The one million dollar question. There is not a single golfer in the entire world that is 100% content with their impact and ball striking. Even the best golfers in the world are constantly working to improve their contact with the ball, which will ultimately help to improve their scoring. I have battled inconsistencies with my impact for years, but I have found a few tips that do help me continue down the path of perfection. I do realize that every golf article or website in the world claims to have the answer to impact issues, but to be honest, there is no such thing as a cure-all.

The first thing I want you to look at when thinking about impact, is to focus on your front shoulder. Ideally, your front shoulder will be above your front foot at impact. When you are able to get that front shoulder over your lower body during the downswing, you are ensuring that the impact with the ball is as it should be.

The moment of impact is the moment of truth in the golf swing. It’s easy to get caught up in all of the other pieces of the swing puzzle, and those pieces are important, but there is only one moment when you actually touch the ball. You can do a lot of good things in the swing that will wind up going wasted if you get it wrong when impact arrives. In this article, we are going to talk about the various important points you should have in mind related to impact in the golf swing.

Before we get into the discussion, it’s important to remember one thing throughout this article – impact is not a static moment. While you can pause a swing video and evaluate the position of your body and the club at impact, in reality that moment passes by in just the blink of an eye. Why is this important? You need to work on building a composed swing, rather than a series of static positions. You aren’t trying to swing the club in order to arrive at impact in a static position, because that’s just not how it works. You are going to swing through the ball at a high speed, so your swing needs to be built to handle the dynamic nature of the swinging action.

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.


— What a Great Impact Position Looks Like

The best way to get started with this kind of article is to highlight the key points that are usually seen in a good impact position. So, if you do decide to record your swing on video and watch it back later, you’ll know exactly what to look for when you pause that recording at impact.

It’s important to note that you may not hit each and every one of the points listed below. There is certainly room for some individual style in the game of golf, and some people manage to find success despite doing things a little unconventionally. However, do your best to stick as close to these points as possible and you should be happy with the results.

• Eyes on the ball. This is a big one, and it is a point that you may have already known to look for when evaluating your impact position. When the club strikes the back of the ball, your head should be down, and your eyes should be watching the ball carefully. This is an important point for a couple of reasons. First, it’s easier to hit something that you can see, so watching the ball is going to help you make better contact on a consistent basis. Additionally, if you were to pull your head up out of the shot, that movement would cause your shoulders and the rest of your upper body to pull away from the ball. That’s an unnecessary movement and one which is going to affect your ability to hit a solid shot. So, in the end, keeping your eyes on the ball is one of the biggest keys for your impact position and you should be careful to hit on this point as consistently as possible.
• Balanced. You will see this point come up over and over again in golf instruction. If you are going to hit good shots, you need to be balanced. That is true at address, it’s true during the backswing, and it’s certainly true at impact. If you feel like you are falling over in one direction or another, it’s always going to be tough to strike the ball accurately and with authority. At impact, a balanced position is one where slightly more weight is on your left foot than your right. You should be hitting into your left side, as the rotation of your body has started to move your weight in that direction. If you notice that a still frame of your swing at impact shows a lot of your weight hanging back on the right foot, get to work on improving that position right away. It’s common for amateur golfers to hang back on their right side during the downswing, and that mistake always makes it tough to hit good shots. There are many potential causes of poor balance to consider as you work on your swing, but two places to start are address and the overall effort of your swing. On the first point, if you aren’t balanced at address, it’s going to be hard to find balance later on. And, if you are swinging too hard, it’ll be tough to stay balanced all the way through to a good finish. Don’t let balance problems linger in your game too long, or they will only get more difficult to fix.
• Great extension. This is a point that is easy to overlook when you are analyzing your impact position. When the club strikes the ball, you’d like to see great extension from your shoulders down to your hands. In other words, your arms should be straight, or as straight as they can be at this point in the downswing. With good extension, you’ll be able to max out your swing speed because you’ll be creating a big arc and the club will have an opportunity to fully accelerate as it comes down. If you were to keep your arms bent and held in close to your body, not only would you struggle to produce much speed, but you would also have trouble making good contact. It’s often true that good extension is tied to proper upper body rotation, so make sure your shoulders are completing a good turn and it will be easier to extend all the way through the ball and on into the finish.

If you can check off the three key points listed above – eyes on the ball, good balance, and proper extension – you’ll be in excellent shape at impact. Hitting those points doesn’t guarantee that you are going to hit good shots, of course, but you will be a lot closer to a good outcome than if you were missing one or more of those fundamentals. Find an opportunity sometime soon to record your swing on video and check out how you are faring at impact. If you spot any mistakes, get to work right away on making the necessary adjustments.


— Signs of Impact Trouble

Some golfers go years and years without realizing they are making the same mistakes over and over again. If you are hitting bad shots in the same patterns as you were years ago, and you haven’t yet gotten to the bottom of the problem, it might be time to pay attention to the signs below. The points we have listed below highlight some of the common impact problems seen in the amateur game. Be honest with yourself as you assess your current performance and you might be able to find an area that is ready for improvement.

• Fat and thin contact. You probably don’t need to be told that hitting the ball fat or thin is a sign that something is going wrong at impact. In fact, this is probably the most obvious sign of impact issues. If you are regularly hitting the ball fat, which means the club is contacting the ground before the ball, you will need to adjust your swing path or the bottom of your swing arc to better match up with the position of the ball. Likewise, if you are hitting the ball thin over and over again, a correction is in order. There are countless possible explanations for why you are hitting shots fat or thin, so that’s a discussion for another time, but just know that these kinds of shots are usually indicative of a bigger problem with your impact position.
• Hitting the ball off the toe or heel. Just like with fat and thin shots, striking the ball off the toe or heel can be a problem at impact, as well. These mistakes are not usually as noticeable to the average golfer, as the results won’t be as dramatic as when you hit the ball fat or thin. For instance, a shot hit toward the toe of the club may lose a few yards of distance and may draw more than desired – but it could still wind up okay in the end. The same goes for shots struck in toward the heel of the club. You won’t quite maximize your distance when hitting it out of the heel, and it might cut a bit, but overall you can get away with these misses. Unfortunately, the ability to get away with these errors is part of the problem. Since they are often playable, you might not work as hard as you should on fixing the problem. Pay attention to the way the strike feels at impact and take note if you seem to consistently be missing toward the toe or heel. These kinds of impact problems are often related to balance, so work on that fundamental element of your swing if this problem pops up in your game.
• Poor contact under pressure. The inability to strike the ball cleanly when playing under pressure is a likely sign of fundamental mistakes that need to be corrected. After all, the best way to test your game is to play in a tournament setting where pressure is present – you will quickly learn what parts of your game can be trusted, and what needs work. If your ball striking ability seems to disappear as soon as the nerves arrive, you can be sure that your fundamentals are not all in place as they should be. Specifically, you are probably using your hands too actively in the swing. Active hands might produce solid shots when no pressure is present, but they are hard to trust once you feel some nerves. If you find that playing under pressure regularly causes your game to fall apart, go back to the basics and try to build up the fundamental elements of your swing.

You may already know that you have some issues to work out at the moment of impact – or reading the points above may have brought to light just how much work you have to do. Whatever the case, do your best to work on improving the quality of your contact as soon as possible. Few things you can do in this game will make a bigger difference to your overall performance than learning how to strike the ball cleanly time after time.


— The Mental Side of Impact

At first, it would be easy to think that arriving at a good impact position is about nothing more than having solid fundamentals. And, to be sure, it does help to have good physical fundamentals when making your golf swing. But, if you don’t have the mental side of the game to go with it, you still won’t be able to find success.

In this section, we are going to look at a few points which highlight how your mental game can impact the way you strike the golf ball.

• Full commitment to the swing. One of the common mental game issues that plaques golfers is an inability to commit fully to the swing. These players might start out with the best of intentions when they stand over the ball, but their commitment to the swing may soon waiver once the club goes into motion. Usually, it’s a lack of confidence that is at the heart of this kind of issue. In other words, the player doesn’t truly believe that the swing is going to lead to a successful shot, so he or she gives up on their rotation before the ball is sent on its way. This is an issue that can lead to ugly results. If you give up on your, the club will keep rotating while your body stops in its tracks. That’s going to lead to a couple of possible outcomes. For one thing, you could bottom out your swing too early, hitting the ball fat and leaving the shot well short of the target. Or, the club face may shut down before you make contact, sending the ball well to the left. Either way, you won’t be happy with the results. To get to a good impact position swing after swing, you have to completely trust in your technique and believe that the ball is going to fly in the right direction.
• Patient enough to stay down. Even if you do believe that you are going to hit the ball in the right direction, you still may be tempted to look up early to see where the shot is going to go. As we mentioned earlier in the article, this is a mistake that’s likely to cause some serious trouble. If you aren’t looking at the ball when you try to strike it, you’ll have difficulty making solid contact. And, lifting your eyes up away from the ball is going to pull the rest of your upper body out of the shot, taking speed out of the swing and again making it hard to find the sweet spot. The key here is to have enough patience to wait to look up at the ball until after you’ve swung through the hitting area. This is a hard lesson to learn, and it’s something that you need to consciously practice on the range in order to improve on the course.
• Analyzing the lie. This last point is something that is hard to practice on the range, so you really need to develop this skill on the course. For each shot, other than tee shots, you need to analyze your lie and make a decision about the kind of shot you’ll try to hit based on the way the ball is resting. On the range, you should always have a perfect lie – but that’s just not the case on the course. Knowing how to read your lie and adapt your swing accordingly is essential if you are going to make good contact at the moment of impact.

As is always the case in golf, your mental game is going to play a big role in your success or failure. If you can remain focused, make good decisions, and not get impatient during the swing, you will find it much easier to achieve good results.


— Impact in the Short Game

The impact that you make in the short game is not nearly as dramatic as when you are making a full swing. With a full swing, the club slams into the back of the ball at a high rate of speed, you may take a chunk of turf out of the ground, and the ball will fly off into the distance. Nothing quite that exciting happens at impact in the short game, but the split second that the club touches the ball is still critical. If you get impact right in the short game, you can send the ball accurately toward the hole over and over again.

To wrap up our article, we’d like to touch on a few key points related to short game impact.

• It’s all about stability when putting. There is one simple rule of thumb you should always keep in mind when working on your putting technique – less is more. The less you can move your body during the stroke, the better. Holding most of your body perfectly still while your shoulders rock the club back and through is the right way to go. Of course, that is easier said than done, so it will take practice to master that type of stroke. Keeping the movements of your body to a minimum will help greatly when trying to find a solid impact position on your putts.
• Downward impact on basic chip shots. When hitting a standard chip shot, your move through impact should be somewhat down through the ball. Not necessarily steep enough to take a big divot, but just enough to brush the club into the ground after you have struck the ball. This kind of impact on your chip shots is going to do two things. For one, it will make it easier to get the ball up off the ground, which is something many amateur golfers struggle to do when chipping. Also, hitting down adds backspin to your shots, making it easier to stop them around the hole. You will want to vary your approach to impact based on the shot at hand, but a standard chip shot using a descending blow is a great platform on which to build a short game.
• No impact with the ball on greenside bunker shots. When you need to blast the ball out of a greenside bunker, you don’t actually want to hit the ball at all. New golfers tend to have trouble accepting this tip, but it’s the right way to go. Instead of trying to hit the ball directly, you are going to hit the sand, which is going to toss the ball out of the trap and hopefully onto the green. To make this work, you’ll need to use a much more aggressive swing than you would use when playing a shot from a similar distance off of the grass. The sand is going to provide plenty of resistance, so use an aggressive swing and put the club head into the sand a couple inches or so behind the ball. With a little practice, you should get fairly comfortable at executing this basic sand shot.

We hope this discussion of impact in the golf swing has helped you gain a better understanding of how you can improve your technique. Golf is about making small, incremental improvements over a long period of time – so don’t worry if you don’t make dramatic gains during your very next practice session. Stick with it, work on your technique consistently with regular range sessions, and look forward to lower scores in the long run. Good luck!