Natalie Adams – PGA Teaching Pro

With this swing tip we are going to have a look at what’s causing your drives to go really, really high and if you are hitting your drives too high you are not going to be hitting them far enough. So three main reasons that your driver would go high first of all we are going to look at the club face and if the club face is open or your club face is pointing more to the right than you are aiming then you are going to have a lot more height on the shot and on the launch angle. So if we look at the golf club, if your golf club is turned to the right you can see straight away opens the club face up there and as you open the club face up it puts more angle on to the club face so you are turning your driver if you playing say a 14 degree driver you open the club face you turned it in to a 16 or a 17 degree driver so you are going to be hitting the ball a lot higher. So straight away double check that when you are setting up that you haven’t got your club face open and when you are coming back in to hit the ball the club face isn’t open because that is going to give you a very high flight. If your club face is slightly open you will see that the ball is going to be swinging to the right or its going to be going straight to the right of where you are aiming so that’s another good way to tell if your club face is open or not.

Okay so now we can also look at what I’m hitting the ball straight but I’m hitting it high now one of the reasons for that would be that as you’re coming in to your impact position you are flicking your golf club like this at the golf ball and so again you are adding more loft on to the shot. So as you are striking the shaft is really leaning back you can see here that my hands are kind of opposite my right thigh of the inside of my right thigh. But they are very much on the right hand side as I’m looking to the club head. So what we want to do is work on swinging through, keeping the hands over the club head and that’s going to make sure that the actual loft of the club comes back to the ball if you like this with the hands back you’re going to find that you’re going to put more loft on to the club and again the more loft you’re putting on to the club the higher you’re getting a launch angle.

And the third reason that you’d be hitting your golf shot high if you come in over the top. Now this kind of shot is going to really pop up in to the yard very, very high and not get a lot of distance at all. So if you are coming over the top if we look this way on you’ll be swinging your golf club back and then as you’re swinging down your club head is moving over the top of your hands on to this side of your hands. So now as you go to strike the ball the club head will be on the far side of your target line and you’ll have to pull it back towards you to hit the golf ball and this action will really get the club to dig underneath the ball and really pop the golf ball up very, very high.

So if you’ve seen that kind of shot and that’s why the ball is going high you’ve got to work and as you swing back in to keep the club head behind you more don’t allow the club head to come over the top of your hands, keep the club head behind you so that you can swing the club down the target line a lot more. So a good tip for you to help you with that so if you take your range basket and you put the range basket just in the – to the right of the golf ball but just on the far side of the target line so you can just about swing your club head back without clipping that basket if you do come over the top you’ll find that you just clicked that basket as you swing back down.

So this is really, really good drill to help you improve that to swing the club away and then as you swing back in make sure you are inside that basket so you don’t hit the basket. And there are three reasons why you’d be hitting the ball high if you work on those you should lower your ball flight and start to get additional yardage.