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How To Spot Swing Problems
By Foursome | March 23, 2008
Accomplishing a better swing is a life-long process for every serious golfer. As soon as you become skilled enough at the game to spot and fix a specific swing problem, you are then more alert to other small items that need tweaking.
And once you tweak those areas, your skill level increases and your professional eye starts to notice what was before unseen issues. This never-ending process of improving your golf swing is what keeps the sport exciting. In other words, you never stop learning and there is always room to sharpen your skills. Even professional golfers hire coaches to help them pay attention to potential swing problems.
Still Unsure Of Your Innate Swing Tendencies? Here Is How To Find Out:
First you must keep in mind that the less lofted the face of a golf club, the less backspin it imparts to the ball (which, of course, is why a long-iron flies so much lower than a pitching-wedge). For a true reading of your clubface alignment at impact, hit some shots with your driver. Any curvature indicates how you tend to deliver the clubface at impact: looking right of target (open) if the shots mostly curve to the right; looking left of target (closed) if the shots mostly curve to the left.
To assess your clubhead path, hit some shots with your 9 iron. Because the strong backspin created by its steeply-pitched face negates most of any sidespin imparted to the ball, the shots will continue to fly in their starting direction with little or no curvature. If they mostly start to the left, your clubhead path obviously is from out-to-in. If they mostly start to the right, you are equally and obviously swinging from in-to-out.
The inter-action of backspin and sidespin is the answer, of course, to one of golf’s great mysteries for many golfers:
“Why do my driver shots finish to the right and my short-irons finish to the left of my target?”
The truth is that the attack on the ball – out-to-in and open-faced – remains constant, while the countering of sidespin by increasing backspin as the clubs become more lofted simply disguises the clubface error.
In short, just another example of golf’s single most important fundamental: The flight of the ball always tells you everything you need to know to become a better player.
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