Pete Finch – PGA Teaching Pro
Now, first things first, how do you know if you are swinging from over the top? Now, in an absolutely ideal situation, you will be able to get yourself a lesson using launch monitors and video analysis to actually show whereabouts your swing path is heading to. However, there are certain things that you can do if you don’t have access to lessons or you don’t have access to launch monitors.
If you’re just using an iron shot, you can start to check your divot patterns to see in which position the club is entering the point of impact. So, what I’m going to do here is I’m just going to move this ball a little bit further forward and I got an alignment stick here, which is pointing parallel down towards my ideal target line. Now, if I’m swinging out-to-in here, what should happen is my club should move over the target line, hit the ball and then travel left. And after I stroke the ball, my divot should be going further left, then ideally want it to. So, I’m going to take the swing, move out-to-in and you can see from this divot pattern, it’s pointing in this direction rather than down towards my intended target line. So, I know the fact that with that swing I move the club from out-to-in and I shot the ball off to the left-hand side. Now, this is a very simple and a very rudimentary way to understanding and to be able to see if you are swinging from over the top. There are a lot of drills that you can use. You can use gate drills where you pull ball down either side and see if you can swing through, seeing which balls you hit. There is lots of different ways of telling. But just by simply identifying which way that your divots are going, you will be able to get a better understanding of where your swing path is heading and then by analyzing where the divot is and by analyzing what happened to the ball flight, which traveled off to the left-hand side and then stayed off to the left-hand side without much curvature, I know that my club path and my club face were both pointing left at the point of impact. And it is from there that I can decide to start making the most of this technique and trying to get that ball back to target. 2016-10-11Now, first things first, how do you know if you are swinging from over the top? Now, in an absolutely ideal situation, you will be able to get yourself a lesson using launch monitors and video analysis to actually show whereabouts your swing path is heading to. However, there are certain things that you can do if you don’t have access to lessons or you don’t have access to launch monitors.
If you’re just using an iron shot, you can start to check your divot patterns to see in which position the club is entering the point of impact. So, what I’m going to do here is I’m just going to move this ball a little bit further forward and I got an alignment stick here, which is pointing parallel down towards my ideal target line. Now, if I’m swinging out-to-in here, what should happen is my club should move over the target line, hit the ball and then travel left. And after I stroke the ball, my divot should be going further left, then ideally want it to.
So, I’m going to take the swing, move out-to-in and you can see from this divot pattern, it’s pointing in this direction rather than down towards my intended target line. So, I know the fact that with that swing I move the club from out-to-in and I shot the ball off to the left-hand side. Now, this is a very simple and a very rudimentary way to understanding and to be able to see if you are swinging from over the top. There are a lot of drills that you can use. You can use gate drills where you pull ball down either side and see if you can swing through, seeing which balls you hit.
There is lots of different ways of telling. But just by simply identifying which way that your divots are going, you will be able to get a better understanding of where your swing path is heading and then by analyzing where the divot is and by analyzing what happened to the ball flight, which traveled off to the left-hand side and then stayed off to the left-hand side without much curvature, I know that my club path and my club face were both pointing left at the point of impact. And it is from there that I can decide to start making the most of this technique and trying to get that ball back to target.
