Help! Dropping left shoulder during backswing.

Help! I'm having a problem. At the top of my backswing I'm dropping my left shoulder (tilting rather than rotating?). My head drops down and forward a few inches and my weight shifts to my left, hard (nearly fully). Thus my downswing is coming in steep and with that much weight forward, I'm losing my balance. Obviously consistency is a major problem and I'm getting "stuck" on the way down which leads to an over the top action. Other obvious side affects are there as well; loss of distance, major increase in spin, divots pointing left of the target, and of course, major frustration.

The "why" in this case is simple, I had a number of neck surgeries recently and the subsequent pain led to compensations, compensations led to bad habits. Fortunately these habits haven't been around long so they should be easy to break, especially since the pain is gone. Lesson learned here, take adequate time off, too late for that now though.

So, how can I fix this? Does anybody have any good drills that help this? I understand that this is a fairly common swing fault. I'd work with a local instructor but things are just getting thawed out and that's not an option (not yet anyway). Unless I get things turned around myself, it's going to be a long spring.

Thanks in advance for any help... Oh, and I'll work on getting some videos posted. Hopefully the weather will cooperate.

The weight forward really has nothing to do with this - and the best way to fix a problem like is usually to do the opposite (as it takes the extreme feeling the other way to get the "middle). Make some swings where you simply turn your shoulders and STAND UP...yes...stand up...to complete the backswing. If you really are tilting too much sideways in the second half of the backswing this will take care of the problem. The end result should be a good combination of turning, tilting and extending to reach the top. Hope this makes sense!

Not only does this make sense but I've been doing slow motion practice swings in the house standing almost straight up and down. As you elude to, it forces you to turn when you're in this position. You can't tilt even if you wanted to. Sounds like I'm on the right track anyway... I'll keep this up and try your suggestion of standing up during the swing as a transition back to swinging normally, thanks!

I would like to second this. I had the same exact problem with the shoulder dipping down on the backswing. During my range sessions as I worked to correct this, it actually felt as though I WAS standing up when in fact I was simply NOT dipping the shoulder.

This thread is old but current for me. I didn't know I had the issue until my new golf instructor caught it, According to him the biggest issue is it robs power from the swing. I'm working on slow motion drills inside also. The hardest things to fix are these kind of habits  - the one our bodies want to do on their own. Hope I can break it.

Verbiage to describe the 3 dimensional swing is always difficult but you're saying it right. Instead of a pure rotation about the spine, imagine the left shoulder dipping a bit toward the ground.

Assuming that have some degree of inclination to the ground, pure rotation around the spine would be rotation on an incline, in which case your lead shoulder will definitely dip downwards. If it didn't dip downwards it would mean your rotation is horizontal and therefore NOT rotating around your inclined spine angle. A picture is worth a thousands words and in golf, a video is worth two thousand, mostly misunderstood, words. Post some video.

Agreed and that's why it's so hard to feel the difference between right and wrong. I'll see if i can get a vid.