You cannot fix a swing you've never seen.
That's the whole argument. You can feel like you're making a full turn and be making about forty percent of one. You can feel early extension and be doing nothing of the sort. The gap between what your swing feels like and what it actually looks like is where most golfers get permanently stuck.
The fix is embarrassingly simple: film it.
Why propping your phone against a bucket doesn't work
We've all done it. Range bucket, water bottle, someone's golf bag, a shoe. Then you swing, and the video is:
- Framed at your knees
- Tilted at 30 degrees
- Cut off exactly at the top of your backswing
- Or the phone fell over and filmed the sky
Bad footage teaches you nothing. Worse, it teaches you the wrong thing — a tilted camera makes a perfectly good swing plane look broken.
The two angles that actually matter
Down the line. Camera behind you, on the target line, roughly hip height, far enough back to see the whole club. This angle shows swing plane, path, and body position through impact. It's the one that reveals why the ball goes where it goes.
Face on. Camera directly in front, hip height, showing your full body and the ball. This shows weight shift, hip rotation, and where your low point is.
Hip height matters more than people think. Film from ground level or eye level and everything looks distorted.
How to actually get good footage
Use a real mount. The GPOD is a carbon fiber monopod with a MagSafe magnetic mount — stick your phone on with one hand, adjust the ball head, swing. It's 41 inches, fits in a golf bag, and doesn't require a second person or a prayer.
Or mount it on the cart. A magnetic cart phone holder works for on-course filming and keeps your phone off the seat where it slides into oblivion.
Slo-mo, always. Your phone's slow-motion setting at 120 or 240 fps turns a blurry blob into something you can actually analyze.
Film three swings, not thirty. More footage isn't more insight. Three good reps at each angle, then watch them.
Film the same setup every time. Same distance, same height, same angle. Otherwise you can't compare week to week, and comparison is the entire point.
What to look for
Don't try to diagnose everything. Pick one thing. Head position. Whether your lead arm stays connected. Where the club is at the top. Whether you finish balanced.
One change at a time, filmed before and after. That's the whole method.
The bonus nobody mentions
Once you're filming your swing regularly, you have content. Not on purpose — as a side effect. A good slo-mo swing clip with decent framing is the single most reliably watchable thing in golf social media, and you're already making them.
Whether you post it or not is your business. But the setup that fixes your swing is the same setup that builds an audience, and that's a rare piece of overlap.
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Grip it. Rip it. Review the footage. Regret it. 🪷