Swing Metrics — Seeing Whether You Hold Your Posture Through the Swing

The Swing Metrics panel exists to answer one fundamental question: are you maintaining your posture through the swing, or losing it?

Most amateur swing faults come from posture breaking down somewhere between address and impact — the spine angle straightening (standing up out of the shot), the hips sliding forward, the head lifting. You feel like you swung the same as always; the video shows you actually moved your skeleton noticeably between the frames where it mattered most. The metrics make that movement measurable instead of a guess.

The two metrics that matter most

Spine tilt

How much your spine angle changes from address to impact. At address you've set up at some angle leaning over the ball; the question is whether you're still at that angle when the club arrives.

Even a small change is a big deal. A spine that straightens 8 degrees between address and impact means you've "stood up" through the shot — and that translates directly into thin contact, high spin, or pulled shots, depending on what compensations your hands make. Tour players hold their spine angle within 2–3 degrees through impact. Most amateurs lose 6–10.

The metric lets you scrub through a swing and watch the number change in real time. The frame where you see the biggest jump is the frame where your swing is leaking power and consistency.

Center of hips movement

How far the center point of your hips has moved from its position at address. Measured in inches, in any direction.

This catches the things hard to see on raw video:

• Early extension — hips moving toward the ball through impact (most common big-handicapper fault — the club gets stuck behind, hands flip to save the shot)
• Hip slide — hips moving toward the target through impact without rotating (loss of power + erratic contact)
• Reverse sway — hips moving away from the target in the downswing (low-point too far behind the ball)

The light-bulb moment most golfers have with this metric: "Wait — my hip is 3 inches forward of where it started? No wonder I'm flipping the club to save it." Once you can see it, you can feel it. Once you can feel it, you can fix it.

Joint angles across the swing positions

Beyond the two key metrics, the panel can track angle measurements at any joint across the 10 filmstrip positions: shoulders, hips, knees, elbows, wrists. Useful for deep-dive work on specific phases of the swing — e.g., "is my lead wrist flat at the top?" or "how much does my trail knee straighten in the downswing?"

These angles aren't graded the way the two key metrics are — they're numbers you read and reason about. The AI Coach uses them under the hood when answering questions, so even if you don't dig into the panel, the data is doing work.

How to read the panel

The panel shows the metrics alongside your video. As you scrub through the swing, the numbers update live to whatever frame you're on. The most informative comparison is address vs. impact — for both spine tilt and hip-center movement, that's the comparison that tells the story of whether you held the structure you set up with.

Tap into the filmstrip (Filmstrip FAQ) to pull up the actual frames the metrics are computed from. The metrics inherit any nudges you make there — if you correct a misdetected impact frame, the numbers re-compute against the corrected frame.

What to chase

For most golfers, working on these in this order tends to produce the fastest improvement:

1. Get your hip center within ~1 inch of its address position at impact. This eliminates the biggest single source of ball-striking inconsistency for amateurs.
2. Get your spine angle within 3 degrees of address at impact. This unlocks the consistent low-point most amateurs chase but never quite find.
3. Then start looking at joint angles for specific feels you're working on.

The AI Coach reads these same metrics when generating feedback, so once you have the profile set up and a few good swings in, you can ask "what should I work on?" and get an answer that's anchored in the same numbers you see on this panel.

See also: Video Review — Reading Your Swing for the panel system overall. Filmstrip for the frames the metrics are computed from. AI Coach for how these metrics feed AI feedback. Training Profiles for telling the AI what you're specifically working on.