Instruction
Stickney: Do your golf shoes really matter?
One of the most overlooked aspects of your golf equipment is the shoes you wear, how they react, and what they will do to your swing to enhance it or detract from it while you play. There are a million different types of shoes — some have higher heels, others have flat soles, and the bottoms are all different sizes, shapes, and thus provide different interactions with the ground. It’s these interactions that help to power your golf swing and when they are maximized great things can happen but when you have a deficiency within these forces you will find that you are leaving distance and speed behind.
As we have now learned with systems like Swing Catalyst, people use these ground reaction forces in different ways. Some people are more horizontally driven, others use rotation to power the downswing, and some even use vertical force that makes them “jump up” at impact. The most common one that is used is side to side horizontal force. I don’t mean sliding back and forth exaggeratedly, but the simple aspect of loading your weight into your rear foot at the top and then moving or bumping your weight into your lead foot on the way down at the right time. It’s this side-to-side motion that most people understand yet have problems with daily.
One of the biggest issues in golf as it pertains to the backswing is the sliding of the rear knee out of its original position at address in route to the top. When this happens, players tend to move the pressure to the outside of their rear foot making it hard to “push off” of their rear foot transitional. When this happens, you will tend to leave too much residual weight on the rear foot during impact robbing them of power and solid contact.
As you can see this player below allows his rear knee to slide and this allows his weight to move too much to the outside of his rear foot at the top. This is shown by the grey dot on the rear foot in the second photo as it has slid to the rearward portion of the ball of the foot to the top.
When this happens, you will find that the head will tend to fall backwards and the rear foot will tend to have too much residual pressure and you will remain “flat-footed” through impact making it easy to hit the ball fat and shorter thank you’d like.
One of the things we noticed was the shoes that this player was wearing. They were the soft, tennis-shoe, type of golf shoes with narrow soles and mesh uppers. While these are great for comfort they are NOT the best for a player who tends to move side to side in the backswing or for a player whom uses horizontal force as their biggest asset!
What narrow sole soft shoes do not do is provide support to the upper-ankle and the soft upper places little resistance against the foot for any type of tactile feedback during the backswing. This tends to allow players to slide their rear knees and pressure too much laterally in the backswing causing a delayed “push off” of the rear foot and lagging back through the impact zone.
For players such as this, I would suggest the widest sole possible with a stiff upper that will provide support for the backswing. There are many products from shoe companies that provide this support, and I’ll leave these up to you to investigate your favorite brand.
Please stay away from the narrow front sole, soft tennis shoe type of footwear if you have this propensity in the swing. Try to find one of the other better suited products from the company that you like that will support your backswing. If you do, I promise you will find your stability increase, your pivot will improve, and your ball will be further down the fairway as a result.
Questions or comments? [email protected]
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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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Ccshop
Apr 8, 2022 at 5:48 pm
Your connection to the ground is in your shoes. Time to start treating it like the other equipment we get fit for and make sure your in the proper style. Glad finally someone came out with an article about it. Completely understandable that a casual golfer might not care and go for style, but competitive golfers should definitely consider shoes as part of their equipment.