Back in my early teens, I lived on the golf course and trained, played, and competed with ball strikers who made it all the way to the biggest tours and even the Ryder Cup. They were better, but not a lot better than I was.

I had some kind of small swing flaw in relation to them, but I could never understand it. More on that later.

So how did they develop their motions? Was it through strapping on 3D vests, studying advanced ground pressure patterns, or assisting their range sessions with 25 different club stats at impact?

Not really.

They took the headwind walk toward the training area 2 kilometers away. 2–3 clubs in their hands and the good old practice bag full of physically abused tour balatas. Then, on the rather shoddy grass turf, they would just beat balls until it behaved the way they wanted it to. It wasn’t small training sessions with a bucket on the range, but three-hour stretches where you fetched the balls yourself.

I did the same.

Swing development was clearer back in the day. You were forced to have good technique since the balata ball just wouldn’t accept a steep, glancing blow motion. Notice the wording—forced to have it. If you didn’t develop, you would basically quit, and that type of motivation trumps all analysis.

Also, please consider this: a balata ball was like 3 bucks, and as a youngster, you were constantly broke. Thin it the wrong way, and you would put a rift in the ball that would smile up at you at address. More important than you might think.

Long story short, you needed a proper inside, shallow striking path that you could later maneuver for different shots. In fact, we almost never talked about technique in our training, and if anything, the level of depth was maybe “stick the finish” or “accelerate through the ball.”

But we had a hidden advantage. We started young, and we weren’t strong. We couldn’t cheat, but were rather forced to make that club work for us.

Towards the Modern Instruction Break Up

In my early 30s, I took my first headfirst dive into swing development. Alright, let’s make this swing good for once. Some key coin drops and a three-month period later, I had taken my weak 78 round and turned it into a sub-70 score.

Was it through deep mechanical change and slow-motion analysis? Was it through going to 25 different coaches? Nope, it was much simpler than that.

Sure, I did a bit of reading here and there, but that wasn’t the success factor. It was all about finding that internal hierarchy of what actually matters. My thinking was unspoiled (since I knew very little about instruction at that point), and the frame of thought went something like this: “So you have early extension and feel that the swing isn’t reaching its full potential? Ok, then do the opposite of that. Make space with the body and swing all the way through.” This just outranked anything else, and I laser-focused on achieving just that.

Achieving this development and lower scores led me into coaching since I just loved helping others improve. And now the challenge began. As a coach, you are supposed to work under certain principles and “be smart” about how you talk, right? I spent three years talking mumbo jumbo, but since I had so much dedication and commitment, it worked out anyway. But I knew so little—so very little.

I ventured into the mechanical world of golf instruction and got more confused by the minute. None of this applied to my own youth development or my even better playing buddies’ development. Five swing changes later, I stood basically at the same spot—forcing mechanical changes based on stuff that doesn’t matter.

Somewhere, I had to do something different. It can’t be this hard. I need to go back to the roots and start from another vantage point.

I started a collaboration with my colleague Per Källfelt, and over seven years we’ve discovered a thing or two. FMM is my own project, but our discussions have been paramount to its early development.

Fueled by our discussion, a different—and I believe correct—train of thought started to appear.

Working with Softer Thought Patterns

Soon this mindset started growing on me. The best of the best cannot have performed something as difficult as the systems I studied a couple of years ago. It must be much simpler so that it can be performed at speed and under pressure.

Another vague question started forming. Why did my best golf always feel like the club was just working for me? How can I inspire that so I don’t get in the way of that process?

I started looking at golf swings with softer values in mind. I stopped looking at shaft lean, dynamic loft, and hard numbers, and instead aimed my attention at fluidity, harmony, and impact-area synchronization—the opposite of a choppy, hiccup swing.

And since my modern swing endeavors had injured me over and over again, I made it my top priority to find a swing technique that doesn’t make you the cash cow of the local chiropractor.

Where can I find these answers? Where can I find fluidity, harmony, effortless power, and longevity?

In the 1930s, 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, and a little bit in the 90s. In these decades, the majority of top players had these more fluent, harmonic motions. From the mid-90s until today, it’s the odd player out that has it.

Now a much more important question started forming: What facilitated these motions? How can I start using the club in different ways to inspire my motion?

A standard swing change used to take 20,000 reps, and now I was seeing changes in maybe 500 reps. It was astonishing. I was finally looking at the right facilitators.

Safe to say, my breakup with modern instruction was complete, and I’ve never looked back.

Now, let’s talk about old-school fundamentals.

Old School Fundamentals – What I’ve learned

Old-School Swing = Less Taxing Body Angles

So old-timers could play their entire careers, and modern 23-year-olds leave the tour with back problems. What’s the deal?

Let’s make it super simple. If you have a shut face, you need to push the energies forward to avoid snap-hooking it. When you push forward, you steepen your swing. What do you need to make that equation work out? Lean to the right, side bend, right lateral bend, etc.

If you are strong, do it the right way (leaning thoracically and tucking your pelvis for lumbar disc space), and have the mental capacity to act in the impact area (which 95% of the golfing population don’t), you have just developed a tour-level motion. Personally, I’m not athletic enough, and my brain doesn’t allow me to do it. And if I do it anyway, my “bad swings” will hurt my body. So it’s a no-go.

Let’s take the other extreme. Imagine your spine as completely straight in the impact area (sure, you have a bit of hip flex and residual bends from the power…). What do you need to do to get to the ground? Release the club.

That’s the difference between extreme modern swings and a theoretical base-layer old-school swing.

What more is needed to be able to do the old-school one? Well, you can’t play a shut clubface, can you? Open the blade toe-up in the backswing mid-position, and you’ve opened the gateways for releasing the club.

If you injure yourself, then what’s the point at all, right?

Ok, that was the first box to be ticked. Let’s move on.

The Best Breaks “Common Rules”

The golf industry has a slight tendency to spit out different “truths” that are then quickly adopted as rules that you need to obey. But my finding is that there are no general rules that make sense:

  • For instance, the biggest enemy of golf is early extension, yet Jack Nicklaus early extends more than most.
  • The hands are a unit, yet Tiger Woods feels everything in his right hand. And Mr. Nicklaus clearly describes his trail hand as power and his lead as support.
  • You are supposed to close down the clubface with the lead hand, yet Ian Woosnam uses his right hand.
  • You are just supposed to let the club fall in the downswing, yet Mike Austin whips it out to not lose it behind him.
  • You are supposed to keep your head still, yet George Knudsen said allowing his head to move unlocked his swing.
  • You are supposed not to sway, yet Payne Stewart moves all over the place and has loads of fluidity and consistency.
  • You need to have your club outside your hands, yet Raymond Floyd drags his hands in like the classic “over-the-top ad” you see on YouTube.
  • You are supposed to have the blade as your spine, yet Ben Hogan spirals his lead arms 45 degrees in the forearms and probably another 45 with the humerus bone.
  • Sam Snead holds the club like a live bird, Ernest Jones says hold and don’t grip the club, and Ben Hogan post-war developed a grip that made him hold it tighter to snap harder.

So a general “one-size-fits-all” set of rules seems quite obsolete, doesn’t it?

Common Denominators = Different Pattern Buckets

There’s a clear difference between many modern swings and old-school fluid motions, but that’s not enough. There are loads of differences in the old-school world too.

The normal catchphrase to deal with this is “swing your swing,” but that leaves a lot on the table. A missed opportunity at best.

The best of the best definitely share common denominators, and I’ve made it one of my key assignments to find them.

At the end of the day, it all boils down to how you put energy into the golf club in different directions, but this is also paired with matching ground and body work.

Voila, patterns emerge.

The common denominators that I see, I try to put into these pattern buckets that make sense of the old quotes, sayings, and descriptions, and provide a way of avoiding some of the biggest faults in golf, including taking the right tip for the wrong swing—or, as many instructors put it, taking someone else’s medicine.

So let’s dig in with some general observations.

  • Almost every single golfer from the early 1990s back to the start of golf has had a lot of fluidity in their motion. It’s been one continuous journey all the way to the follow-through. No stalls or hiccups.
  • Many really early golfers (pre-1930) would have a bent lead arm in the top backswing position, showing very low tension.
  • Almost all players from the inception of golf to the early 1990s played with at least a toe-up position in the mid-backswing (blade opening happening mostly in the backswing).
  • Almost all of the longest-lasting strikers have a relatively straight body with relatively little hip flex and side bend through the shot. They kind of rotated in what I would call “from the feet” instead of “from the hips.”

There are more observations, but these aren’t to be taken lightly. And even more importantly, why does the clear world No. 1, Scottie Scheffler, have more of these moves than anyone else on the playing field?

Now, let’s move into observations in pattern buckets instead.

Not One Holy Grail – Different Solutions

When I started looking at this, experimenting, and guinea pig testing, it became clear. There are different underlying intentions that create different golf swings

If I were to categorize, at my current knowledge level, it would be big arc swingers, backside pushers, impact body rotators, lead drag & trail whippers, and finally trail power hitters.

And all of the categorizations (that I actually educate about) hold flexibility for idiosyncrasies within them. With that said, let’s dive in.

Big Arc Swingers

The big arc swingers would portray a high hand backswing position and perform these long, fluid motions. This would be all the way from Bobby Jones, which kind of revitalized through Nicklaus, Weiskopf, Watson, Miller, Ballesteros, Stuart, Els, a certain Mr. Woods, all the way to early McIlroy, Thomas, Scott, and the modern Scheffler. Their body movement can at times be quite wild which in itself tells a story of a power package that’s pretty simple to do, right? If you can go that extravagant in the look, then the athletic task behind it—the base power, if you will—should probably be pretty easy to accomplish.

John Jacobs called this swing style the American disease for a while and claimed it was too upright. Nicklaus commented back in his book Golf My Way: no problem—I just make it wider. I like to listen to the sources if anything… 

Backside Pushers

Over to the flatter motions like Thomson, Venturi, Knudsen, Trevino, to some extent Moe Norman, Player, and some more. All of these seem like very simple motions where accuracy in the ball flight was kind of a common denominator. It’s a very different form of power than the big arc swinger, right? It’s more intense, almost “swing hack”-like. Peter Thomson was critiqued for hitting it too short despite the fact that he won five British Opens in seven years. Sometimes analyzing and comparing makes us miss the forest for all the trees.

I call it backside pushing since the release is entered quite unintuitively from the backside in a rather early fashion, which then creates matching with a steepening and outside, property-bound target push. A very linear motion.

Impact Body Rotator

Also, in what I would consider to be the golden era (30s–50s-ish), you would have the master himself—Mr. Hogan. In his 30s swing, he was all over the place. In the later part of the 40s, his swing became the best of all time, in my opinion (pre-injury). The perfect blend of swinging power accompanied by a synced, aggressive body rotation never seen after it. In the 50s, and the Five Lessons swing, it became more mechanical and tight, and quite possibly even better performing.

Point being, Mr. Hogan had the most aggressive full-body rotation through the impact area known to golf. How did he accomplish that? He’s the odd one out, really. Well, that could be an article of its own, but let’s just put it like this—he probably did something different than you think. Massive amounts of blade opening in the backswing, probably completely different balance points, and a power system that was as far from the big arc users as it gets. Sounds about right?

And by the way, who was Mr. Hogan’s ball-striking idol? Wild Bill Melhorn.

Lead Drag & Trail Whip

Born in the same year as Mr. Hogan (1912), Mr. Snead portrayed a bit more of a swing motion with more centered tendencies. The power protocol utilized an intentional lead-hand handle drag with an aggressive whip for power. Not as much lateral slide as Hogan, but possibly more beautiful to watch.

I would argue that many, many golfers have been inspired by—or come to the same conclusion as—Mr. Snead when it comes to power. Mickelson, Singh, and many more share the same traits (the trail hand almost leaves the club to ensure the release of centrifugal force). Woosnam describes his downswing like Snead too.

Trail Power Hitters

Warping a bit forward, somewhere in the early 90s, when Mr. Faldo’s amazing swing change carried him to early-90s dominance, the era of golf instructors started. Now it just becomes complex and difficult to follow. Ideas to use the big muscles only and to take away disturbing parts of the golf swing, I believe, sent a lot of great players into swing-tech prison. Or, in my own view, we moved away from the core of a golf swing, which has always been to swing the base pendulum. There is no such thing as a never-miss swing.

Happily Tiger Woods came along and presented some clarity to a very scattered swing technique perspective. A clear leader had emerged. A leader that basically just copied Jack Nicklaus with his own twist.

The only key takeaway I have from the early and mid 90s is the influence of early O’Grady work. You could see this movement influencing swings all over the place, and the MORAD early project is to be respected as one of the most true-of-heart contributions to golf ever. It would be more about trail arm usage in a centered entity inspired by Mr. Kelley’s hitting protocol.

I really like this style of golf swing and stumbled upon it whilst working with vertical power elements in my own experimentation setting. It’s very much a trail-downswing-focused motion where you trap the ball. In its pure, easy, non-overcomplicated motion, I call it trail power hitting.

Finding Your Fit = Luxury of Complete Focus

Having worked with thousands of students over the years, I don’t say this lightly. If you fit with a pattern, you have hacked swing development.

You narrow the scope, and you can start ignoring 95% of the golf instruction world. You can stop chasing the quick fix on YouTube and instead get the laser focus that is needed to perform your swing.

You just need to answer two questions: How do you make the club work, and which swing style should you focus on?

The biggest gains are within these questions. The biggest losses are within trying to do something that doesn’t fit you.

So, how to get there?

Becoming Old School in a Modern Setting

What actually facilitates a harmonic fluid swing and how do you accomplish it? How can you make it achievable?

I’ve pretty much found an answer. It goes something like this.

Knowledge First & Club Intentions = Swing Development

There’s some kind of unwritten norm of swing development. You are supposed to go to a coach for lessons and just trust it. And of course, do your reps in between each session. But don’t forget to book your next appointment, please.

Having performed all of these swing changes on myself and worked with a guinea pig community for the last decade says otherwise. You need knowledge (what to do & why) and clear directions on how to perform it from the brain’s perspective (the how).

I cannot overemphasize this: understanding your golf swing (however simple the explanation might be) is the most important part of swing development. It’s the foundation for trust, and it’s the manual for returning from cold stretches. And it’s not supposed to be rocket science hard.

Now over to how you develop your motion. In three words:

Use the Club.

In more words, for some kind of base swing: make a backswing where you allow club rotation (so that you can use the club) to a toe-up mid-backswing position. Lift the arms on top of a 45-degree rotated body. Let the wrists cock and hinge, and let the arms fold naturally. Voila—pretty much a functional backswing. Now picture the entire journey of the club from the top of the backswing to the follow-through position as something meaningful. It’s a journey. A long journey, and the ball gets in the way.

How can you inspire it? With direction of energies in the club. With ground pressure shifts that you can harness athletically (depending on the pattern).

Club intentions and how we put force into the club in different directions will make your whole body move. The club will become the leader of the show. Old-timers would swing a very heavy club to feel the forces.

It’s really only about the balance of how much you swing the clubhead and how much you swing the hands. This forms a base pendulum. I’m not big on “golf instruction” since it never really helped me, but I will say this: Ernest Jones spent 120 pages writing the last version of Swing the Clubhead. There’s a reason for this. Forming a swing-arc-inspired motion that works will take you away from years of deep method development. The base pendulum’s rather flawless execution takes you away from 95% of all possible swing faults.

So what’s my contribution, then? Well, I love that book, but I’ve found that you can go BEYOND swinging the clubhead and move into the realms of different great players by inspiring the club with power arrows (energy directions) in different patterns.

First “Lesson” at 75 Years Old

In mid-2025, I got a message from Bertil, a 75-year-old golfer who had been playing for 60+ years. He had just watched a highly non-explanatory video I made called “Let the Club Do the Work” and said that he had just added 20 yards. As a man of action, he just drove by one day and said, “I’ve never taken a lesson, but I wanted to meet up.”

We talked for 10 minutes about golf swing power, and he showed some swings. I said, in more words than this, that he was almost there and showed—with a crayon on a hitting mat (high-end technology)—that he should aim his energies earlier instead.

Bertil hit one shot, flushed it, and said this: “Why the heck did I never look behind that door?” We said our goodbyes, and he was on his way again. A man of action. In his motion, he was manipulating his arc so much that his pendulum was broken. With one change in his mind, he went from glancing blows to flush contact.

In early 2026, I received a message saying that he had played the best golf of his life. Sure, I convinced him to buy my educational knowledge first, but I’m very proud to say that I managed to unclog his mind and narrow his scope to what matters in a golf swing.

This is a “picking the raisins out of the cake” kind of story, but it proves a point. It’s NOT supposed to be too difficult.

Now let’s talk about an easy step progression to go more old school.

Performing the Old School Advantage

So how can you start to harness this goodness yourself?

Well, for starters, you can actually use the fact that we have some really great advantages right now. A TrackMan facility will give you, black on white, your numbers. Do me a favor and don’t overuse it. Use club path, face-to-path, angle of attack, and low point. That’s all you need.

Secondly, you can film your progress, but DO NOT fall into the slow-motion trap. Golf swings aren’t performed in a slow-motion position train of thought. Analysis should start with the big picture, not the small stuff. Does it look fluent, smooth, unhindered?

Equipment Matters – Get a Training Club

There’s a reason almost every modern tour pro uses a 130g steel shaft. They need to feel their power. And there’s a reason most tour pros play much flatter equipment.

One of my students and early adopters has a very free and clear mind. He instantly took my ideas (or the old greats’ revived ideas) and applied them to a show pilot. You know the beautiful maniacs who fly in loops in the sky with small, agile aircraft. Whenever they are supposed to make a turn, they need to dump their nose to be able to perform their desired motion, BUT if they dump their nose too much, they move down into a death spiral.

Translated into a downswing blade rotation: if your lie angles are too upright, your nose dive becomes too aggressive, and you start to over-rotate. This leads to residual effects of you not daring to release the club and results in a loss of power and dynamics.

And please get a pretty hard-to-hit club. You are much more athletic than you think. I borrowed one of my dad’s blades all the time whilst growing up—heavy, hard to hit, and definitely flatter than most of today’s clubs. It definitely helped develop my swing arc power.

Long story short: get your hands on, e.g., a 2–5-degree flat (depending on your arm length) blade or almost-blade 6-iron with a somewhat heavy steel shaft. Preferably a Dynamic Gold R300 or S300.

The flatter lie will allow more release. The heavier weight and the shaft construction will allow you to feel the club, and the blade characteristics will force you to center your strikes. Congrats—you’ve just acquired the best swing coach of all time. (If you want a really fancy addition and like pleasure through pain – then buy a similar setup 3 iron.)

Step 1 – Make the Club Work Basics

Stand with your feet together and see your arms and club like a triangle. It leads the show.

Make a backswing where you allow club rotation (so that you can use the club) to a toe-up mid-backswing position. Lift the arms on top of a 45-degree rotated body, and the chest will rotate by itself. Let the wrists cock and hinge, and let the arms fold naturally. Voila—pretty much a functional backswing.

Make a complete swing, feet together and all, where you end up with the hands above your lead shoulder. Yes—lead shoulder. Your intention and the actual chain of events separate. You try to get them there but it doesn’t happen. BUT it inspires release of the club and desired body behavior. One more thing. Hold the club—don’t grip it. Soft and free, please. This ensures that you can unleash force and make your body (since it’s more tension-free) respond to the club.

Do this until you have a good harmony of the hands vs. the clubhead and you have efficiently created a solid base pendulum. Overcast it, and you will lose power and chunk it. Handle drag, and you will thin it with an open face. Just grind it out.

Step 2 – Widen Your Base and Get Rid of the Chunk

When you widen your base (separate your feet), you step into one of the “problems” in golf that you need to solve. Since we grip our right hand under our left hand, we most of the time create a slight tilt in the body. With force applied and just performing a pendulum, you will actually strike the ground just before or at the golf ball most of the time (depending on ball position, of course).

This is NATURAL, and here lies the biggest fault in golf swings: the famous over-the-top movement. To deal with that, we manipulate forward to not chunk it. This leads to an outside path, steepness, and a loss of harmony generated from the “make the club work” swings.

So what to do instead? Well, why not just shift the base and allow the body to do its thing?

Make a backswing and get your entire body over on the lead side (all of it, and break the rule of a head that needs to be still). Now perform your swing circle like in Step 1.

Congrats. You just created a body that starts reacting to the forces in the club, and since your base has moved forward (Scheffler moves his base 10–15 cm), you’ve secured a low point after the golf ball. And even more importantly, since you’ve moved forward, your pressure has entered the lead foot, which means that you get the ability to react from the ground WITHOUT trying to do it.

This sounds nuts, but that’s a golf swing. That’s it. Is it the perfect one? No. Is it functional? Yes.

Supercharging is where it really starts to shine.

Step 3 – Supercharging Within a Pattern

With a decent base pendulum on top of a low point in check we want to reach our full potential. 

You direct the dynamic energies (how you feel the energies) in the golf club to inspire the swing arc circle to have a faster moving clubhead.

You supercharge the base pendulum.

But this is where I need to leave it since I need video to convey my messages.

I’ve created knowledge-first and swing-change material building upon the above-mentioned steps in what I call Big Arc Swinger, the Backside Chop & Push, and the Trail Power Hitter. The Impact Body Rotator comes in early Q2 2026, and then the Lead Drag & Trail Whip pattern will be presented.

A top recommendation in swing development is that you harness the inspirations that you have. It’s much more powerful than you might think since it allows the slight courage and tenacity needed for swing change. If you love Nicklaus, don’t do Hogan.

Pick a pattern. Get to work, but please consider this: you should feel the start of a change within 50-100 balls. Otherwise, you are performing something that is unnatural to you. Some kind of vague industry standard may suggest six months and 50 000 reps to accomplish a swing change. That’s probably 47 000 reps too much.

I price my light version of education as low as possible ($10 on YouTube and $29 on Skillest) so you can test it without burning a hole in your wallet. If it fits you, dive deeper to increase your knowledge about your swing. It builds trust and confidence.

No matter what you do, put yourself on top of the hierarchy and use us “know-it-alls,” like me, as tools for your development. Don’t just lend out your head fully. You need to own it. 

Or let me suggest an alternative approach. Get yourself a vintage ball bag and fill it with the spiniest balls you can get your hands on. Give them a proper beating—on grass turf.

Best of luck in your endeavors!

Petter Tärbe

Contact & Next Step

My edcuational patterns are located inside the FMM Academy..

Just contact? Email me at forgottenmastermoves@gmail.com or message me on SKILLEST here.

I read and respond to everything.

General Article Collection Pages

More FMM Swing Articles

Some General Swing Tech Posts (with Videos)

Old School General Articles