Younger players? Go ahead, Padraig Harrington says, and “go with it” with your body as hard as you like in your swing, and your arms will keep up. 

But the not-so-younger players? 

“Our biggest problem,” he said. 

Talking last week during Golf Channel’s “Happy Hour,” the three-time major winner had been shown a clip of him working with players — an activity where he’s become maybe peerless among his fellow pros — when Harrington was asked what he’d shared. He said it was what he tells a lot of folks.

His lesson featured body movement. 

“Pretty much what I tell all recreational golfers, all guys who get a little older,” Harrington said on Golf Channel. “Our biggest problem is our bodies can keep moving, but our arms can never keep up with that speed. So, well, I tell young guys they can go with it with their body as hard as they like, and if they’re practicing every day, their arms will keep up. But for the older guys, you know, most guys who play golf, or girls, later on in life, they play once or twice a week, and they think that turning, — turning through, turning back or turning through — is gonna increase speed. It really doesn’t.

“The likelihood is the arms are going to drop behind, not be able to keep up.”

What’s the fix then? 

“If I was teaching an older player or a casual golfer,” Harrington said on Golf Channel, “I would 100 percent say, swing your arms and hands and make them drive the body out of the way. So the opposite of what you would teach a junior. So you’re swinging your hands and arms as hard as you can, and they will drive and push your body out of the way much more so than if you spin at all. 

“I see it every week. My amateurs, they want to hit it harder. They spin the upper body, and their arms just can’t get down. They can’t. They stay up, and then they have a late release, a flip at it, and they mishit it.”