Solving The Problem Of An Early Golf Swing Release (Video) - by Pete Styles
Solving The Problem Of An Early Golf Swing Release (Video) - by Pete Styles

So if we’ve now established that the fault might be the early releasing, we’re hitting the ball too high, hitting the ball fat, hitting the ball with a slice, we can now establish why that early release might be happening and how we can start to correct it. So from a good asserted position, I’ve gone now to a wedge here for this exercise and I encourage you to do the same. Wedge, ball in the middle of the stance, you swing back, the temptation would be the early release creeps and the club beats the hands so the golf ball is in its early release position. That is mainly driven for most golfers by that dominant hand, so for a right hander, that’s my right hand doing too much work. So what I would encourage you to do is try and swing slightly more aggressively with the left hand and more passively with your dominant hand, for me the right hand.

So in my set position here, I’m actually going to unwrap my fingers from the right hand so I’m only holding it with sort of thumb and fore finger loosely in this position. I can then swing the club back and drop the club into the back of the ball but you’ll see my right hand has very little influence at this point. Now if the left hand can pull down and the left hand can dominate and win, the right hand doesn’t have the influence of scooping underneath. That should encourage me to have my hands more in front of the golf ball at the point of impact as I strike down on the golf ball here rather than the right hand coming under. Now, initially you might find this drill quite difficult because effectively we’re hitting the ball with one hand really. We’re not really involving both hands in this. It’s more of a one-handed technique. So we might find that the golf ball certainly won’t go as far as it should and it might be a little inconsistent to strike it. So by all means pop the ball up in a little tee pack, set it back and drive that left hand down. But the one thing we are looking for when we hit the shot is a slightly lower flight. So even though it’s only one-handed, we should be chipping the ball down and forward and having a slightly lower flight. I’ll set myself up here and I’ll go ahead and try and produce one from down the line. I will hit in one-handed. It’s not going to be the easiest thing in the world but we’ll just pitch one forward. So rather than scooping and giving my right hand too much influence, let left hand the technique and try and hit down on the golf ball and we can see that the ball came out quite low. It’s actually gone a little bit left because my left hand just over rotated and turned through, but what I saw there was my hands were ahead and I took a nice divot as I struck the ball and it wasn’t my right hand flicking and scooping. So left hand only technique, right hand no fingers wrapped around on the back of the club, dominate with the left hand, take the right hand influence away, and see that you can bring your ball flight down and stop the early release. 2016-04-20

So if we’ve now established that the fault might be the early releasing, we’re hitting the ball too high, hitting the ball fat, hitting the ball with a slice, we can now establish why that early release might be happening and how we can start to correct it. So from a good asserted position, I’ve gone now to a wedge here for this exercise and I encourage you to do the same. Wedge, ball in the middle of the stance, you swing back, the temptation would be the early release creeps and the club beats the hands so the golf ball is in its early release position. That is mainly driven for most golfers by that dominant hand, so for a right hander, that’s my right hand doing too much work. So what I would encourage you to do is try and swing slightly more aggressively with the left hand and more passively with your dominant hand, for me the right hand.

So in my set position here, I’m actually going to unwrap my fingers from the right hand so I’m only holding it with sort of thumb and fore finger loosely in this position. I can then swing the club back and drop the club into the back of the ball but you’ll see my right hand has very little influence at this point. Now if the left hand can pull down and the left hand can dominate and win, the right hand doesn’t have the influence of scooping underneath. That should encourage me to have my hands more in front of the golf ball at the point of impact as I strike down on the golf ball here rather than the right hand coming under.

Now, initially you might find this drill quite difficult because effectively we’re hitting the ball with one hand really. We’re not really involving both hands in this. It’s more of a one-handed technique. So we might find that the golf ball certainly won’t go as far as it should and it might be a little inconsistent to strike it. So by all means pop the ball up in a little tee pack, set it back and drive that left hand down. But the one thing we are looking for when we hit the shot is a slightly lower flight. So even though it’s only one-handed, we should be chipping the ball down and forward and having a slightly lower flight.

I’ll set myself up here and I’ll go ahead and try and produce one from down the line. I will hit in one-handed. It’s not going to be the easiest thing in the world but we’ll just pitch one forward. So rather than scooping and giving my right hand too much influence, let left hand the technique and try and hit down on the golf ball and we can see that the ball came out quite low. It’s actually gone a little bit left because my left hand just over rotated and turned through, but what I saw there was my hands were ahead and I took a nice divot as I struck the ball and it wasn’t my right hand flicking and scooping. So left hand only technique, right hand no fingers wrapped around on the back of the club, dominate with the left hand, take the right hand influence away, and see that you can bring your ball flight down and stop the early release.