A Practical Look at the De La Torre Golf Swing Method
The De La Torre Golf Swing is a teaching methodology that gained traction on the European circuit before filtering down to club-level instructors. At its core, it focuses on a compact, one-piece takeaway combined with a neutral wrist hinge angle established early in the backswing. The idea is to reduce lateral weight shift and create a more rotational path through impact. It isn't rocket science, but it does require a specific type of repeatability that some players find surprisingly difficult to build. Most modern instruction pushes a separate hand and body takeaway, where the arms swing away while the torso stays quiet until later in the motion. The De La Torre approach keeps the arms and lower body moving together from the very first move of the backswing. Your hands, club, and chest initiate the takeaway as a single unit. This produces a shorter, wider arc because the club never gets separated from your body rotation. The wrist set happens at roughly a 45-degree angle rather than the full 90-degree cupping you see in conventional teacher recommendations. That angle is maintained through the top position, which means you aren't trying to reset your wrists during the transition. One practical consequence: players who try to force a full hinge often snap the club too far inside and come down offline. The 45-degree limit prevents that over-cocking.
How to Build the Swing from Scratch
Start with a half swing using a mid-iron. Position yourself with feet shoulder-width apart, weight balanced evenly across both feet initially. Make your first move by rotating your lead hip and shoulder together while the hands stay low and close to your body. Do not lift the club with your arms alone. Think of your upper body turning as a plate, with the club trailing behind it on the same plane. Once you have that single-unit takeaway down, work on the wrist angle. Hold a alignment stick against your lead wrist and practice hinging only until the stick forms roughly a 45-degree angle with your forearm. If it goes beyond that, your hand is collapsing inward instead of hinging properly. This check took me maybe three sessions to internalize, and I had been playing for over fifteen years at that point. For the downswing, the key is letting the lower body initiate while the arms and club drop into the slot rather than being actively pulled. A good drill is to place an impact bag about six inches in front of a normal ball position. Take your De La Torre Golf Swing setup and make slow-motion swings until you can strike the bag with the clubface square and your hands slightly ahead of the clubhead. Most people overshoot the bag because they aren't used to the compact tempo. I hit the bag too hard on my first five tries and actually bruised my thumb on the grip because I was gripping harder out of frustration.
The tempo here is different from a traditional swing. You're looking at roughly a 3-to-1 ratio of backswing to downswing time, but the backswing itself is shorter. A full traditional backswing might take two seconds. This one takes closer to one second. That compression is what creates the consistency, and also what makes it feel strange if you're used to swinging long and loose.
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Common Problems and What Actually Works
The biggest issue I see is that players try to add power by extending the takeaway further than the method allows. The compact arc is the entire point. If you pull the club away with your arms first, you've defeated the mechanism. The workaround is to tape a string from your belt button to the grip of the club. If the string goes slack during the takeaway, your arms and body have separated. Keep it taut throughout the first thirty degrees of rotation and you'll stay connected. Another problem shows up with ball position. Because the swing is more rotational and less laterally aggressive, ball position needs to sit slightly forward of center compared to a conventional stance. I had a student who kept fatting shots because he left the ball back in his stance like he was hitting a traditional fade. Moving it two inches forward fixed it immediately. No other adjustment was needed. There's also a quirk with drivers. The compact backswing doesn't naturally create the same clubhead speed potential as a longer takeaway, which means you lose a few yards off the tee if you don't compensate with ground force. I learned this the hard way after switching to this method and dropping about twelve yards off my driver within a week. The fix was loading the trail leg more aggressively during the setup address and feeling like I was pushing into the ground during transition. Once I added that vertical force component, the speed came back to within five yards of my previous numbers.
Where This Method Actually Fails
This isn't a universal solution. Players with hypermobile wrists or those who already have a deep, independent wrist hinge tend to struggle because their natural mechanics fight the 45-degree constraint. You'll find them constantly resetting their wrists mid-swing just to get the club to square up at impact. If that describes you, this method will be a source of frustration rather than improvement. Similarly, if you have a severe slice caused by an outside-in path due to poor hip rotation, the De La Torre Golf Swing won't magically fix it. The rotational focus helps some people, but if your hips simply won't turn, you'll just hit more consistent slices instead of inconsistent ones. In those cases, going back to fundamentals on hip clearance and understanding the K-sequence is more productive. The method also doesn't translate well to players who rely heavily on arm strength and quick hands. If your game has been built on a fast transition and aggressive release, switching to a slower, more rotational tempo feels like driving a manual transmission after years on automatic. Give it at least eight weeks before judging whether it works for you. I personally spent about ten weeks feeling like my short game had regressed because I was overthinking the takeaway on every chip and pitch as well. That carryover effect is real.
Resources and Download Options
There's no single official downloadable program you can just grab and run. Most of the material is distributed through certified instructors who've completed the De La Torre curriculum. Some video breakdowns exist on YouTube under search terms like De La Torre Golf Swing tutorial, and there are a few independent PDFs that summarize the key checkpoints. None of them are particularly comprehensive on their own. The most complete free resource I've found is a set of swing checkpoints posted on a Spanish golf instruction site that mirrors material from Miguel Martin's clinic notes, though the page is entirely in Spanish and the layout hasn't been updated since 2019. If you're serious about this method, the practical route is finding a certified instructor and committing to structured lessons. Self-teaching from scattered videos leaves a lot of room for misinterpretation, especially around the wrist angle and transition timing. Two or three lessons with someone who can watch your actual swing from multiple angles will save you months of building bad habits on top of partial understanding.
