Green Grass Golf Shop

Hello friends, welcome back into the Green Grass Golf Shop, and today we have another awesome video to help you play your best golf, but more importantly, how to keep you from making the game harder on yourself. Now what I want to talk about this week are those quick fixes that I see ever so often from amateur and weekend golfers. And be sure to stay to the end, or each of these quick fixes golfers use that actually hurt their game in the long run, I’ll go over something that you can actually do as a true quick fix to help you start playing better immediately. I see a lot of things out there on the Bogey Golf Tour that players do in their setup that in theory and by common sense they imagine are fixing the looming faults that they know are about to hinder their swing and their upcoming shot. Things like aiming way left or even setting up with a dead shut face to try to mitigate a slice, closing their stance way off to try to swing more in to out. Now let’s be honest, most amateur golfers, they suffer from an over-the-top motion, a big fade (or slice…), and are trying to do everything they can to hit a draw to no avail. This is who this video is for. If you struggle with blocks and snap hooks, you can’t stop your ball from over drawing or starting your shot too far right, THIS VIDEO IS NOT FOR YOU! This is a player who struggles with over the top motions starting the ball towards their pull side and curving back toward their target.

What I’m going to do here today is go over the three things i see most often from players to try to fix that pesky slice. We’re going to go over three quick fixes that i see, go into a little detail about how those are not helping. More often, they’re actually making the problem worse, making those faults that you’re trying to fix much harder to fix. Now, we’ll be using the driver for this video, but a lot of it will apply to every club in the bag. Now, everyone has played with, or may even be the person in their group that sets up like this, with the face dead shut, pointing at the ground in front of their foot rather than trying to square it up. Now, going back to my intro video, my whole swing philosophy, your body and your brain are much better at golf than you realize. What I mean by that is when your subconscious looks down at that club pointed a million miles left, you have to fight your natural instincts in order to square that club face. Your brain sees that shut face and says, “damn, dude, if I release any more than that, I’m going to hit a thousand yard draw and hit it OB. I have to hold off that finish.” So by setting up like that, you’re not allowing your body or your club to move the way it needs to. You’re not allowing the problem to be fixed, you’re only grooving in a follow through and a finish that will get it harder (to change) the more you swing it into your muscle memory. You’re telling your body you need to swing like that, which doesn’t allow you to properly get down to the golf ball, so your body moves like this to get back down, so you have to do this and stand up in the takeaway, and it causes so many issues. If you want to tell your brain it needs to release the club more, do the opposite. Set up with the club face slightly open, like this, with the face pointing toward your miss. Tell your subconscious, “man, I better release the absolute heck out of this club, or it’s going a thousand yards right, like it normally does.” If you still can’t release, you need to make sure your grip’s in the right spot. Most importantly, this, right here, this pad underneath your pinky NEEDS TO GO on top of the club. When you look down, you can see three knuckles on your top grip hand, both these “V’s” created by your thumb and your forefinger pointed at your trailing ear, just off of your eye line, bottom hand palm pointing right at the target both at setup and impact. Grip is in the fingers at the full swing very very loose, you should only be holding onto your club as tight as you need to so that it doesn’t fly out of your hands. Most often I’d see golfers that don’t even know what the release is, and it’s immediately fixed by just strengthening their grip like that. Those are my favorite lessons, too. Just “here, move your hands like this. Now swing. There you go. Slice gone. Money, pweeeeeeease.” And then the absolute best feeling as an instructor, when your student turns around, looks at you dumbfounded, like, dude, I’ve never done that before.

Okay, now to the next quick fix, and certainly something I often see paired up with our first setup, the closed space, and that’s the closed stance. Somewhere along the lines, and maybe with older and maybe more static body mechanic style teaching philosophies, it was loosely understood and taught that your club path was influenced primarily by your foot line, which can certainly be true to some degree. But what I see a lot is, “oh, I want an in-to-out path. I’ll just point my feet that way, aim my shoulders where I want the ball to end up, and boom.” With most amateur players fighting that over-the-top motion, you see a lot of close stances trying to influence that in-to-out path. But again, that can actually really hurt your swing, make your over-the-top motion worse. This one is not tricking your brain at all, it’s just really restricting your lower body movement. See, with the proper golf swing, the hips really do have to move in some form or fashion. Each player is going to be different with their unique angles and the way their body’s shaped, the physical moves they’re able or not able to make with injuries, age, body wear and tear, what have you. And how much they need to move their hips in some way, some way, form or fashion with their unique swing, but the hips can’t stay completely static. If the hips stay completely static, the chest moves first and the hands have to go into out. However, as you can see here, watch what my hands do when my hips are the only thing moving. When the hips turn first, I mean, it kind of blocks me out a little bit, but it really brings those hands straight down to where they need to be in the slot and into a nice position. Gives me a really nice into out motion, right? Again, how much, how hard, how fast you rotate your hips Your sequencing is very much unique to your body and your swing. When you set up in a position that restricts your lower body movement, it makes it very difficult for your hips and your lower body to move the way it needs to. It makes it really hard not to come over the top. If you’re trying to stop coming over the top, closing your stance is the last thing you want to do. Instead, try setting up with a stance more open to your shoulders, then a big, quick fix that actually helps you in your setup: You can take your front foot here and kind of angle it out towards your target a little bit to fire through the swing, makes it a lot more easy to move the hips and move them independently with your shoulders as well.

And finally, the classic, tried and true, my ball always curves right, so let me aim left, take my natural swing, let it curve right back into the fairway, or as I like to call it, the “happy hacker.” Now believe it or not, and contrary to the rest of this video, this one can actually help, but not for the reason that you do it. Let’s go over some basic ball flight laws very quickly. Now most of us have heard, the face sends it, the path bends it, or something to that effect, right? The relationship between your swing path or the direction that your club head moves through the impact zone relative to the direction that your club face is pointing tell your golf ball where to start and which way to curve. If I have a perfectly square path, meaning zero degrees directly at my target, with my face pointing directly on that same path, it produces a perfectly straight shot. But that rarely happens, okay? So if you swing, say, five degrees left with your face, five degrees left and square to that path, your ball will start and stay left. Same thing if you swing right with your face square to that path. Where your slice comes in is when you swing left with your face slightly open to that path. Now say if you swing 10 degrees left, face 5 degrees open to that, or 5 degrees closed to your target, your ball will start left, 5 degrees left to be exact, and with that math curve perfectly back to your target line. When you’re playing well and hitting fairways, that’s generally what’s happening. When your face is 10 degrees open to that 10 degree left path, or pointed right at your target, your ball starts perfectly straight, curves off to the right. that’s what they mean by the path bends it and the face sends it. Where your face is pointing relative to your swing path determines the direction that you’re pointing, and the curve, if any is put on it, is determined by your swing path. So you swing four degrees right, face two degrees open to [YOUR TARGET!]. It’s a perfect draw. Two degrees right, curving directly back to where you’re pointing, right back to the center of the fairway. That’s why having your face closed hurts your brain so much. You set up with your face 20 degrees closed, [with the finish that is forcing] your brain needs to swing 40 degrees LEFT to bring that back to the center, or do something to square the face through impact, like not releasing the head. This again goes back to what I said in the beginning about your brain understanding much better than you realize how to swing a golf club. When you aim left like that and play for the slice, it actually makes it much easier to swing back out to the right, back towards your target where your brain wants the ball to go. The further you aim left, the more your brain naturally wants to swing that club back towards your target. That means it can be much harder to swing left like you need to in order to swing that ball back to the fairway when you aim left, since the path is curving the ball opposite the way it’s moving. This is what happens when you feel like you made your best swing of the day, that ball goes dead straight where you were aiming 100 yards left. Your body and brain fought hard to swing back towards your target, which for your natural over-the-top motion turned that into no more than a perfect barely-in-the-out swing, perfect baby draw right where you were aiming. It’s one of the hardest things to do, but one thing, if you can understand it, that can really help you out on the course is you have to swing towards your misses. What I mean by that is if you want the ball to stop curving right, you need to swing your path more right. You want the ball to stop moving so far left, you have to swing more left. If your ball is curving right, trying to swing your path more towards the left is only going to make it curve further right. Isn’t golf fun? So essentially, you have to fight every instinct and ounce of common sense in order to get better and improve, which is kind of why we as golf instructors have a job in the end, I guess.

So, thanks so much for watching everyone. If this video helps, please be sure to leave a like, comment for the algorithm, subscribe or follow for all of our latest videos and swing tips. Be sure to also check out the Golf Live link in this video description and our channel description to book your free swing analysis and see if virtual lessons are right for you. Because remember, nobody who can’t see your swing can tell you how to improve it. Check out our Greengrass Golf Blog over on GreengrassGolfShop.com for even more tips to help you play your best and most importantly, don’t keep us a secret. Leave a comment, share our videos with your friends, help us grow our reach, and help us help more golfers. Thanks again all. We’ll see you on the course.