extreme numbers golfers chase, why the rib-cracker and pinched-arm drills hurt more than they help, what Scott Hamilton says about taking shaft lean OUT of players, and why the club champions at every course are more lined up at impact than any of these forced positions. Plus: the Bryson divot photo everyone misreads, "science evolves one funeral at a time," Webb's Windows and the ranges that actually matter, and why every choice in your swing has a consequence. Give yourself some grace, learn the good ranges, and be careful where you get your information. 👉 FREE: Add Instant Distance With This GO-TO "Distance Injection" DRILL: https://athleticmotiongolf.com/distance Chapters: 00:00 Bad swings are closer to good swings than you think 00:35 How the instruction industry teaches the opposite 01:00 The flip vs forcing too much shaft lean forward 01:18 The natural athletic move done at the wrong time 01:46 The punch-shot method that ruined his release 02:34 Why pinching the ball between your arms is so bad 02:58 The rotating arm action of good players 03:20 Why he can't get under 10 degrees of shaft lean now 03:51 The "opposite" that's all over Instagram & YouTube 04:18 Club champions everywhere are lined up, not forward 04:42 Rory, Aaron Rai, and the straightest hitters 05:00 The bowed-wrist trend vs the best players 05:20 Where that method actually came from (a "look") 05:55 The rib-cracker drill (and the bruise as a badge) 06:29 Scott Hamilton: taking shaft lean OUT of players 06:45 The 135-foot-high 7-iron college kid 07:07 Why this one's personal (the locked lead arm) 07:28 The leg thrust: closer than pinning the trail leg back 08:14 The winners all make the same big movements 09:02 Too big a shift off the ball (still closer than you think) 09:20 "Rein it in, don't do the opposite" 09:30 The Arm Shark analogy for over-correcting 10:25 The clubface-matching-spine myth 11:00 The Bryson divot photo everyone misreads 11:32 The Ben Hogan rubber-tee photo 11:54 "Science evolves one funeral at a time" 12:50 Why zero shaft lean is closer to the tour average 13:35 Tour players who played themselves OFF tour 13:56 The food & starvation analogy 14:44 How this made them better teachers (leave more alone) 15:21 Webb's Windows: the ranges that matter 15:47 Rotation at impact: huge range, least correlation 16:12 Why 4 degrees of shaft lean beats 14 for most golfers 16:32 Be careful where you get your information 16:51 Why your drills leave "fingerprints" in your swing 17:32 Natural vs manufactured movement patterns 17:51 Give yourself grace, get a qualified eye 18:13 Learn the good ranges (2 to 8 degrees of shaft lean) 18:51 Choices and consequences #golf #golfswing #golfpodcast #shaftlean #golftips