Lydia Ko’s swing – and how we can all learn from it

Lydia Ko is a Major winner again after capturing the AIG Women’s Open at St Andrews.

It added to the Olympic gold medal she claimed in Paris just a few weeks earlier.

The New Zealander is now in the Hall of Fame at the age of just 27.

Ko has been coached by the likes of David Leadbetter and Sean Foley and she is now reported to be back with Ted Oh.

She is the youngest ever player to win on the LPGA Tour and is one of the most talented players of her generation.

Here, Advanced PGA Professional Deana Rushworth breaks down her swing.

The posture

I love this. Throughout her spine it is completely straight so her arms don’t look like they’re going forward from her chest too much and she looks like she’s holding her shoulder blades back nicely as she tips forward. So she’s got very clean lines.

If you were to dangle a club off the back of your tricep, it should hang just in front of your knees, and that’s what she’s got. So, she’s got a light amount of knee flex, which is good because people do tend to over-flex their knees, so she’s doing really well at just keeping her legs lively. There’s a bit of bounce in them but nothing excessive.

The backswing

She takes it back nice and straight and then rotates nicely so, in the first two feet of her takeaway, it is parallel and then you can see as she rotates her lead arm, it covers the top of her right shoulder really well at the top.

So she’s got less moving parts in a sense so there’s that first bit, nice and straight, and then as she’s rotating, it’s a kind of diagonal move really with the club, going up across her body.

What I really like about her backswing is how she turns her hips nicely but without overly sacrificing her right knee flex. There is a little bit of give but a trend these days is to go for this big hip turn in the backswing and they’re losing the right knee flex completely and this then makes it so difficult to transition in the downswing. It’s almost like running a race with someone having a hold of your shirt,

The downswing

This is what I most love about her swing and in particular her right wrist position at the top. She has a wrist break at the top and she retains that as she starts down so there’s not one bit of that wrist coming out of position.

She also lines up the shaft with her trail forearm really well. A lot of players tend to spin out of it, they think that they need to move their hips and they just spin out of it but what you can see with Lydia is that, although she’s moving her hips from the top of the backswing, you can see there’s a slight lateral movement with the hip to the target. So her weight transfer is going to the target and then she turns the hips,

Whereas if she was rotating her hips fully from the top, the club would fling out over the top and it isn’t doing. So she just keeps that left hip in sight for a little bit longer and this helps to shallow the club.

The finish

She’s got a very nice high rotated finish so this is a good indication of coming from the inside to hit the ball and shallowing the club because, if she had a steep out-to-in swing, her through swing would be very narrow and close to her chest and the hands wouldn’t get anywhere near as high as they do. They may get high at the end but there would be no forearm rotation and there is with her so she’s fully rotated to the target.

Lydia Ko’s golf swing in slow motion

The glove armpit drill

You can see here that she has a glove under her right armpit. She has probably got herself into a position where it might be her cue for the downswing, you can see she’s squashing that as she comes down. It’s more a downswing drill but the only thing I would say from an amateur golfer point of view is, when you get them to work on that, they tend to get right sided with their weight shift and they don’t shift their weight. They’ll stay on their right side the whole time.

I do a lot with external focus where I will draw stuff on the mat and then, by them trying to line their club up with that point on the mat, it naturally puts the right arm in but it’s doing it in a dynamic sense rather than a static sense.

Or if you’re on grass, place a diagonal set of three balls with the one on the outside set back and you’ll have another ball set in slightly and ahead of the ball that you’re hitting. So you’ll try and hit the middle one without disturbing the other two. This will improve your club path and, if you are struggling with a slice, then this will train the club to drop on the inside. This will naturally tuck your right elbow into your side without consciously thinking of it.

About Deana
A former England player Deana is now the Head Professional at Witney Lakes in Oxfordshire and she is a regular in Today’s Golfer magazine

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