Stop Coming Over The Top In Your Golf Swing (Video) - Lesson 6 by PGA Pro Pete Styles
Stop Coming Over The Top In Your Golf Swing (Video) - Lesson 6 by PGA Pro Pete Styles

The words coming over the top are pretty synonymous with a lot of golf lessons that I give and a lot of clients that come in for golf lessons say to me, “Pete, I know what I am doing, I am coming over the top.” And I think it’s probably words a lot of people dread to hear as well because there can’t be good things in a golf swing to come over the top. So let’s explore that sense to understand what it means and what it affects the golf ball with.

So setting up to the golf ball when we swing back effectively have this concept of a swing plane. So someone that comes over the top is someone that attacks the golf ball from the swing plane that is too steep, it’s over the top of the intended swing plane. So we might also call that and out to in kind of motion, but an over the top swing, is never going to be a good thing unless you are intentionally trying to hit large left to right sliding golf shots. And the problem with this concept of coming over the top, is for a lot of golfers it actually saps power. They don’t generally hit the golf ball a long way within over the top or an outswing, golf swing. We often see a lot of golfers will take the club nicely to the top and chop it down from the top and then bring the club quite severely across themselves with this over the top motion. And because of that the point of contact is quite a steep, quite an aggressive swing downwards and it’s slaps across the back of the golf ball and it kind of spins the ball high up into the air and often lacks a bit of distance. And another issue that lot of golfers find with that motion, that over the top, coming over the top motion, is that when they hit the ball, they can only really hit the ball with one directional shape, it generally moves left to right for the right handed golfer. So it would be fade or it would be slice, the ball would set off down the left side and cut back to the right hand side. And a golfer who brings the club over the top, is generally going to struggle to hit the ball with a drill, a drill shot is going to require a swing path that’s much more rightwards down the over the top swing and a golf club that generally comes down more underneath the plane and swings out to the right hand side to create a drill, so an over the top golfer is often spinning the ball too much, lacking distance and hitting that one dimensional left to right shape of golf shots. 2016-05-13

The words coming over the top are pretty synonymous with a lot of golf lessons that I give and a lot of clients that come in for golf lessons say to me, “Pete, I know what I am doing, I am coming over the top.” And I think it’s probably words a lot of people dread to hear as well because there can’t be good things in a golf swing to come over the top. So let’s explore that sense to understand what it means and what it affects the golf ball with.

So setting up to the golf ball when we swing back effectively have this concept of a swing plane. So someone that comes over the top is someone that attacks the golf ball from the swing plane that is too steep, it’s over the top of the intended swing plane. So we might also call that and out to in kind of motion, but an over the top swing, is never going to be a good thing unless you are intentionally trying to hit large left to right sliding golf shots. And the problem with this concept of coming over the top, is for a lot of golfers it actually saps power. They don’t generally hit the golf ball a long way within over the top or an outswing, golf swing. We often see a lot of golfers will take the club nicely to the top and chop it down from the top and then bring the club quite severely across themselves with this over the top motion. And because of that the point of contact is quite a steep, quite an aggressive swing downwards and it’s slaps across the back of the golf ball and it kind of spins the ball high up into the air and often lacks a bit of distance.

And another issue that lot of golfers find with that motion, that over the top, coming over the top motion, is that when they hit the ball, they can only really hit the ball with one directional shape, it generally moves left to right for the right handed golfer. So it would be fade or it would be slice, the ball would set off down the left side and cut back to the right hand side. And a golfer who brings the club over the top, is generally going to struggle to hit the ball with a drill, a drill shot is going to require a swing path that’s much more rightwards down the over the top swing and a golf club that generally comes down more underneath the plane and swings out to the right hand side to create a drill, so an over the top golfer is often spinning the ball too much, lacking distance and hitting that one dimensional left to right shape of golf shots.