Instruction
For solid impact, control your low point
Besides “consistency,” the second most common request I get from my students is they would like to hit the ball more solid. There’s nothing like the feeling of a compressing the golf ball, and I firmly believe most people would rather hit the ball in the screws and miss the green for 18 holes than beating it all over the face and hitting the green.
I feel the same way. No one likes sticking it in the ground and coming up short on the front fringe, or half-blading it to the back fringe. Ugh!
Whenever you can’t find the center of the face, it means you have lost control of your “low point,” or the lowest point of the forward swing arc that determines where the club hits the ground. In this article, we’ll discuss a few reasons why people have variance within their low point control, as well as my favorite drill to use in order to find your low point once again so you can hit it SOLID!
**Note: For this article, we will assume that your swing plane is perfect and it’s the pivot of your body that’s causing your low-point issue.**
There are three general places that the club can bottom out:
- Just in front of the ball
- Too far behind the ball
- Too far in front of the ball
First, let’s try a sample drill using practice swings to see just what your low point tends to be. As you can see in the photo below, I have drawn a line in the grass and made a few practice swings. You can see that Swing 1 (left divot) was perfect, Swing 2 (middle divot) was too far behind the line and Swing 3 (right divot) was too far in front of the line.
So what does the location of these divots tell us?
If you impact the golf ball “on the line and forward” toward the target (as shown in the left divot in the photo above) you can assume that your pivot — how you twist, turn and move your weight — is under control and it allows your club to hit the ground in the proper place. This is what you should strive for in general on every shot. On hilly lies, this becomes much harder to accomplish, thus the reason why pros take so many practice swings before hitting a shot off a weird lie. They want to better “feel” where their low point will occur so they can hit the shot solid.
If your divot is behind the line then something is causing your low point to occur too early. This is often a issue of an unsolid lower body to the top.
The three reasons why this occurs
No. 1: Your right knee can bounce around on the way to the top, thus moving your weight to the outside of your right foot. From there, you cannot get your weight onto your left foot fast enough. Bam! You hit behind the ball. The cure for this is to make sure your weight stays on the FRONT INSIDE portion of your right foot at the top of your backswing. This position will springboard your weight back into your forward foot long before you impact the ball and solid impact will be the result.
No. 2: From the top you can “spin-out” and not allow your weight to move into your left foot before you begin to rotate your hips. (This is often the cause of the dreaded over-the-top move of the right shoulder as well). Whenever the left hip spins from the start of the downswing, the weight moves rapidly into the left heel and the center of gravity stays back behind the ball. Often when you do this, you will hit behind it. The cure for this is to allow your hips to “bump” toward right field so that your center of gravity moves into your left toe to begin the downswing. From there, the right shoulder lowers and you can rotate through the ball hitting the ball first and the ground second.
No. 3: The second part of “spinning out” moves your low point behind the ball and can also cause you to hit the ball thin or even top it. If you are the type of player who never makes a divot, then this alerts you that your low point is occurring behind the ball and you are pulling up through impact. The best way to solve this issue is to place a tee in front of the ball and do your best to hit the ball first and the tee second. This will move your low point back in front of the ball where it should be.
If your divot occurs too far in front of the ball, then it’s apparent that you have a pivot issues, which causes too much lateral motion in your downswing and moves the low point too far in front of the ball.
**Remember we stated earlier in the article that we are only dealing with PIVOT issues causing improper low-points and not PLANE issues.**
There are two basic reasons why this usually occurs for most players:
No. 1: An overly aggressive hip slide into the ball from the top. Sometimes the feeling of moving the weight back into the ball from your rear foot can cause your hips to slide too much on the way down and past your left ankle. When this occurs and the head follows, you have moved your center of gravity too far to the left, which moves the low point too far left of the golf ball (as is shown in the far left divot above). The key to fix this is to kill the excessive hip slide on the downswing and “post” up on the left leg, hitting the ball with the weight on the inside of the left foot at impact, not the outside.
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Instruction
Clement: Laid-off or perfect fade? Across-the-line or perfect draw?
Some call the image on the left laid off, but if you are hitting a fade, this could be a perfect backswing for it! Same for across the line for a draw! Stop racking your brain with perceived mistakes and simply match backswing to shot shape!
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Instruction
The Wedge Guy: The easiest-to-learn golf basic
My golf learning began with this simple fact – if you don’t have a fundamentally sound hold on the golf club, it is practically impossible for your body to execute a fundamentally sound golf swing. I’m still a big believer that the golf swing is much easier to execute if you begin with the proper hold on the club.
As you might imagine, I come into contact with hundreds of golfers of all skill levels. And it is very rare to see a good player with a bad hold on the golf club. There are some exceptions, for sure, but they are very few and very far between, and they typically have beat so many balls with their poor grip that they’ve found a way to work around it.
The reality of biophysics is that the body moves only in certain ways – and the particulars of the way you hold the golf club can totally prevent a sound swing motion that allows the club to release properly through the impact zone. The wonderful thing is that anyone can learn how to put a fundamentally sound hold on the golf club, and you can practice it anywhere your hands are not otherwise engaged, like watching TV or just sitting and relaxing.
Whether you prefer an overlap, interlock or full-finger (not baseball!) grip on the club, the same fundamentals apply. Here are the major grip faults I see most often, in the order of the frequency:
Mis-aligned hands
By this I mean that the palms of the two hands are not parallel to each other. Too many golfers have a weak left hand and strong right, or vice versa. The easiest way to learn how to hold the club with your palms aligned properly is to grip a plain wooden ruler or yardstick. It forces the hands to align properly and shows you how that feels. If you grip and re-grip a yardstick several times, then grip a club, you’ll see that the learning curve is almost immediate.
The position of the grip in the upper/left hand
I also observe many golfers who have the butt of the grip too far into the heel pad of the upper hand (the left hand for right-handed players). It’s amazing how much easier it is to release the club through the ball if even 1/4-1/2″ of the butt is beyond the left heel pad. Try this yourself to see what I mean. Swing the club freely with just your left hand and notice the difference in its release from when you hold it at the end of the grip, versus gripping down even a half inch.
To help you really understand how this works, go to the range and hit shots with your five-iron gripped down a full inch to make the club the same length as your seven-iron. You will probably see an amazing shot shape difference, and likely not see as much distance loss as you would expect.
Too much lower (right) hand on the club
It seems like almost all golfers of 8-10 handicap or higher have the club too far into the palm of the lower hand, because that feels “good” if you are trying to control the path of the clubhead to the ball. But the golf swing is not an effort to hit at the ball – it is a swing of the club. The proper hold on the club has the grip underneath the pad at the base of the fingers. This will likely feel “weak” to you — like you cannot control the club like that. EXACTLY. You should not be trying to control the club with your lower/master hand.
Gripping too tightly
Nearly all golfers hold the club too tightly, which tenses up the forearms and prevents a proper release of the club through impact. In order for the club to move back and through properly, you must feel that the club is controlled by the last three fingers of the upper hand, and the middle two fingers of the lower hand. If you engage your thumbs and forefingers in “holding” the club, the result will almost always be a grip that is too tight. Try this for yourself. Hold the club in your upper hand only, and squeeze firmly with just the last three fingers, with the forefinger and thumb off the club entirely. You have good control, but your forearms are not tense. Then begin to squeeze down with your thumb and forefinger and observe the tensing of the entire forearm. This is the way we are made, so the key to preventing tenseness in the arms is to hold the club very lightly with the “pinchers” — the thumbs and forefingers.
So, those are what I believe are the four fundamentals of a good grip. Anyone can learn them in their home or office very quickly. There is no easier way to improve your ball striking consistency and add distance than giving more attention to the way you hold the golf club.
More from the Wedge Guy
- The Wedge Guy: Golf mastery begins with your wedge game
- The Wedge Guy: Why golf is 20 times harder than brain surgery
- The Wedge Guy: Musings on the golf ball rollback
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Instruction
Clement: Stop ripping off your swing with this drill!
Not the dreaded headcover under the armpit drill! As if your body is defective and can’t function by itself! Have you seen how incredible the human machine is with all the incredible feats of agility all kinds of athletes are accomplishing? You think your body is so defective (the good Lord is laughing his head off at you) that it needs a headcover tucked under the armpit so you can swing like T-Rex?
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Matt Christian
Oct 4, 2014 at 5:00 pm
http://youtu.be/oY3LGVreUuI
ed
Aug 31, 2014 at 12:08 pm
Tom-
How far ahead of the ball should the tee be placed for suggestion #3? I rarely take a divot and hit both thin & fat, so assume this may be my best drill out of what you mentioned.
Thanks!
Tom Stickney
Aug 31, 2014 at 6:49 pm
A few inches. Experiment.
Pingback: For Solid Impact, Control Your Low Point | Golf Gear Select
Billy
Aug 26, 2014 at 1:22 am
Tom, when you say “The cure for this is to allow your hips to “bump” toward right field”. You mean the left hip for a RH golfer?
How would one do such a thing? Push off the ground with your right (back) leg? Let your hip drop back towards, 7-6 o’clock?
You are not supposed to slide, but what would be the best option to “bump” my left hip? I don’t do that and I hit it fat.
Tom Stickney
Aug 26, 2014 at 9:19 am
Hips are rotated in the bs and pointing rt if you put a shaft along your hips at the top your hips bump slightly in that direction to begin the ds
Cwolf
Aug 25, 2014 at 7:45 pm
Thanks tom. Great article. I have really been focusing on the “bump to left field” and causing my divot to bottom out in front of the ball.
How would you apply this teaching to a driver when one should be hitting the ball on the upswing and not the low point?
Tom Stickney
Aug 25, 2014 at 8:15 pm
Ball forward head back through impact. Must move lp behind ball if you can.
birly-shirly
Aug 25, 2014 at 6:42 pm
Nice article – but how do you establish the validity in the particular case of the assumption that swing plane isn’t the issue?
Would you work on the pivot “cures” first – and if those don’t work reverse the presumption?
Tom Stickney
Aug 25, 2014 at 8:16 pm
It can go both ways…depends on the student.
Dennis Clark
Aug 25, 2014 at 4:52 pm
well put Tom; Once they get the difference in shallow fats and steep ones, they know which pivot corrects it, as you said!
Tom Stickney
Aug 25, 2014 at 5:08 pm
Thx