Hitting Straight, Start with making your swing more shallow!

Introduction  

We have another golf lesson blog for you today! Ted Oh from Epic Golf Studios will be helping out Jennifer, who has been playing golf for about 5-7 years. She is a beginner and has an average score of about 110 plus. Her favorite club is the nine iron and her worst club is the driver and today, she would like to improve her ability to hit straight! 

 

Let's Begin! 

Ted will start by having Jennifer take a swing to review through the playback camera.

Jennifer explains that she tends to miss to the right often; Upon checking the playback of her swing, we can see that the shot was a miss to the right. According to Ted, Jennifer has a typical over the top swing and the shaft is coming in way too steep at the front. Upon looking back, it is apparent that she has a great take away up to the top and she's keeping her posture really good, but if you look at her arm:

She starts to hold the back swing and begins to lift

This shows she's coming way too steep over the top, and this is a common slice that occurs. This happens when you come over the top and put a little cut spin on the ball! What Ted will do to help straighten out the shot is "shallowing the club". This is a term often heard where you bring the club down behind you, and shallow the shaft. If you look at at this scene here, you can see it's way too vertical and she keeps the club in front of her with her club face open. Jennifer is catching the heel during her swing which is causing the slice.

How to fix this?   

In order to fix her steep angle, Ted will show her how to shallow the club.
There's a few things she or people at home can do to fix a steep angle; You can angle a stick off the ground to guide your swing.

By doing this, it will shorten the backswing a little bit and keep the club in front. For Jennifer, it will feel as though she's keeping the shaft very low and swinging more out. The sensation can be described as a forehand swing playing tennis or ping pong. Now she will try a few test swings!



That looked great! Ted will now assist with her in-to-out to get her face more square and have her understand the sensation of keeping her face angle down. Going slow, Ted shows Jennifer the flow of the swing and will now have her try another swing!



Jennifer got the draw going!
To review, the two things that Ted did to help were:

1. Exaggerate the sensation of keeping the club face down and square during her swing as her slice was too extreme.
2. To get rid of that vertical swing she has, he had her come from the inside

Upon viewing a playback of her most recent swing, her shaft is clearly more shallow. For Jennifer, her homework to fix her habit of slicing, will be to put a stick down in front of her at an angle and get her to swing with a more round and smooth motion. She needs to get rid of the vertical swing. When you compare her swings (before and after), you can see the difference Ted's adjustments made just by the distance she gained. She gained an additional 40 yards compared to her previous swing, which is strictly due to her hitting with a square face.

 

Conclusions 

In order for Jennifer to achieve the same results with her other clubs, she will need to do the same and practice coming in a little more shallow and keeping the face more square. For people like her who don't have much time to practice out on the field, Ted recommends a different pre-shot routine.

1. Swing the club around like a baseball bat to imitate the round motion of an ideal golf swing (to prevent a steep down swing) and to round the shoulders.
2. Drop the swing about 40 degrees and swing with the same motion - this will help her with her club path. The club face is controlled by the wrist, so by facing her wrist down towards the ground, it will keep her more square at impact.