Trusting Your Swing When Faced With Elevation Changes On The Golf Course (Video) - by Pete Styles
Trusting Your Swing When Faced With Elevation Changes On The Golf Course (Video) - by Pete Styles

Playing a golf shot with an elevation change in front of you, be that uphill or downhill, cn pose its own challenges, particularly in terms of selecting the right golf club. We’ve talked in the previous videos about how we might have to add or take away a club depending on the distance. It depends on the height gain as well.

What we often see golfer do in this position, is they make this correct assessment, they make the correct judgment of club and then they hit a dreadful golf shot anyway. And part of the poem is, they probably don’t trust what they are doing. If you have lasered your distance to the flag and you know it’s a 150 yards, that might be a 7-iron, you pull your 7-iron, you standout over the wall. Then you realized that you are 30 feet above the flag that’s going to drop down by around about 20 yards in terms of its distance. So we need to take 20 yards off so we then have a 9-iron, but now we stood 150 yards away with the 9-iron, probably not something that you are used to doing, you then think to yourself, what do I need to do to my swing. Well I need to battle it, I need to hit really hard. If you do it really hard, and you make correct contact, you might go further than your normal 9-iron distance, further than you intended the ball to go and it goes off the back of the green anyway, because the elevation is checked. The other thing you take your 9-iron out you think you need to better it, you then make a bad swing, you make a bad contact, you get poor contact on the ball, you make a poor directional swing, the ball waves offline and even though it went in the right distance it wasn’t a good strike, good contact or a good direction so you make a mistake regardless. So when you have assessed which club you need to hit, pull that club out with confidence, then make a swing as if the hill on the elevation change is not there, imagine you are playing a normal flat golf shot, you are trying to hit it at your desired distance, you are not trying to do anything different to that shot, that should encourage you to make good controlled swings, knock the ball nicely on the green without trying to do something too funky just because you’ve got an elevation change. 2016-10-17

Playing a golf shot with an elevation change in front of you, be that uphill or downhill, cn pose its own challenges, particularly in terms of selecting the right golf club. We’ve talked in the previous videos about how we might have to add or take away a club depending on the distance. It depends on the height gain as well.

What we often see golfer do in this position, is they make this correct assessment, they make the correct judgment of club and then they hit a dreadful golf shot anyway. And part of the poem is, they probably don’t trust what they are doing. If you have lasered your distance to the flag and you know it’s a 150 yards, that might be a 7-iron, you pull your 7-iron, you standout over the wall. Then you realized that you are 30 feet above the flag that’s going to drop down by around about 20 yards in terms of its distance. So we need to take 20 yards off so we then have a 9-iron, but now we stood 150 yards away with the 9-iron, probably not something that you are used to doing, you then think to yourself, what do I need to do to my swing. Well I need to battle it, I need to hit really hard. If you do it really hard, and you make correct contact, you might go further than your normal 9-iron distance, further than you intended the ball to go and it goes off the back of the green anyway, because the elevation is checked.

The other thing you take your 9-iron out you think you need to better it, you then make a bad swing, you make a bad contact, you get poor contact on the ball, you make a poor directional swing, the ball waves offline and even though it went in the right distance it wasn’t a good strike, good contact or a good direction so you make a mistake regardless. So when you have assessed which club you need to hit, pull that club out with confidence, then make a swing as if the hill on the elevation change is not there, imagine you are playing a normal flat golf shot, you are trying to hit it at your desired distance, you are not trying to do anything different to that shot, that should encourage you to make good controlled swings, knock the ball nicely on the green without trying to do something too funky just because you’ve got an elevation change.