Angle of Attack
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Taking deep divots? Are you supposed to? What do the pros do? This video tells you how steep you should be - or shouldn't be!
all right let's talk a little bit about the angle of attack and that is essentially what we're talking about here is that the angle that the club is approaching the ground to hit the ball at the time that it actually strikes the ball now many golfers don't really understand the importance or relevance of angle of attack but it really ties into everything it ties into your swing plane your path your body movements your angle your force of movements but at the end of the day it's how the ball flies it's going to dictate what kind of golfer you are and how you hit the ball and one of the most important pieces of that equation is the angle of attack and what happens for most golfers because everybody tends to be too right side dominant what the right side does is it has angles in it right you've got an angle here you've got an angle in your wrist you've got an angle in your shoulder so this allows for a lot of vertical movement in the swing so you can create kind of a chopping motion with the right arm pretty easily versus the left arm which has got an angle in your wrist but your elbow isn't doing anything it should be staying perfectly straight and the shoulder shouldn't be yanking down it's falling down as you're pulling it down with your body what your weight shift and your hip rotation so but the right arm it tends to get a little over active and tends to start doing this kind of motion that's what creates an over-the -top move but also changes the angle of attack and the angle of attack is going to have a huge discrep or create a huge difference in how the ball is going to literally fly in the air because if you start coming down really steep with a lot of right side movement the tendency is going to be free to hit the ball really high on the face because it's hard to control exactly where the ball hits the the club on the face when it's working down so steeply versus coming in very very shallow and so when you tend to hit the ball high on the face you tend to get a lot of flyers you tend to get grass between the club face and the ball the ball tends to take a little bit of spin off of it because you're using the vertical gear effect which is going to reduce backspin which on your eight iron you may not necessarily want when you want to stop it close by the pin and not have it run off the back of the green so ideally what you want is a very shallow angle of attack with your irons and on average the tour pros are only about four degrees down with every iron in the bag now obviously you go to a wedge it goes up to about five you go down to three iron it goes down about three but on average a four degree negative angle of attack is pretty ideal now what is the average amateur well this varies quite a bit but what we see using the flight scope data it's about 10 or 12 degrees down and a lot of this comes from the idea of oh i want a lot of forward shaft lean i want to really use my right side for power so you start getting the club working down really really steep in an effort to deal off the club but you don't want to deal off the club that much there's got to be a balance between the two there's no point in taking an eight iron and turning it into a four iron you're not going to be able to release the club enough so at this point the club still has another foot that it could release but you're taking all that speed out because you're not allowing the so you want the club to get closer to vertical have some shaft lean just to deal off but as you're coming through the ball more shallow it allows you to get much cleaner contact and that's the key to iron play is making sure you hit the ball not only in the center of the face but you reduce how much grass and dirt and stuff like that gets in between the club face and the ball when you hit it but the last thing is as you're coming through and you hit the ball a little bit lower on the face it tends to lead to a little bit more of a penetrating trajectory and create a little bit more backspin on the iron shots which helps them hold greens so let's take a i'm going to do a couple examples here and i want you to take a look kind of at the divots that i'm going to create based on doing a couple different things just with my body i'm not going to do anything else i'm just going to change my force of movement so first swing we're going to look at the angle of attack here is going to be just a normal eight iron shot and you'll see the grass barely skimmed it my ball was here my divot started up here and ended up about six inches in front of the ball so my angle of attack there is going to be quite shallow now if i change just my force of movement i'm going to start coming at it from the top with my right side watch what the divot does now that ball flew perfectly straight proper trajectory good spin rate etc so we don't have any complaints with that shot now i'm going to use my right side to try and move the club down i came over the top a little bit hit a little bit of a pull cut got a little open and now you see this nice big trench that i dug that's working to the left all i did was change where i started the swing down from instead of going to the top and focusing on shifting my weight letting the arm fall back down took my right side and heaved at it created a nice big chopping motion hit a nice little pull cut which is the least desirable shot for most golfers so the key here is your force of movement has got to be right just the exact same stuff that i talk about in the rst five step system body rotation weight shift letting the arms fall taking the right side out of the equation if you're tired of slicing you have to pay attention to taking this right side out and letting the hands completely come off the club will automatically shallow out the angle of attack if you let your right hand come early i'll do an example here so i'll just let my right hand completely come off now i hit a nice straight shot a little bit steeper no one i push with my left thumb a little bit but you get the idea if you let this hand come off the club can now shallow out because it doesn't have anything to force it to go steeper so really when you're working on changing your swing plane and your path and your angle of attack the key is not focusing on the golf club the key is moving from the right places using your rotation and your weight shift to help you shift and shallow out the swing plane on the way down is key the steepening moves are almost all going to come from too much right side involvement when you're swinging really steep and across the ball and taking these big trenches and worried about chunking the ball all the time take your right hand off follow the release videos especially the release the vj release video and all of a sudden you'll watch you start taking nice shallow crisp dollar bill divots
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