Proper Golf Divot?

[threejack]

I understand you can learn a lot from your divots in terms of the direction and where it is in contrast to the ball, I was wondering if you can tell something from how wide your divots are. My divots tend to be as thick as my club face is long, I see some on the course that look thinner than mine, should the heel or toe cause the divot or the entire face like mine is doing?

[jshots]

When I was playing my absolute best golf ever this summer, hitting 10-14 GIR, I noticed on average I was taking very large divots. I personally don't believe divot size can tell you anything.

If you think strictly about the theoretical path of the swing, a divot is caused just by the descending blow to the ball, or the bottom of the arc of the club head being below the ground. As you have more descending of a blow the divot will be deeper and the ball will have more spin on it. And minus some other things I believe its just about that simple.

One thing I was doing a lot of was pushing balls, but taking huge divots. Well in reality I wasn't pushing balls and I was making perfect contact.. and I simply had to adjust my mind to realize that to hit the ball straight with a descending blow, you actually have to aim left because of the way the arc of your swing is tilted.

There may be something to be said though that the smaller the divot is the less error prone you may be, as in your misses will not be as severe but i'm not 100% positive about that.

What I have said is really just more related to size and depth of the divot though. Your divot should begin very close to where the ball was lying and extend from there.

[mymizunosrock]

If I miss a green, I tend to lay the shaft through the middle of the divot in the direction of it then step back and look at it. Tells me what my swing path was, then think about the flight path and process what went wrong. Ideally, you dont want to take the grass your ball was sitting on, you want the divot ahead of your ball. Divot depths and lengths change with every club, but the entry point should look like the exit point (like drawing a line through the edge of a circle, swing arc), not deeper at the exit, unless you hit a knockdown. It should also be the same depth from the heel to the toe (slightly deeper in the middle if your clubs sole is curved) or you might have a lie angle problem. If I take no divot, I didnt stay down on it. I analyse every divot. It tells me a lot about my game and the swing I made. These are just my thoughts.

[JetFan1983]

Please take a look at this very recent thread from the Swing Thoughts forum.