Taking a Divot in Front of the Ball
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Taking a proper divot is something that is critical to crisp and consistent iron play, but if you don't know what a proper divot is, it's tough to know when things go wrong. In this video, I give you a drill to teach you how to get your divots in front of the golf ball at impact.
- The left hand and left-side musculature control most of the conditions at impact - club face, swing plane, shaft lean, etc.
- Learn proper form by training the left arm independently
- Once the divot is consistently in front of the ball, practice hitting chip shots with the left arm
- Review the Impact Alignment and Lag lessons for proper form
Learning how to get your divots to start in front of the golf ball instead of even with or even behind.
It is usually the ultimate goal for most amateur golfers, who are used to hitting the ball really fat.
So I'm going to give you a couple quick tips today to show you how to do that.
To start building the proper swing mechanics into your golf swing, to get the divots, to start in front of the ball, to get you cleaner contact, but also tell you one simple secret that most golfers who are better players know and most amateurs don't.
And let's start with that.
The trick to golf is that what controls the conditions at impact and when I say conditions I mean where the club face is pointing, what the swing plane and path is, how much shaft lean you have at impact is primarily determined by the left hand and the movements of the muscles in the left side of the body.
Unfortunately, most golfers are very right handed and very right side dominant, and that's why they get into a position where they're fully releasing this right wrist.
The club face has a ton of loft on it.
Now.
Because I don't have any shaft, lean toward the target, and because this is a very dominant motion, it's very common, and that's what most golfers learn to do.
The trick is that you've got to learn to move the left hand into the right position at impact.
And the only way to do that is to simply train it independent, which is what Rotary Swing Tour does.
We train each arm independently so that you learn how to control each movement correctly without the confusion and frustration of having some other dominant motion in there.
That wants to muck up all your hard work.
So, to learn how to get your left hand in the right impact position, what you want to do is take your normal set up, put a ball in position and then with your left hand only choke up on the club, don't move your body yet, we're going to make it really simple at first.
Just make practice swings with your left hand only until you see your divots bottoming out.
You'll see I'm taking a little divot in front of the ball here.
So it's bottoming out about two club head widths, about five or six inches or so in front of the ball.
Now, what's happening here is that my left hand or my left arm is just swinging freely from my shoulder socket.
That's what gets the divot moving in front of the ball.
So you can see that my divot is well in front of the ball at this point.
Now the catch is if I take my right hand, I'm going to do the same drill now and I use my right hand only, now you'll notice how much my divots want to bottom out way back behind the ball and now you start to see the problem.
Unless you play the ball way back off the back of your stance, you're going to have a lot of problems getting clean contact, which means you've got to train the left hand to get into the right position and it's way easier when you let the right hand come off the club.
So that's how you want to practice.
You'll notice most good golfers, tour players, you watch them all the time, they just kind of practice on the tee while they're wasting time.
They'll do it with their left hand.
You're not going to see very many guys just kind of sitting up with their right hand.
The right hand is a very important job to do, but as far as making sure that your divot starts in front of the ball, you need to focus on working on the left hand only.
Now, once you get the point where your divot's bottoming out very consistently, in a minute, I'll show you a close-up of how that looks, where your divot bottoms out very consistently because your arm is swinging very freely, you want to work up to hitting little chip shots with it.
At first, it's going to be really tough.
You're going to want to flip your wrist.
Of course, you want to go back and look at the impact alignments videos to see what positions you need to be at impact.
But you need to get this left wrist into a nice flat position and get into a good solid impact position using the left arm only.
Now, one other critical key to this is that you have to learn how to produce lag in the golf swing.
Now, of course, there are tons of videos on the website that talk about how to produce lag.
But you need to understand that if you don't have any lag coming down and this right wrist is starting to release early, you're going to have no chance of getting your left hand in the right position.
So they all have to work together as a system.
You have to have lag.
This right wrist has to bend back.
And that allows you to have more time to get your left hand in front of the ball at impact.
So, work on this drill.
I'm going to show you some close-ups and slow-mos of me doing this drill.
So you can see how the divots bottom out and how to get this left hand in the right position at impact.
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