Strong Grip+long Irons= Inconsistency and low hook?

hey everyone im havin a little crisis here. I consider my self a good ball striker. My swing is built on a very strong grip my swing is almost identical to Boo Weekley's. (see here http://www.youtube.com/?v=4LDvfhAZe4I )
I hit my short irons very far and accurate. I belive this is becuase how i de-loft of the club like they mention in the video. But when is get to my long irons 5 and below occasionally but always at the wrong times i produce a very low ball flight. I always play a draw and the occasional cut. But any thing below a 5 is a SNAP!!. I think this is because i take so much loft of the club. I can get get away with it with 6-and up but im starting to think i cant get away with it with 5 and below. Does my theory sound like it makes sense or am i just going crazy!!
I appreciate the insight
..Chris

EDIT I had to change the video because the one i wanted could not be imbeded. Although he is hitting a knockdown in this video he still uses simmilar concepts on his full swing

I have trouble with long irons too due to my incredibly strong grip. Like you said, I hit my short irons long and straight but when I get to my 5 and under I still strike the ball well, but the ball just doesn't get high at all. I mean, it basically makes a 3 iron useless when even if you did land it on the green, the ball would roll off due to how long and fast the ball is coming in. As you said, this is because I really deloft the club which works well from 6 and up but it doesn't work as well with the 3-5. I have no problem though with hooking the ball with long irons. Are you sure you're not releasing the hands too early?

I don't mean to hijack the thread but as a related side question, what do people do with their swings to get the ball up a little bit with long irons? I mean, I've heard don't change your swing with any club but just change ball position. I try this and although it helps me get the long irons up a bit higher, they're still not as high as I would like.

answering your question on higher ball flight i would recommend trying to move the ball up in your stance and releasing a tad bit earlier

Hope this helps ..Chris

I'm not sure how you hit the occasional cut. How many left hand knuckles can you see at address? Sounds like you're easily 4.

Your grip is causing a) a shut face at impact (do your snaps start right of target or left?) and b) a very aggressive release through impact. You're going to notice the snap hook bigtime with a straight faced club much more than you will with the shorter irons as they'll generate more sidespin.

Is your grip masking any other swing issues i.e. an "over-the-top" attack? Change your grip. You'll hate it initially as it'll feel very odd but you'll only progress with the right fundamentals.

Sorry to sound a bit curt maybe, but you shouldn't be "doing" anything special to elevate long irons. If you make a decent, descending, ball-turf strike (with a normal grip!) they'll get up fine on their own.

To be honest, we're not helped by the modern, delofted clubs c.f. the past. The modern balls are also designed to spin less on long clubs so you don't get as much help from backspin as you would have done in the past from a balata ball.

Chris, I can see you are a Ben Hogan fan, so let me let you in on a little swing key. Perhaps you are aware of it already, but it could be the key to you getting that draw / occasional cut under control. Yeah, I know, I'm an 18 handicap, but this is something I learned from a good pro, so maybe it will help you.

The release of the club is powered by the forearms, not the wrists and hands. The wrists themselves, with the exception of the supination action to maintain lag, play very little part in the overall swing. The left forearm roll is what squares the clubface. Hogan did this already, in fact he did it too much, which combined with this fast hips caused a hook. His cupping the wrist and weakened grip allowed him to keep this fast forearm roll and preserve his timing, while avoiding the hook.

If you try to use your wrists on longer clubs to both supinate (pronate? ... whatever... you know what I mean... lol) and turn the club over, you are always going to be either ahead of or behind the timing required to hit the ball under control. Using the wrists this way produces a very whippy release that is very, very hard to time. The diagram in 5 Lessons is a bit misleading this way, because you can't notice that the forearm is controlling the actual roll-over, not the wrist itself.

Since using the left forearm turnover uses bigger muscles, it is a more stable, and more controlled way to release the clubhead. Tour Pros have been doing this for years. A strong grip is simply a left forearm preset, so the backswing requires less clockwise rotation to reach a solid top position. The downswing then requires less counter-clockwise release to get to square. You can still, and must, use the wrists properly to deloft the clubface. It's just not the only action to square the clubface.

Trying to release solely with the wrists is a major cause of pain and confusion for the average golfer (including me until recently ). You can strengthen your grip all day, not roll the forearm, and hit a massive slice. Then you think, "oh I must be coming over the top". Nope. Take a look on a swing monitor, and you can be coming from too much inside and not getting the face square. Without the left forearm rolling over, it's anatomically impossible (your wrist locks based on forearm rotation angle).

To prove this, hold your left arm out in front of you and grab your left hand near the wrist with the right hand. Try to rotate the hand around the wrist joint without turning the forearm. Impossible. If you do get any range of motion, it's from bending the wrist (and we want to avoid flipping in the golf swing). Setup as before and now allow the forearm to rotate the wrist. Notice how the angular rotation of the forearm dictates the angle of the wrist? That also represents the clubhead. Pretty easy now to understand how you can hit the ball thinking you turn your wrists over, and then either duck hook it (flip it over far too quickly) or slice it (zero forearm rotation).

It sounds like you have gotten pretty good at the wristy release and probably have some forearm roll already (the draw). So for you, I just recommend working in some left forearm roll control with the longer clubs. It is easy to time, and much less whippy than just the wrist roll. Once you program the wrist action, let it take care of itself. You just roll the arm over. With the shorter irons, the wrist roll only release is possible because the club is both shorter and lighter (although over time you may find the forearm roll is more consistent). Swinging some mid-irons with the left arm only can help you get the feeling of turning the arm over to square the face.

Took me a while to find this out. Finally had a teaching pro tell me at an impromptu lesson that the "release occurs from the rolling the forearm" and I said "but I thought you square the club with the wrists...". He looked at me like I was talking a foreign language, then explained how the forearm controls the wrist movement and thereby the clubface. The impact on my swing within minutes of working on the forearm roll was amazing. Smooth, stable, and so much easier than my wristy action. I still consciously use the wrists on short shots for feel and compression, but it's in conjuction with the forearm roll.

Let me know if this helps ya!

thanks everyone everything is starting to all come together but i jus wanna clear up on suttin i worded wrong. When i said i hit a occasional cut i mean that i can hit a fade at will its not a problem. The reason i said that is to say i hav no problem shaping the shots but long irons get out of controll.

..Chris

I can't quote

all that! Hmmm. Why set a strong grip to set the club face in the backswing and then have to control/resist an early, fast release on the downswing?? Set the grip right and the hands/arms will do the right thing pretty much automatically in the impact area. If you have a strong grip, you'll ultimately have to compensate somewhere else; I'm not sure I can see the logic of making an already difficult game harder!

Sounds like you have a closed/shut club face at the top of your swing.

What came together for you and what adjustments did you make?

Indeed, I have to agree with you in some part. You see many pros however with strong grips (Boo Weekly is a good example, Duval and Azinger are others) who have to hold off the release to avoid hooking the ball. Azinger learned this from John Redman, who taught him not to turn over the forearms. Duval learned his technique as a kid, working to get lots of power out of his swing (so I have read). Years ago, you would have seen more players with more "neutral grips". Then again, golf used to be more of a precision sport, and less of a power contest on tour. A strong grip allows you to easily hold more wrist cock in the downswing, thereby allowing a more aggressive move through the ball (not neccessarily better accuracy though).

I personally use a neutral grip because I don't like the feel and compensations required for a strong grip. However, I was making the point earlier that anatomically, if you "just let it do its thing" but inadvertently "restrict the forearm rotation", you will not get the clubface square. Very difficult to tell if you are doing this through the hitting zone (took video analysis to see it on my swing). It's a feel more than anything else. I've never felt it was fair to say "be natural" in the golf swing. That means different things to different people, and let's face it, to the average joe, the golf swing is not a natural act. Sometimes you gotta reprogram the body to achieve the desired result or stop getting in its own way. One person's initial "natural swing" may produce a nice high draw, while the other guy ends up topping it.

Hogan did not roll his forearms to release the club. What you are describing is called a 'down the line' release which most certainly was never practiced by Hogan at any point in his career.

He used his body to release the clubface through the ball. He kept the left arm close to his chest at impact which pulled the club low and left, naturally closing the club head as it rotated around his body. He did this to eliminate the difficulty of timing a forearm release correctly. This is evident in all Hogan videos. If you slow them down you can clearly see the club going low and left and his forearms are not rotating at impact. His forearms start rotating well after the ball is gone.

I'm going to have to disagree here about the action of hogan's left forearm, based on analysis I have seen in several sources. Although you are correct that Hogan did not use a forearm cross-over release, he did allow the forearm to rotate clockwise on the backswing, and return in sequence WITH the chest through impact, then around and to the left. It could even be argued that Hogan released his forearm rotation angle via the rotation of his body, relative to the swing path, as needed to achieve square contact. Hogan definitely was a "dog wags the tail" hitter on the way down. He most certainly did not rotate it as much as someone like Jack Nicklaus, with a down the line release (neccessary to compensate for less body turn). The more turn, the less forearm release required.

Check out slicefixer on golfwrx. He has studied Hogan and teaches some very very good students a swing that is 99.999% Hogan. The left forearm still turns as you make the swing, but you keep the chest connection and rotate left. It is entirely possible, I am living proof, to try not to allow that forearm to rotate back counterclockwise with the chest on the downswing (too much lateral pulling action) and thereby anatomically prevent the clubface from squaring. I'll go ahead and leave it like that. It's really too bad Hogan didn't write more about his swing, because there are still key questions like this that go around, and everyone feels compelled to jump out with "well Hogan didn't do that, and look how he hit it". It's an ok argument, if everyone on the planet is supposed to hit exactly like Hogan. I certainly don't believe this (neither did Harvey Penick, one of the greatest golf teachers of all time). Perhaps the greatest lesson Hogan left us was that you have to practice and find your swing. Not some textbook swing, or a gimmick from Golf Digest. Own your swing. Find what works, figure it out, and stick to it.

Just got back from two days of personal lessons with Slicefixer. Hogan did rotate his left arm in the backswing because it shallows out the plane and opens the clubface to counter his tendency to hook the ball. This is what Slicefixer teaches, along with the body release that I mentioned earlier.

Ha ha! Imagine that. Looks like I really shot myself in the foot on that one!

I would love to go to slicefixer for some lessons, but it's just a little too expensive for me (even though I live in Texas). He is probably teaching some of the best upcoming ballstrikers in golf right now.

We are probably arguing semantics about the left arm then. There is a notional difference between independent left arm rotational release and body release with the left arm being pulling around. It looks to me that slice fixer really wants the hips and shoulders open at impact. In a textbook 2 plane swing, your hips are slightly open, with shoulders relatively square. Makes a difference in how the left arm comes into the ball (by itself, or with some assistance). My swing right now is more two plane, double plane shift, so for me, there needs to be (at least right now) some conscious left arm roll. Most classic 2 plane swingers will tell you the same thing. Hogan's method is certainly a fantastic way to hit a ball though, but in my case, I still slice the ball just pinning my arm and releasing left (since the left arm never returns from that right rotated position to allow the wrist and clubface to come square).