Rory McIlroy looked pretty fantastic at the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am last weekend, and in the aftermath of his victory, there was a lot of talk about Rory McIlroy’s Scheffler-inspired approach to golf strategy.

Occasionally safer off the tee; more conservative into greens.

But in talking about his strategy, a lot of golf fans glossed over what I consider arguably the more important piece: that Rory McIlroy went hard this offseason tuning up his technique and stripping away some bad habits in his golf swing.

Rory’s right arm

A lot of good golfers chase a lot of width on the backswing, which can be beneficial because it creates a big, powerful stretch. But when you overdo it, as Golf Digest’s No. 1-ranked coach Mark Blackburn explains here, it can cause your right arm to stay too straight.

That can keep your right shoulder high and, in Rory’s case, get his hands deep and across the line. That’s why this offseason, as you may remember in this video, he focused on this takeaway move.

After Pebble, Rory explained a little more why…

“I want to get my right arm and right shoulder more externally rotated on the way back. I feel like I keep my right elbow in front of my body at the top of the backswing. It’s a right-sided sort of takeaway feel. Then from there, it will hopefully stop the club from getting across the line. That’s the change I was trying to make. I have a big shoulder turn, so the club will probably always point right of the target for me. I just feel like over the past year it got a little bit too pronounced, so I’m just trying to tease it back into position where it’s a little more in line at the top.”

As Rory says, his goal is to keep his right arm a little more externally rotated, meaning slightly more twisted this way.

That helps keep his right elbow a little softer and more in front of his body, putting the club less across. It means that the club simply re-routes less in transition, which makes timing it all up a little easier.

These changes already seem to be sticking in his golf swing. The early returns are great—Rory’s striping it, and the club looks much more similar to where it was in 2014 compared to the past few years. If there is a big miss in there, we’ve yet to see any signs of it. It simply looks like a subtle upgrade on an already elite move.

So, good job, Rory. All the golf swing nerds are really excited about this.

Main Image: Jed Jacobsohn