How to Film Your Golf Swing for Analysis (Phone Camera Guide)
5 min read · by the AnchorStance team
Good swing analysis starts before you swing: with where you put the phone. Whether you review footage yourself or run it through a golf swing analyzer app like AnchorStance, the same few filming rules decide whether the video can be measured accurately or is just a blurry memory. Here is the setup that works, and why each rule matters.
The camera setup that works
Set your phone on the ground line directly in front of you — the face-on view — at roughly hip height, square to your body. Face-on is the angle where lateral movement (sway, weight shift, head motion) and setup geometry are genuinely measurable from a single camera.
- Face-on: camera in front of you, lens square to your chest at address.
- Hip height: prop the phone about a metre off the ground (a bag stand, tripod, or bench works).
- Whole body AND club in frame for the entire swing — including the club at the top.
- 3–4 steps back is usually enough; check the first recording.
- Normal speed, not slow-mo: timing metrics like tempo are computed from real frame timing.
- Good light, golfer facing it; avoid strong backlight that turns you into a silhouette.
- One ball in view. A pile of range balls near your feet confuses ball detection.
- Keep the clip short — a few seconds around the swing is all an analyzer needs.
Why these rules matter to a swing analyzer
Modern video swing analysis reconstructs your body position on every frame — AnchorStance tracks 34 joints plus the club and rebuilds the swing in 3D. Every rule above protects a measurement: a cut-off clubhead at the top hides your swing plane; slow-motion footage breaks tempo math; a tilted or waist-height-plus camera skews the angles that setup metrics are computed from.
The good news: you only have to get this right once. Mark your camera spot at the range and every session becomes comparable with the last — which is what makes week-over-week trends meaningful.
Common filming mistakes
- Filming from a diagonal ("kind of face-on") — angles read wrong and honest tools will warn or reject the clip.
- Holding the phone by hand — micro-shake blurs frames and drifts the framing.
- Slow-mo mode — looks great, measures wrong.
- Cropping the feet or the club at the top.
- Vertical video with the golfer tiny in the frame — step closer while keeping everything in view.
What happens after you film
With a clean clip, an analyzer can detect the eight swing positions (address, takeaway, mid-backswing, top, mid-downswing, impact, follow-through, finish), measure 20+ metrics against ideal ranges, and point at the one fault worth working on. AnchorStance does exactly this from one phone video — and tells you honestly when a clip cannot be read cleanly instead of inventing numbers.