AI golf swing analysis: how it actually works

Filming your swing on your phone has become second nature. The hard part is what comes next: you watch it back, decide it "looks a bit off", and have no idea what to do about it. Without a trained eye, a swing video is raw information, not a diagnosis.

That's exactly the job of AI swing analysis: turning a few seconds of video into measurable data, and then into things you can actually work on. Here's what really happens between the upload and the report.

This article covers the mechanics. For how far to trust the numbers that come out — which are measured, which are estimated, and which a phone simply cannot see — read how accurate AI swing analysis really is.

Step 1: from video to skeleton

The first building block is pose detection. A computer vision model reads every frame of your video and places joint markers on it: shoulders, elbows, wrists, hips, knees, ankles, head — and, on systems that track it, the club. FlyAway's pipeline follows 21 keypoints in total.

Frame by frame, those points form a skeleton that tracks your movement. From that point on, the AI is no longer working with pixels but with geometry — angles, distances, rotational speeds. That shift in representation is what makes everything else possible.

Step 2: splitting the swing into phases

A swing isn't one uniform motion, it's a sequence. The algorithm identifies the key moments, and FlyAway's analysis segments eight of them:

• Address — setup, alignment, posture
• TakeAway — the first move away from the ball
• BackSwing — the rest of the way up
• Top — the change of direction, where a great deal is decided
• DownSwing — acceleration into the ball
• Impact — the few milliseconds that determine ball flight
• FollowThrough — the release after the strike
• Finish — balance at the end of the motion

This automatic segmentation matters more than it sounds. Saying "your wrists break down" is meaningless without saying when. The same angle can be correct at address and a problem at impact, so every measurement is anchored to a phase.

Step 3: what actually gets measured

Once the phases are mapped, the analysis produces concrete metrics. FlyAway scores 17 dimensions, plus a weighted overall figure. The ones worth understanding:

Tempo. The ratio between backswing duration and downswing duration. The benchmark observed among tour professionals sits around 3 to 1 — three times as long going back as coming down. A rushed backswing is an extremely common amateur fault, and one of the easiest things to fix once you see it as a number.

X-factor. The separation between shoulder and hip rotation at the top. Below about 25 degrees there isn't enough coil to generate speed; above about 60 degrees the position becomes hard to sequence back down. Both extremes get flagged.

Kinematic sequence. Whether your hips start the downswing before your shoulders, and by how much. Get this backwards and you're over the top, which is the mechanical root of most slices.

Posture and stability. Spine angle held from address to impact, vertical and lateral head movement, how your centre of mass travels through the swing.

Lag and shaft lean. Wrist angle retention into the downswing, and whether your hands are ahead of the clubhead at impact.

Step 4: fault detection

This is where measurement becomes useful. The analysis compares your data against known technical patterns and flags characteristic deviations. FlyAway screens for 26 named faults — 10 detectable from a down-the-line view, 16 from face-on.

They're the catalogue an instructor would recognise: over the top, casting, early extension, reverse pivot, chicken wing, flying elbow, hip sway, hip slide, hanging back, blocked release, spine raise, overswing, poor shaft lean, insufficient wrist cock, unbalanced finish, and the rest.

Each one comes back with a severity — high, medium or low — and the exact frame range where it appears, plus the single frame where it peaks. That last detail is what makes the report checkable rather than something you have to take on trust: you can scrub straight to the moment and see it for yourself.

The overall score isn't the interesting part — it's a tracking reference. What matters is the prioritised list, because out of five detected faults one is usually causing the rest.

Filming it properly: the part that changes everything

This is the most underestimated step. An analysis is only as good as the video behind it, and most disappointing reports are capture problems rather than model problems.

Pick your angle. The two standard views don't show the same things:

• Face-on (perpendicular to your target line): best for tempo, weight transfer, rotation and balance. Most faults are detectable from here, along with kinematic sequence, x-factor and lag — which is why it's the view to choose if you only film one.
• Down-the-line (behind you, along the target line): best for swing plane, spine angle, head stability and club position.

Put the phone at hand height, not on the ground and not at eye level. A camera that's too low distorts angles and skews the reading.

Step back far enough that your whole body and the club stay in frame from start to finish, follow-through included. A swing cropped at the top of the backswing is the single most common mistake.

Shoot at 60fps or better — 120 or 240 if your phone supports it. More frames mean more accurate detection, especially around impact where everything happens fast.

Mind the light, and what you're wearing. Backlighting, harsh shadows and low light noticeably degrade detection. So does loose clothing, which blurs the body outline the model depends on, and dark clothing against a dark background. Fitted clothing against a contrasting background measurably improves results.

What you get at the end

On FlyAway, once your video is uploaded the analysis runs as a live stream — you watch it progress rather than staring at a frozen screen. What comes back:

• An overall score out of 10, plus the 17 individual dimensions
• The list of detected faults, each with its severity and its exact location in the swing
• A ball-flight tendency — slice, fade, straight, draw or hook — inferred from club path and sequencing, reported with a confidence level rather than as a hard measurement
• An optional annotated video with the skeleton overlaid: you literally see what the AI saw
• A coaching report that traces symptoms back to likely root causes, with an action plan
• Training videos matched to the faults you actually have, rather than a generic playlist
• The history of your analyses, so you can compare over time — which is where it gets genuinely useful

One behaviour worth knowing about: metrics that can't be measured from the view you filmed come back marked as not applicable rather than estimated. Kinematic sequence and x-factor need face-on video; head rise and spine angle need down-the-line. Those fields are excluded from the overall score instead of being filled with a plausible guess.

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Try AI swing analysis with a video from your next range session — and before you act on the report, it's worth knowing how accurate these numbers actually are. For longer-term work, the AI coach builds a training plan from your analyses and your scorecards.