Golf Swing Plane Gap (Video) - by Pete Styles
Golf Swing Plane Gap (Video) - by Pete Styles

I think now we’ve got a decent understanding of firstly what a swing plane terminology is and the second thing is we now understood how we can record our swing plane with this video camera behind. I’d now to look at whether your swing plane is what we would term as a correct swing plane and how consistent your swing plane is because if your golf swing plane is very inconsistent or the backswing and downswing planes are nothing like each other it’s going to be relatively difficult to consistently hit the golf ball how you’d want to hit it.

So when you’ve got your video camera set up as mine is here behind the line of my hands and my feet, I’m in a good addressed position here, I’m going to start swinging the club head back and we can start to look at the swing plane position the club is in. As we go up we can then look at the swing plane position the club is in on the downswing and one of the most common issues we see for the club golfer is that those two positions don’t match, whether the backswing is steeper and the downswing is shallower or actually the much more common one of the backswing being quite shallow and the downswing being quite steep. So let me just highlight those two key points to you again. The most common swing I would see on a day-to-day lesson tee is that the backswing would be too flat here and the downswing would then change shape and become a lot steeper, we might talk about being over the top on the downswing and it’s because the plane is over the top of the backswing plane. Now, to understand that as an analogy that isn’t related to golf that would be like taking a hammer and a nail and trying to hammer the nail with a circle. You don’t hammer the nail with a circle, you’d hammer the nail with an up and a down action, a straight forward, straight back action rather than one plane and two planes. So a golf swing ideally would be one plane up and a similar plane coming down, not a one plane going back and a different plane coming down, that circular action is going to be very difficult to repeat on a consistent basis, particularly if that’s your target line and the downswing plane is not is not matching that target line. So once you’ve got your video camera set up you can go ahead and look at the swing plane back and down and start to see whether the back and the downswing planes are similar or if they have a gap. If one is here and the downswing is here we’d talk about the plane gap and the gap between the two planes, the smaller that gap is the better that’s going to be for you. So utilize your video camera, have a look at that plane gap and see if you can get the up and the down swing planes to be more similar to each other. Remember, that’s like hammering a nail straight up and straight down. 2016-04-22

I think now we’ve got a decent understanding of firstly what a swing plane terminology is and the second thing is we now understood how we can record our swing plane with this video camera behind. I’d now to look at whether your swing plane is what we would term as a correct swing plane and how consistent your swing plane is because if your golf swing plane is very inconsistent or the backswing and downswing planes are nothing like each other it’s going to be relatively difficult to consistently hit the golf ball how you’d want to hit it.

So when you’ve got your video camera set up as mine is here behind the line of my hands and my feet, I’m in a good addressed position here, I’m going to start swinging the club head back and we can start to look at the swing plane position the club is in. As we go up we can then look at the swing plane position the club is in on the downswing and one of the most common issues we see for the club golfer is that those two positions don’t match, whether the backswing is steeper and the downswing is shallower or actually the much more common one of the backswing being quite shallow and the downswing being quite steep.

So let me just highlight those two key points to you again. The most common swing I would see on a day-to-day lesson tee is that the backswing would be too flat here and the downswing would then change shape and become a lot steeper, we might talk about being over the top on the downswing and it’s because the plane is over the top of the backswing plane.

Now, to understand that as an analogy that isn’t related to golf that would be like taking a hammer and a nail and trying to hammer the nail with a circle. You don’t hammer the nail with a circle, you’d hammer the nail with an up and a down action, a straight forward, straight back action rather than one plane and two planes. So a golf swing ideally would be one plane up and a similar plane coming down, not a one plane going back and a different plane coming down, that circular action is going to be very difficult to repeat on a consistent basis, particularly if that’s your target line and the downswing plane is not is not matching that target line.

So once you’ve got your video camera set up you can go ahead and look at the swing plane back and down and start to see whether the back and the downswing planes are similar or if they have a gap. If one is here and the downswing is here we’d talk about the plane gap and the gap between the two planes, the smaller that gap is the better that’s going to be for you. So utilize your video camera, have a look at that plane gap and see if you can get the up and the down swing planes to be more similar to each other. Remember, that’s like hammering a nail straight up and straight down.