Hitting it fat again

[B-Con]

Do you sway to the right in your backswing? Your weight should shift a little to the right, but your body shouldn't sway there. If your chest is moving backwards behind the ball on the backswing, and then forward on the down swing, you can set yourself up to mis-time/mis-judge and come down behind the ball. A recent link to some tips by Hunter Mahan included that tip .

[walk18]

why do you hold onto the club there? Is that to stop people from fliping there hands over in the follow through?

It's a drill to stop flipping/scooping at impact. It keeps the hands ahead of the clubhead, and reinforces hitting down on the ball and hitting it flush, ball first.

[ejimsmith]

Do you sway to the right in your backswing? Your weight should shift a little to the right, but your body shouldn't sway there. If your chest is moving backwards behind the ball on the backswing, and then forward on the down swing, you can set yourself up to mis-time/mis-judge and come down behind the ball. A recent link to some tips by Hunter Mahan

thanks, i had a good practise session this morning and focused on this tip. we'll see if i can continue doing better....

[tgwise]

I just recently started hitting down and through the ball. I have always been a (scooper) I guess it would be called. I kept digging in badly also to the point of just going back to my old swing. I stuck with it and now have much better results. Good luck.

[Zeph]

I've come to think that without holding the right arm flying wedge, but flipping and scooping the rest of the swing doesn't matter as much. You can have a very good looking swing, hips forward, head stays still etc., but still hit it fat. At the same time, you can have the head move aroud, weight pretty much centered, but still hit the ball first with a forward leaning shaft.
Having the weight farther back does make it more difficult, but a lot of the pros don't move the hips as much forward as others. But they still get into a great impact position with the hands.

Lynn Blake said it well on his DVD I think. You got all those people who are good at sports which involves throwing balls or objects, but still can fail miserably at golf. That's because in most sports where you throw something, when extending the right arm, you also extend the right wrist. In golf however, you only extend the right arm, but let the right wrist gain a bit angle because of gravity, but it is not thrown out.

That is one of the things that makes golf so difficult, that this move is quite the opposite of what we do in a lot of other situations. So the idea was to educate your right wrist, learn how the feeling is of not throwing it out while the right arm extends. You can do these small swings without a club, just making sure you don't throw out the wrist. Then you can progress on with using a club and hitting small chip shots. A lot of us do chunk a chip here and there. If you do this correctly, you should be able to hit chips for hours without hitting it fat.

As a little sidenote, I don't mean you should not focus on better weight transfer, club path, hand path etc. Just have in mind that you can do everything correct, but fail at this key component, and end up not seeing any progress.

[ejimsmith]

I've come to think that without holding the right arm flying wedge, but flipping and scooping the rest of the swing doesn't matter as much. You can have a very good looking swing, hips forward, head stays still etc., but still hit it fat. At the same time, you can have the head move aroud, weight pretty much centered, but still hit the ball first with a forward leaning shaft.

interesting, i'll try that.

[BostonSully]

bahh... i thought i was improving but i think i took a step back today. i was really liking my game at the range, and even my warm up before todays round felt real good. but if i wasnt' hitting it fat, i was hooking most everything. except my driver, for whatever reason i hit that real well. luckily it was a 5 person scramble tourney i was in today. we played my drive most of the time.. so at least i carried some weight.

Sounds like your dipping. Keep your spine straighter through the swing. Sometimes i take a practice swing and just quaf a nice divot and im like yep dipped on that one. Keep the shoulders up and usually hit my next shot arite. For me it has to do with Being Tired/ and Concentration.