The true key to the golf of your dreams.........Stop shanking!

I have had more than one golfer come to me with the problem of shanking! You know the shot, the swing feels great, perfectly normal, and then suddenly when we get to impact with the ball…….. DINK, straight of the hosel/neck/heel (delete as appropriate) and we see the ball go straight right and very low.

The next shot, our minds a bit baffled with what just occurred, but we go again. Same swing, same nice feeling, then all of a sudden…… DINK, another one going low and to the right.

Right now, our anger levels and blood pressure are growing suddenly, we are hugely confused as the swing felt exactly the same as if we’d struck the ball out the centre of the golf club, but we ended up hitting one of ‘those’ shots, a shot that looks pretty ugly and can get us into a lot of trouble.

So what do we do to ensure it doesn’t happen again?

Well, like most amateurs, we try and solve the issue by focusing on the swing. Trying to tinker with almost all of our limbs to get them into what we perceive as the perfect position to stop this from happening again. But what happens………… DINK! The changes that we have made have not helped and our mind is now a blur of every single aspect of the swing that we have ever been taught, learnt or heard about. It’s a disaster!

To avert this feeling, we need to ensure we KNOW why we have hit this shot. And by why I don’t mean because X or Y have happened in the golf swing. I mean where has the ball made contact with the club!

In this case, the ball has hit the neck of the golf club, the part of the club where the shaft enters the head. All our task is next to ensure we strike the ball out of the opposite end of the golf club, the toe. And by this I don’t mean trying to manipulate your golf swing or think about the swing. I mean to simply FEEL the ball coming out of the toe.

Yes, different things will happen in the swing but the trick here is to not be conscious of these changes. Our task is to simply feel the ball coming out the toe anyway we can.

Results are everything in golf, it’s not the one with the prettiest swing that shoots the lowest scores and wins tournaments.

Too many wedges spoil the loft!

I am very much an advocate of golfers, no matter what level you are at, copying something one of the top players does, whether it be what they think on the course, what a certain swing thought is and so on. However, I think amateurs (high handicappers in particular) would do best to stay well away from this one………. Putting more than 3 wedges in the bag! With the expertise the pros show in their short game, the finesse, the touch, it’s brilliant to watch. I notice a lot of amateurs, in need of a better short game and touch around the green, investing in numerous wedges with lofts no more than 4 degrees apart starting from a modern day 45 degree Pitching Wedge, all the way through to a 60 degree lob wedge!  

‘Why’ I hear you cry. To put simply, to be a great chipper and pitcher of the ball, you need to have the ability to ‘control the loft on the club’. For example, if you have a wedge which says 52 degrees on it, to control the trajectory of the shot (the flight path) and contact the ball as well as you possibly can, you need to have the ability to ‘feel’ what the loft is at impact. This is controlled by either leaning the handle of the club towards the target or slightly away from the target.

Now, when a high handicapper hits a chip or a pitch, the likely outcome is he/she will thin it through the green or duff it barely 3 yards in front of them. Why is this? In my experience the majority of golfers try and lift or scoop the ball up in the air, trying to, subconsciously, add loft to the golf club. This doesn’t make sense however since there is already a lot of loft on the club itself…… in this case 52 degrees! The results are even more disastrous with a lob wedge. If we catch the ball well and we increase the loft at the same time, guess what’s going to happen? The ball flies up the air barely reaching half way to your target. Next time when we swing the lob wedge? We put a longer swing on it as we are reacting to the result we got previously. The danger in this is if we don’t catch the ball very well we run a massive risk of thinning it and, combined with a long and powerful swing, is a recipe for that ball shooting 50-80 yards past the green……… a highly embarrassing result!

One of the keys to good golf as mentioned previously is to keep things simple. Investing in 4 wedges is giving the golfer far too much choice over the shot which leads to confusion which leads to poor short game play.

Do yourself a favour…….. stick to 3 wedges maximum (pitching wedge, gap wedge and sand wedge) and learn how to manufacture shots with them, hit it high, hit it low, but most of all, get to know them and love them before discarding them for a lob wedge.

Always advise someone who has a weak chipping and pitching action who owns a lob wedge to treat the loft with caution!

Divots!

I once had a gentleman for a lesson, in his 70’s, who used to play off a 9 handicap but has crept up and up as he has matured in years to a 19 handicap. You can imagine he was a tad annoyed about creeping ever closer to the 20’s seeing as he was a former single figure golfer, something only a small percentage of golfers ever achieve.

It was his first lesson and, before we started, I asked him, as I do with all golfers on their first lesson, what they want to get from their game and what have they been working on, if anything, this past few rounds or practise sessions.

This guy was very honest. He said he watches a lot of golf, especially the PGA Tour, with lush fairways and quick greens. He had noticed something very striking in all the time he’d been watching the best players in the world in action. He noticed they took HUGE divots! Even some taking divots with their fairway woods and hybrid clubs. Now, I bet you know what he was trying to do in his game? Yep, he tried to take as big a divot as the pros on the TV.

‘But why is that a bad thing this guy tried to do that?’ I hear you say. Well, first of all, here was a man  who predominantly cut across the ball and hit slices, played on fairly soft courses, especially in the winter, and he was trying to hit DOWN on the ball to an extreme effect to emulate those tour professionals and take big divots to help, what he thought, enabled him to play better golf and reach that level he had before.

Unfortunately, the tactic was not working for him and he was getting frustrated with his game and, quite literally, was hacking up the course taking divots the size of a small country with the ball going barely 30 yards.

Our first session took place on the golf course on a rather damp day, the kind this player didn’t like for obvious reasons. What did he do down the first hole? First 4 shots were heavy, huge great divots with him hitting very much down on the ball, attempting to copy the worlds best.

Now for me this was an easy one. No need for technical instruction, no need for mechanics or endless amounts of time needed to spend out on the practice area. I simply said to him, ‘brush the turf, feel as though you’re taking the top layer of grass off and hardly touching the soil underneath’. This idea was completely alien to him! ‘Well hang on, why do the pros take big divots?’ he asked me. I explained to him that because they generate lots of club speed and create a consistently good angle of attack (approx. 4 degrees down with a short iron) they are able to make that ball then turf contact. When (with all due respect to him) 70 plus year olds don’t generate the same club speed and when they hit excessively down on the ball (approx. 8 to 10 degrees down) you get the turf ball contact that so many amateur golfers dread, watching the ball trickle 10 yards in front when they had 120 to go.

I allowed him to hit a few shots from the fairway to practise this new theory, whilst I could see him still thinking I was mad for telling him something that he thought was completely wrong and against the grain!

And, after 5 in a row that were the 5 sweetest shots he had struck in a long time, the penny dropped for him! It was like a miracle had occurred, a eureka moment as   I like to describe it! He simply had to feel the club bruising the turf. He didn’t have to take massive chunks

out the ground to be able to play his best golf, he barely had to touch the turf to get the ball to where he wanted it to go.  

The divot tells us a lot about your swing and how you play golf. Do you take a divot? Do you take too much of a divot? Next time you’re out on the course, take a look and see how much turf, if any, you take up during your shot. A lot of people put emphasis and thought into the swing when the swing can’t give us much feedback into why we played a good shot or a bad shot. On the other hand, a divot can tell us a hell of a lot and provide us with necessary feedback……… direction of swing and angle of attack (hit down too much = big divot, hit too much up = no divot).

Don’t try and emulate the best in the world when it comes to divots or you will probably leave a lot of greenkeepers unhappy!