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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stephenf
Feb 16, 2017 at 10:16 am
Oy. And the “two drills to correct over-the-top” video was so good.
You tell amateurs who are already steep and outside to “pull left through impact,” it’s going to destroy their games.
The true causes of the flip for most amateurs are: 1) misunderstanding of the role of the hands and wrists; 2) a path that is too outside and steep, disabling a proper release and necessitating a “throw” to square the clubface at all and to get any speed, in an effort to save the shot; and 3) the actual cause of #2, which is an overactive upper body too early in the downswing (too much rotation too early), which then has to slow down approaching impact, with the club coming steep and outside, or else the player would miss the ball entirely. You see this over and over with amateurs — the shoulders dominate the early downswing (sometimes from instinct, sometimes from a misunderstanding of instruction or just bad instruction overemphasizing “rotation” at the expense of everything else), the player lunges with his upper body, and by the time he gets late in the downswing if he doesn’t flip or throw the clubhead he’ll never touch the ball. You can prove it to yourself in slow motion with a club. From the top of the backswing, just turn your shoulders with a “hit the ball with shoulders/rotation” thought in slow motion, then swing your arms and club downward toward the ball after the fact. If you don’t stop your rotation at some point, the clubhead will pass completely over the top of the ball and miss it.
The right way to kill the flip is to get the right path and plane coming into the ball (inside and shallow) and to support the release of the hands and wrists with the rotation of the forearms and the support of the rest of the body.
It’s not that _no_ player could have the “pull left” thought and still do well. Some can, especially tour players who have already developed a free, full, and fast release and a good path and plane. But as with so many tidbits of advice circulating in the field of instruction and based on endless video observation rather than valid principles of physics and kinesiology, their success is largely in _spite_ of the move rather than _because_ of it.
D
Jan 28, 2017 at 9:16 am
Is there a risk this drill could lead to the shoulders becoming open at impact, rather than square?
Tim
Jan 22, 2017 at 3:30 pm
Mr. Davies, I appreciate your effort to jazz up an old and somewhat simple issue. However, the “hit instinct”, as WolfWrx put it, is so strong in almost every mediocre to poor golfer that it is the root of many swing “faults”. I would love to see a study done of at least 100 golfers with handicaps ranging from 10 to 30 which measures tension levels all over the body as well as how tension changes during the swing. I would bet everything that, for the right handed golfer, tension in the right hand-arm-shoulder would dominate their swing. Quite the opposite for good golfers. Golfers in general need to work on left sided control. There is not doubt in my mind that good golfers (5 handicap and below) can hit quality shots even if they take their right hand off the club just before impact. No average golfer can do that.
Ted
Feb 5, 2017 at 10:12 am
I am left handed, but I play with righty clubs. I disagree with your statement. Due to my lead hand dominance, my right thumb and index often completely come off the club through impact. My right side is usually just along for the ride. Despite this, in the past i have had a flip. The Main cause of a flip is club moving too fast for the body. I sorted this out by thinking of the swing as more of a simple rotation around the spine. Just keep rotating. This guy explains it better:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WBIagUWkbRY
WolfWRX
Jan 22, 2017 at 11:23 am
Interesting video Alistair. I like the look of that drill and definitely think I could benefit from this. However I do feel there are other significant reasons for the flipping motion that I’m not sure would be addressed by this drill (though I appreciate it’s not necessarily meant to).
The big ones are a lack of understanding from golfers on how the wrists uncock (i.e. up and down not side-to-side), the “hit” instinct and perhaps, even more relevant, an open club face at P6. The open face often means players have to flip to make contact with the ball, especially if the body is stalling. The below Chris Ryan video covers this quite nicely:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBC2calniKo
This Dan Whittaker video also covers this issue:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VB3XrNneyhM
I’d be interested to hear your thoughts.