Effortless power — every golfer’s dream when stepping up to the tee with a driver. In a recent Performance Golf YouTube video, coaches Eric Cogorno and JT Thomas break down a crucial, yet often overlooked, element that can make your driver swing smoother and more powerful: loading your arms correctly.
Keep reading and watch the video below for a drill to create that effortless power and hit the ball further with less effort, something that’s especially important with your driver swing.
Why Loading Your Arms in the Golf Swing Matters
How you load (or hold) your arms relative to your chest is a make-or-break part of the driver swing. Most golfers struggle with power in their golf swing because they either:
- Use up their arm space too early, collapsing into poor positions.
- Fail to load their arms at all, leading to powerless swings.
The goal is to keep your arms in front of you early in the swing and load them behind your body later — creating the stretch and separation that unlock effortless speed and distance.
Step One: Keeping Arms in Front Early
At the start of the swing, focus on preserving space between your arms and chest. To feel this:
- Place your right hand in an “L” shape, with fingers touching your chest and bicep to monitor that gap.
- As you turn, maintain that space, avoiding collapsing or overextending too soon.
- Think of turning your torso and chest together with the arms, rather than letting arms overtake the body.
The Drill: Hold the club across your torso (between sternum and belly button) and turn, keeping your lead arm slightly ahead of the shaft to reinforce proper arm-body connection.
Step Two: Loading Arms Behind for Power
Once you’ve nailed your takeaway and kept your arms in front through the first third of the swing, these are your next steps for effortless power:
- Pull your arms behind you — positioning them behind the midline of your body at the top.
- Imagine opening a door with your trail arm, moving it back and around to create a big stretch across your chest and back.
This stretch creates elastic tension — essential for “effortless” power. As JT notes, think of it like a throwing motion: you can’t throw a ball far if your arm is pinned to your side — you need that separation to generate speed.
Bringing It All Together: Drill and Practice
Bringing these two steps together and combining these two moves, you want to be sure you start the swing keeping arms in front of the chest (hip to sternum height) and from there, load arms behind your body as you complete the backswing. Practice slow, smooth rehearsals, then hit soft drives focusing on these drills, not swinging as hard as you can trying for distance at first.
Players like Rory McIlroy, Bryson DeChambeau, and Kyle Berkshire load their arms beautifully to generate massive distance with seemingly easy swings. While you don’t need to replicate them perfectly, observing how they place their arms in the backswing can unlock huge distance in your driver swing.
Effortless Power Starts Here
If you’ve been struggling to find that “easy power” with your driver, how you load your arms may be the missing link. By keeping arms in front early and pulling them behind later, you create the stretch and flow that leads to longer, smoother drives.
Try these drills, experiment with the feels, and let us know how it works for you. And if this breakdown helped, don’t forget to like and subscribe to Performance Golf for more game-changing insights!
