It's the question I've been obsessed with my entire life: How are these guys so good at golf? Golf is an impossibly difficult game. Millions of people play it—most of them terribly—and yet somehow, a few hundred have managed to get fantastically good at it.
In 2025, I spent another year working like a scientist studying tour pros like lab rats making their way around a maze. Studying what they do. Thinking about it. Asking them. I haven't found the answers yet, but here's a few interesting things I picked up along the way …
1. Tour pros' obsession with their grips is on another level
This year I started tracking which pros use midsize grips. So far, only a handful. Most use really tiny, skinny grips. Why? They say it gives them better clubface control and feel.
Soon, however, I learned that Neal Shipley is one of those who does use midsize grips.
When I saw him on the range earlier this year, I asked him about his grips. He said that he's so particular about his grips, he insists that his clubmakers use spiral tape rather than the standard strips because that way he can feel the little grooves between the tape spirals, and therefore know exactly where to place his fingers. No chance the rest of us would notice something like that.
When it comes to feel and connection to the club, these guys are on a different level.
David Cannon
2. Joaquin Niemann's side bend is his superpower
Joaquin Niemann has one of those polarizing moves that really animates armchair golf swing analysts.
The main critique is that because of the amount of severe side bend in his swing—how much he tilts his body away from the target—people say he's almost certainly going to get injured in the future.
Well, that's not exactly true.
Yes, it may be true that side bend can be a red flag for injury generally. But it's also true that the human body can move in lots of different ways, and as a result, people are strong in lots of different ways. It could be that moving like this is what's helping Niemann avoid getting hurt, rather than a precursor to him getting hurt.
As for how it came to be: Neimann said he naturally gravitated towards this amount of side bend because as a little guy, it helped him rotate more. It was by bending like this that unleashed his ability to turn. It gave him a lot of pound-for-pound strength. It also made him one of the best ball-strikers in golf.
Just because it's a move that may hurt you, doesn't mean it hurts him. In fact, it's the thing that makes it work.
3. Your stance should fit you, not a textbook
That insight from Niemann came at a LIV Golf League photo shoot I was at earlier this year. Sergio Garcia and Charles Howell III were also there, and I noticed that day how each of them had fairly unique stances.
Sergio's was really narrow, well inside shoulder width.
Howell's was on the wider side, with both toes flared and his knees pushed out.
As I've gotten more into strength training this year, I've learned that stance width is very particular to the person doing the lifting. Wide may make one lifter feel strong and the other weaker.
The same is true in the golf swing.
A textbook can give you a general idea of how to stand, but the best golfers tailor their stances to what they feel they need. Your stance should make you feel balanced and powerful, like you're ready to jump. That may look different than what the textbook says.
4. Your go-to club needs more than just technology
At that same shoot, Brooks Koepka showed me his 2-iron that was so heavily used the shaft was almost indented. It's his favorite club, and he says he's never willingly going to replace it.
There's no technological benefit to having a golf club this worn—not to mention the face that's almost certainly caved in. But that's what I learned from Brooks this year: When it comes to your most trusted club, forget the science. It's about the intangibles. If it makes you feel confident, and it works, it's doing its job.
5. The best alignment isn't the same for everyone
A few months later, at the Cognizant Classic, I was watching PGA Tour players practicing at PGA National. At one point, there must have been 20 players on the range, and all 20 had alignment sticks on the ground in different configurations.
A lot of players had them arranged like train tracks—one down their feet, one down the ball line.
Some just had it down the ball line.
Interestingly, others like Isaiah Salinda, had them misaligned. Salinda's footline stick was pointed to the left, but the target line was pointed straight. When I asked him about this, he said he was setting his stance in an open position so he could practice swinging out to the right, even though he tries to swing left and hit fades on the course. He's correcting for a tendency he has by doing the opposite so he never overdoes it.
It looked weird, but worked, and that's the lesson. Find the lines that work best for you. Lee Trevino set up open, and that worked for him. Some people need to set up square, some people need to practice setting up open and others closed. It's all about what fits your eye and starts the ball in the direction you want.
6. Speed train through the bag, not just with driver
We shot a swing sequence of Luke Clanton, a rising star, at that same event, where I learned from his coach, Jeff Lishman, that this undersized bomber didn't just speed train from a young age with his driver. He speed trained through his enture bag. His coach would set target swing speeds for his 7-iron, 5-iron, 3-wood and driver. His intention was to hit his goal speed with each club, starting with the shortest one. That prevented his swing from becoming too driver-centric. He wasn't just chasing speed—he was chasing sustainable speed.
7. When working on your swing, ignore where the ball goes
It's not a coincidence that Rory McIlroy finally got to work on some lingering issues in his golf swing during the offseason, then started this season better than anybody else on tour and capped it by winning the Masters and completing the career Grand Slam.
McIlroy spent most of the offseason hitting golf balls, but not knowing exactly where they were going. He hit them into a blank, turned-off simulator screen at night while in New York for six weeks filming "Happy Gilmore 2."
The lesson there is simple: When you're working on your golf swing, work on your golf swing. What the golf ball is doing is a short-term problem and not hugely helpful in that task.
Oisin Keniry/R&A
There are times when the opposite is true—when you need to put away the video camera and focus only on what the golf ball's doing, like before a round or during tournament weeks.
Practicing with feedback is important, but practicing with the right kind of feedback to fit your goals is essential.
8. Use your peripheral vision to improve body positioning
Brendon Todd uses an interesting five-ball setup on the range where the middle ball—a yellow one—sits directly in the middle. It was a good idea, and with a good reason behind it.
The yellow golf ball is a visual cue to help him visualize where his body was in relation to the ball. He didn't want to set up with his body too far behind the yellow ball, and he did want to get his lower body in front of it on the way through. Just putting something in his peripheral vision can help him accomplish his goals.
There are some good technical benefits to this trick, but he also likes the routine of it. It gives him a sense of consistency. The day-to-day of golf may change, but the approach remains comfortably the same.
9. Feel your hips turning level to avoid a reverse pivot
Michael Thorbjornsen shared an interesting tip during our swing sequence shoot earlier this year—a good one for anybody who struggles with a reverse pivot.
The young Stanford alum tries to feel like his hips are turning level to the ground when he turns them, and recommends the same for others. When golfers let their right hip get much higher than their left hip as they turn, it puts them into a reverse-pivot situation. It's a death knell for their sequence—and probably their ball-striking, too.
10. Golfers are getting serious about lifting heavy
In March at Bay Hill during the Arnold Palmer Invitational, I got a few minutes with Rory McIlroy, where I quizzed him him about lifting. I turned it into an article and underlined an important lesson: A growing number of golfers are hitting the weights hard—benching, squatting, the stuff you'd expect a home-run hitter to do.
Watch this space: Golf is finally about to catch up to other sports whose athletes have been doing this for years. Golfers are going to get bigger and stronger, and they're going to do it by lifting heavy weights. There's another speed wave coming. I guarantee it.
11. Your practice swing doesn't have to look pretty
During the 2025 PGA Championship, I followed Padraig Harrington and Luke Donald for a chunk of the first two rounds. I noticed how Harrington would do practice swings gripping the club left-hand low, and during the actual swing, he would slam the clubhead into the ground.
When it was time to hit, he of course just swung his normal swing. But I enjoyed that lesson he was trying to deliver: It truly does not matter what your practice swings look like. Who cares if your practice swings look weird? They should. Their only use is to give you a last-minute feel before pulling the trigger.
12. Soft right hand in transition, firm at impact
Around June, at the time of the Memorial, I got really interested in grip pressure and how it changes during the swing. Coincidentally, that's when I saw Viktor Hovland working on exactly that.
It's pretty common to spot Hovland hitting golf balls with his right hand off the club. This is to prevent him from gripping too hard with his right hand in transition, which steepens the club.
It's something Hovand struggling with, and something the rest of us can learn from. If you want to get shallower in transition, try feeling a soft right hand and then grip hard right around impact.
13. The body follows the eyes
Some of the best players on tour these days have some really interesting head movements.
Scottie Scheffler's head seems to move up and back.
Rory McIlroy kind of tilts his towards his right shoulder.
Ben Griffin lifts his chin up as he swings.
When I asked Sean Foley, a top teacher, about this, he said that golfers' bodies tend to follow the eyes—where the eyes go, the body does soon after.
In many ways, what you're witnessing with these head movements is intent. They're trying to use their eyes to move their body soon after. Sometimes that means pulling their bodies back so their hands can release—that's what Rory is doing.
Other times golfers may lift their head and chase their eyes down the line—think David Duval—as they try to speed their body.
The body follows the eyes. If you want your body to do a certain thing, think about how you can use your eyes to do it.
14. Turn like a ferris wheel on the backswing
At the Ryder Cup in September, top 50 coach Dana Dahlquist, who teaches Bryson DeChambeau, told me something that has stuck.
DeChambeau is working on turning more on his backswing, but he's also trying to lift up as he turns. The reason why is because, oversimplified, as Bryson lifts up on the backswing and turns, it releases more range of motion. If he was to shrink towards the ground while turning, he wouldn't be able to turn as much. He'd be locked up.
It's the up that helps create the around. The analogy Dahlquist used was a Ferris Wheel. The wheel is not turning flat. It's lifting towards the sky as it's moving around. That combination is where the real power is.
15. The best golf swing is one that matches your body
This year, Matt Fitzpatrick made the difficult decision of leaving his longtime coach, Mike Walker, for Golf Digest's No. 1-ranked teacher in America, Mark Blackburn. Tough decisions don't come easy, but this reboot did the trick.
Blackburn's genius is focusing not simply on the golf swing itself, but how it matches with a golfer's body. In Fitzpatrick, Blackburn found that the former U.S. Open champ's wingspan was notably long compared to his height, which could influence his golf swing in unique ways. He tended to stand too far from the ball as a result, and his arms would tend long and flat on the backswing.
So, the pair pulled his arms in closer together at setup, steepened and shortened his iron swing to, in Blackburn's words, "manage his golf swing radius." The second half of Fitzpatrick's season was a revelation, as he would go on to make the European Ryder Cup.
The lesson? If you're chasing positions, beware. The best golf swing is one that matches your body. Tailor your golf swing to your body. Not the other way around.
David Cannon
