Brooks Koepka Golf Swing Analysis

Wasn’t that an awesome final round of the 2018 PGA Championship?

Best major of the year in my opinion. Of course, it helped with Tiger Woods surging up the leaderboard on the final day. But how rock solid was Brooks Koepka under the pressure?!

Hitting long and straight drives, sticking his irons and holing pressure putts.  Let’s take a look at how Brooks did that…

Brooks Koepka – Golf Swing Analysis

First we’ll start by looking at how Brooks sets up to the golf ball.

What an athlete!

Just by his setup it looks like he’s going to crush it. Brooks has a very athletic, ready to explode setup. There’s a few things I just want to point out.

1. He has quite a lot of knee flex at setup.

2. He has quite a strong grip, and I’ll show you how that affects his swing later in this analysis.

3. Brooks is a long hitter and one thing long hitters do is tee up the ball very high and have the ball positioned a long way forward in their stance. Plus, they have wide stances to give a solid platform to explode. Brooks does all of these things, as you can see.

One thing I want you to notice at this point in the analysis is the distance between his knees at setup. There’s a lot of space between his knees.

Ok, let’s look and see how Brooks takes the club away. I’ll draw a few important lines on the swing images so we can track his head movement, swing plane and tush line…

Brooks has a nice wide take away as you can see above left. He takes the club away on plane with his hands but the club head is outside. I have heard him talk about how he does that on purpose to help him hit a power fade.

Notice how closed the clubface is and how much outside the clubhead is from the hands. Again, he is doing this on purpose to hit a power fade. It seems counterintuitive to have a closed clubface in the backswing to hit a power fade but a lot of the golf swing is counterintuitive. Now let’s look at the half way point in his swing to see how his shaft plane is.

The clubshaft is quite vertical at this point in the backswing but if you err on one side or the other in the backswing, you should have the club shaft more vertical in the backswing. This is the opposite of what most amateur golfers do.

Most amateurs take the club back too flat and then come down too steep.

At the top of the backswing Brooks has a very closed clubface. It’s a great top of the backswing position though and one thing to note is the distance between his knees has largely stayed the same from setup to the top of the backswing. His knees have moved very little. You need to be very flexible to be able to do that and still make a full turn. Speaking of that… his turn with his shoulders is not massive. If he let his knees go a bit more he could turn further, but there’s no point in doing that with his length.

Remember I mentioned how his backswing plane was quite steep?

Well, unless he shallows the plane a lot in the downswing he would be a terrible ball striker. Of course he’s not, so check this shallowing out….

That’s some serious shallowing of the club shaft. Check out the blue line compared to the yellow line. If he came down on the same plane as he went back you would have never heard of Brooks Koepka.

When the club is parallel with the ground (left pic above) you can see that he is back on plane with his hands and club. The clubface is closed which it should be to hit a power fade. He wants the ball to start to the left. You can see in the pre-impact picture that he is leading with the hands and his head is slightly behind where it was at address.

Look at the image above of impact. You can tell the ball is starting left. He has maintained his tush line. Then in the picture of post impact you can see there is very little forearm rotation. The clubface is not flipping over, which will lead to consistent power fades.

Look at how he is still maintaining his tush line and how he is keeping down with his head. This is allowing him to swing more down the line rather than around.

Even at this stage in his swing he has his head down and he’s still maintaining his tush line. You have to be very athletic and flexible to do that!

What a great finish. He has maintained his tush line right the way through the swing until the end. Simply awesome.

I really like Brooks’ swing. He has proved it holds up well to major pressure. I believe he will win more majors. He seems to get himself up a notch for them. Not a bad trait to have!

So what’s the big take-aways for you when looking at Brooks Koepka’s swing?

Well, there’s a couple of important things.

1st. Work on maintaining your tush line throughout the swing and you’ll hit more consistent golf shots.

2nd. If your swing plane is too flat on the backswing and then too steep on the downswing like this….

…then you need to change it so it’s at the very least similar on the way back as it is on the way down, like Tiger Woods…

If you don’t do that then you’ll always struggle with your ball striking.

To help you do this, I have 3 Easy Steps you can complete to get a Professional Swing Plane.  So if you suffer from any of these shots often:

  • Hooks and/or Slices
  • Fat Shots
  • Thin Shots
  • Shanks
  • Tops
  • Duffs
  • Whiffs
    You name it…

Then your poor swing plane is probably the major reason why. But you can fix it. And when you do you’ll hit the ball so much more consistently than ever. If you don’t fix it you’ll always struggle with your ball striking. Don’t let that happen. Go here and get the 3 Easy Steps To A Pro Swing plane program.

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Jeff Richmond