There are few shots in golf quite as embarrassing as a topped shot.

As you swing through the ball and into your follow through, you naturally look up to see where the ball is going. Only, you can’t find the ball, because it never got off the ground at all. Instead, it is rolling down the fairway, or bouncing off into the rough. There isn’t much good to say about topped shots, as they are as damaging to your scorecard as they are bruising to your ego.

In this article, we are going to offer tips aimed at helping you stop the pattern of topped shots once and for all. One of the exciting things about working on this part of your game is that it is possible to virtually eliminate the mistake of topping the ball from your game. While you’ll never be able to completely stop hitting bad shots – they are just a part of the game – you can get rid of topped shots almost entirely. For proof, just look to the professional golfers who play on TV each weekend. They hit their share of poor shots from time to time, but you won’t ever see them top the ball (unless playing from a bad lie). You might not ever reach that level, but it’s realistic to believe that you will very rarely see a topped shot again once you work on your technique.

Of course, nothing comes free in golf. If you expect to work yourself away from topped shots, you’ll need to spend some quality time on the driving range working on your technique. Your progress may come slowly at first but do your best to stick with it and it’s likely that you will improve gradually with each practice session. Pretty soon, you’ll find that you are no longer worried about topped shots while on the course, and you can shift your focus to other things.

All of the content below is based on a right-handed golfer. If you happen to play left-handed, please take a moment to reverse the directions as necessary.

Causes of Topped Shots

If you are just getting started in the game of golf, topped shots may be a mystery to you. The swing you made felt just like any other swing, yet the ball didn’t get off the ground for some reason. What went wrong? It’s almost important in golf to get to the bottom of your poor shots so you can improve moving forward. Bad shots are not just random events – they happen as a direct result of a mistake you made. Even when you are frustrated by the poor shot you have produced, it is worthwhile to think through the mistake and try to sort out what caused the error.

With that in mind, we are going to list a few potential causes of topped shots in this section. There are obviously many different possible causes for this kind of shot, so don’t think of the list below as complete. This is just a starting point – the mistake you are making may be on this list, or it may not. Use these common errors as a starting point and you should hopefully determine the cause of your topped shots before long.

• Coming up onto your toes at impact. As the club swings down toward impact, you may feel compelled to lift up onto your toes in an effort to produce additional power. As you might imagine, this is not a good idea. When you raise yourself up onto your toes, you are going to raise the level of your entire body. That means the club is going to come up as well, and you might not be able to reach down far enough at impact to strike a solid shot. The margins in the game of golf are very small, so lifting the club by even an inch or so can have a disastrous effect. Rather than lifting up, your goal should be to keep turning to the left through the downswing, keeping your left foot flat on the turf. This will simplify your swing and it will make it less likely that you’ll top your shot in the end.
• Looking up early. This is a classic mistake, and it is one which can impact experienced golfers just the same as it can affect beginners. If you look up toward the target before you have actually struck the ball, you may wind up topping your shot. The act of looking up away from the ball is problematic for a couple reasons. First, your eyes will be leaving the ball, and it is harder to hit something that you aren’t looking at. Perhaps even more importantly, the movement of your head could cause your shoulders (and the rest of your upper body) to lift up. That would put you into the same position as the previous point, where the level of the club would be raised, and you’d struggle to get all the way down through impact correctly. It might seem like an easy task to just look at the ball while making your swing, but the temptation to look up at the target can be strong. You may be feeling a little anxious about your shot, and you just want to see where the ball is going to go. So, how do you get over this hurdle? The same way you deal with any other problems in golf – practice. On the range, pay attention to the way your head behaves during the swing, and make sure your eyes are staying on the ball all the way through impact. With consistent practice, you should be able to gradually rid yourself of the urge to look up prematurely.
• Trying to help the ball off the ground. Sometimes, it is a mental mistake, rather than a physical error, which is responsible for a topped shot. For some golfers, it is hard to shake the feeling that the ball needs some help in order to get off the ground. Rather than just swinging through on a flat plane, or even a bit down into the ball, some golfers will try to lift up at impact to send the ball skyward. This is not necessary, and it can be harmful to the quality of your swing. If you don’t get the timing just right, the club will be too high by the time it reaches the ball, and you will hit a top. To get over this mental block, think for a moment about the design of your golf clubs. Each club in your bag has some degree of loft, and it is the job of the loft to help the ball get off the turf. As long as you swing down aggressively and make clean contact somewhere near the middle of the club face, you’ll be able to get the ball off the ground. Trust the loft on your club to do its part of the job and getting your shots airborne will be a pretty simple task.

If you are currently hitting a lot of topped shots, the three points above are a great place to start your search for the root cause of the problem. In the next section, we will move on to talking about some tips that can help you to leave this issue in the past.

A Handful of Tips

In this section, we are going to get down to the business of helping you avoid topped shots. We’ve already talked about some of the possible causes of topped shots, but we are now going to shift to the positive viewpoint and discuss how you can get back on track. Even if you aren’t a great golfer, there is no reason you have to suffer through one topped shot after the next. Golf is about having fun on the course with your friends, but it’s hard to enjoy this game when many of your shots fail to leave the ground.

Without further delay, let’s get started with our list of tips. It’s possible that some of these tips will not directly apply to your game, but most of them should help in one way or another.

• Check on your ball position. Ball position is one of those fundamentals in the game of golf that is easy to overlook. When you head to the range for a practice session, you may not think twice about where you are standing in relation to the ball – despite the fact that this is a key fundamental. Take some time to work on finding a perfect spot for the ball to rest as you make your swings. As it relates specifically to topping your shots, it’s likely that the ball is too far forward in your stance when you hit a top. Of course, playing the ball too far back in your stance comes with its own set of problems, so don’t go too far in the other direction. The best way to find the right ball position for your game is through good old-fashioned trial and error. Spend some time working on this point and you can eliminate it as a cause of trouble in your game.
• Work on rotation. A good golf swing is based on rotation. If you don’t rotate correctly while you are swinging the club, it’s highly unlikely that you’ll be able to reach your potential on the course. Not only is power developed through a rotational action, but you will also find it easier to achieve a clean strike when you turn back and through. For those who are topping the ball, it is particularly important to work on rotating correctly. By focusing your effort on turning back away from the target and then turning through toward the hole, you will find that you don’t have much time left to lift up and top the shot. Basically, the force of turning toward the target is going to prevent you from making the mistake that will lead to a top. This is a great way to get rid of topped shots because it is also going to help you develop your game in other ways. Pay close attention to the quality of your rotation in practice and your game is sure to improve.
• Watch your mark. We mentioned earlier that looking up early is a common mistake when it comes to topped shots. If you would like to work on taking away that tendency in your game, try making a special mark on your golf ball that you can watch throughout your swing. It’s easy to draw some kind of unique marking on your ball, or you can just use one of the marks already on your golf ball to serve the same purpose. Whatever the case, the idea is the same – you are going to pick a specific marking on the ball to hold your attention until the ball is sent into the distance. For example, you may decide to use the number printed on your ball as your point of focus. So, as you settle into your stance over the ball, you will lock your eyes on that number and keep them there as the swing progresses. If you do a good job of keeping your eyes focused on that spot, there is almost no way your head will move up early. Once the ball is gone, of course, you will be free to look up and see how you’ve done.
• Keep your hands moving. This last tip on our list is the most technical of the four. As you swing the club down toward impact, you may feel tempted to slow up a bit in an attempt to guide the club into the back of the ball. That would be a mistake. If you slow your hands down toward the bottom of the swing, the club is almost certainly going to ‘flip’ under your hands, and the club head will move back up away from the turf. That is going to make a topped shot a very likely outcome. The solution? Simple – keep your hands moving. Ideally, your hands will be at least even with the ball at impact, if not a bit in front. Make it a point to keep your hands moving aggressively on the way down so you don’t let the club flip up as it heads toward the ball.

With any luck, at least one or two of these tips will help you iron out the issues that are plaguing your swing at the moment. Nothing is going to happen automatically, so don’t think that you will be fixed just because you read this list of tips. You need to get out to the range and put in the work if you are going to make real progress.

The Mental Barrier

It’s essential to work on your swing technique on the driving range. If you don’t put in the work, you can’t possibly expect yourself to get better. With that said, all the driving range work in the world is only going to get you so far. At some point, you’ll need to take your improved technique out to the course to see how it is going to hold up. Hopefully, you will have made enough progress that your physical issues are a thing of the past. The mental side of the equation, however, could be a completely different story.

There is some emotional damage that comes along with hitting a series of topped shots. You probably felt somewhat embarrassed when you hit those shots, and they may have even made you question if you wanted to keep playing this game. Now that you are heading back to the course to test out your improved swing, you’ll encounter some ‘demons’ associated with those poor shots. Basically, as you stand over the ball, you may start to worry about topping the shot you are about to play. Getting past this hurdle will likely be your last big challenge in this process.

There are a couple of strategies you can employ here which may help you get away from the negative thoughts. The first is to remind yourself of all the work you’ve done on the practice range. When you start to worry that you might top your next shot, simply slow down, take a deep breath, and remember that you have improved since you were hitting all of those shots. Your technique is now better than it was before, so there’s no reason to expect that you’ll fail to get the ball off the ground. Lean on your preparation and you may be able to find enough confidence to get through the moment.

The other strategy to consider is to inject some perspective into your game. That means to remind yourself that this is, in fact, just a game. So what if you happen to top the ball once or twice? Is that really a big deal? All golfers want to play well, and there is nothing wrong with being competitive and trying to do your best. However, it’s still just a game, and putting too much pressure on yourself to success is counterproductive. Keep everything in perspective on the links and it will become easier to allow your true talent to shine through.

Topped Shots in the Short Game

To finish up this article on topping the golf ball, we are going to shift gears and move into the short game. It might not be as common to top the ball in the short game as it is with a full swing, but it certainly can happen. We’d like to provide a couple quick tips on how to avoid this outcome, so you can continue to improve your short game right along with your long game.

For starters, it should be said that you should not be having any trouble topping your putts. The putter is quite simple to strike cleanly, even if it is a tough task to actually knock your putts into the hole. If you are struggling with topped putts, take a step back and closely review the technique you are using on the greens.

Most likely, any topped shots in the short game will take place when you are chipping or pitching. If that is happening to you, it’s possible that you are trying to help the ball off the ground. This is a mistake which is extremely common in the amateur game, especially among beginners who haven’t yet learned to how to hit down through impact to make the ball go up. Again, just as we stated when talking about the full swing, you need to trust the loft on your club to do the work of getting the ball airborne. There is plenty of loft on your wedges to do the job, so set aside the notion of helping the ball up and just let the club do what it was designed to do.

Another possible cause of topped short game shots is an overactive right hand. As you swing toward the ball for a chip or pitch shot, you should keep both hands moving through the hitting area. If your left hand slows down while your right hand takes over the action, trouble could be just around the corner. Keep that left hand going to avoid a situation where the right hand does too much and causes the club head to lift away from the turf. As long as your hands wind up in a position just past the golf ball at impact, you should be happy with the results you achieve.

Thank you for taking the time to read through this discussion on topped golf shots. It’s never fun to make this kind of mistake on the course, but you can use it as a learning experience. Take a moment to think about why you topped the ball and spend some time during an upcoming practice session working on a fix. Good luck!

Now, one of the most common shots that we often see with beginners, particularly when they’re starting to play the game, is hitting the top of the golf ball having that thin top shot that goes low across the floor, sends a vibration up the fingers and gives you very little feedback from the good shot. It is just scooting across the ground all the time.

Now, that often happens because ironically you’re trying to lift the ball up into the air. So, trying to help the ball up in the air to try and hit that nice high one is often guilty of hitting the top of the ball and it goes too low. That is often accompanied by your playing partners and telling you that you lifted your head. Now, although the advice that you lifted your head is not strictly true, the sentiment probably is. You certainly lifted up through the ball. It is not strictly your head that is causing the problem. It is more relevant that the chest is coming up and the left shoulder is coming up, maybe even the left elbow.

So, when you’re setting up the golf ball, firstly check if you got correct ball position. Nice ball position is in the center of the stance for a pitting wedge, shuffling across towards the left side as you get slightly longer in your clubs and then right up into the left instep as you’re playing a driver. So, once you’ve got good ball position here, we’ve adopted a nice knee flex and a nice posture position, so you’re nicely feeling like you’re staying down on the golf ball on the set position, making your normal back swing to the top, now we just need to stay in that nice set up position ready for impact.

We certainly don’t want to have a set up position and an impact position that are two very different movements. We want to have set up position and impact position that looks quite similar still staying down over the top of the ball. Focus on left shoulder staying down, left arm, left elbow staying down and straight and importantly the chest, the buttons if you like, get the buttons on your shirt down to impact, not up to impact. Anything where the chest comes up, the head comes up. Hence, the expression, you look up to see where it went, and you hit to top of the golf ball.

So, if I can stay down through impact, this will be my impact position instead of this being my impact position. So, if I hit the bad one for you, this is deliberately a bad one where I would lift out of the shot. You’d see this happen coming straight over the top of the golf ball, looking up to see it, bending the arms, and the ball doesn’t move at all. If I stay down for impact and I hit through the ball better, my impact position is still down. I would then rise up right to the very end.

Then, maybe that is a good exercise for you. Stay down through impact a little bit longer, then lift up at the very end to stand up and see the golf ball. Anything where you lift up too early, you are going to be topping the ball and that is one of the worst shots you’ll ever hit.