The feeling of catching a shot thin or topping it completely because you lifted your head is a common frustration in golf. The reality is, keeping your head down is some of the most misunderstood advice out there. This subconscious urge to stand up is a deep-rooted swing issue, not just a simple head movement. It's about your entire body losing the posture you established at address, causing a chain reaction that prevents a clean, powerful strike. This article will break down why you're really coming up in your swing and give you actionable drills to help you stay down, rotate properly, and start compressing the golf ball.
When a coach says you're "coming up" or "standing up," they're not just talking about your head popping up. They're describing a loss of your original spine angle. At address, you create a specific posture: you tilt forward from your hips, bend your knees slightly, and your arms hang down. This creates angles that you need to maintain throughout the swing to get the club back to the ball in a consistent way.
Coming up is when your spine angle straightens during the downswing. Your hips move forward toward the ball, your chest and head lift up and away from it, and your arms are forced to make last-second compensations to try and find the ball. This is one of the most common swing faults among amateur golfers, and it's the root cause of many frustrating shots:
Simply telling yourself to "keep your head down" misses the point. Your head is rising because your body is forcing it to. The real problem starts much lower down.
The technical term for standing up in the golf swing is early extension. This is the big kahuna, the habit you need to break to start striking your irons pure. Early extension happens when your hips and pelvis move towards the golf ball during the downswing instead of rotating away from it.
Think about your belt buckle. In a good golf swing, as you start the downswing and rotate through impact, your belt buckle should turn around and point to the left of the target (for a right-handed golfer). In a swing with early extension, your belt buckle moves forward, closing the space you need for your arms and club to swing through.
Why does this happen? Most often, it’s a player’s attempt to generate power. Many golfers have a subconscious instinct to thrust their hips and "push" into the ball to create speed. They haven't learned that true golf power comes from rotational speed, not a forward lunge. The body is an incredible machine, it knows it will get "stuck" if the hips don't clear. So, when it can't rotate properly, it creates space by extending early and standing up. It's a compensation born from an incorrect understanding of the power source in the swing.
Before jumping into drills, it's helpful to understand the feelings you're trying to achieve. Breaking early extension is about reprogramming your lower body to work differently. It’s not about restricting movement, it's about changing its direction.
This is a an effective mental image for many players. Imagine there's a wall or a line directly behind your glutes at address. As you make your backswing, your right glute (for a righty) touches this wall. As you start the downswing, you should feel your left glute move back and along that same wall. Golfers who stand up do the opposite: both glutes move forward and off that imaginary wall as they thrust their pelvis toward the ball.
The transition from the backswing to the downswing should feel like you're unwinding from the ground up. You've loaded into your right hip during the backswing, and the first move down should be a shift of pressure to your lead foot followed immediately by the rotation of your left hip. The arms and club should feel like they are just along for the ride initially, responding to the core and lower body unwinding.
Many early extenders try to start the downswing with their arms and hands, which throws the club over the top and forces the body to stand up to make room. The downswing is a sequence, and it starts with the lower body transferring weight and rotating, allowing the club to drop into the slot.
Knowing what you're supposed to do is one thing, actually doing it is another. Drills are perfect for building the muscle memory needed to make a permanent change. Here are a few simple but powerful drills you can do at the range or even at home without a ball.
This is the classic, number-one drill for curing early extension because it provides immediate physical feedback.
This drill ingrains the feeling of proper weight transfer and forces you to rotate fully, making it very difficult to early extend.
Sometimes you need to feel the opposite to find the middle ground. This drill helps you internalize the feeling of keeping your chest down through the shot.
This isn't really a drill, but a simple setup adjustment that can make rotation much easier.
Standing up in your golf swing is nearly always a symptom of early extension, where your hips thrust towards the ball instead of rotating. Fixing it comes down to re-training your lower body to clear correctly, allowing you to maintain your posture and stay down through the shot. By focusing on keeping your backside back and using drills like the chair drill, you can build the correct movement patterns and start making the clean, compressed contact you've been searching for.
Building a better swing often relies on trusted feedback to make sure your practice is productive. Sometimes, what you *feel* isn't what's *real*, and pinpointing the exact cause of a problem can be tricky on your own. At our company, we developed Caddie AI to act as a personal coach right in your pocket. You can get instant analysis on your swing video to identify if you are genuinely early extending and receive personalized drills right in the app that address your specific issue, taking the guesswork out of your improvement.
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