How Pros Square the Club Face vs Amateurs | Swing Rotation

If you want the golf ball to come out dead straight like that every single time, you have to have a proper golf club release. Now, I just talked about the release a lot in the last couple of videos I did. You can take a look at those, in the I card I’ll link to those, or down in the description, but what I want to talk about today is understanding what’s really happening through the hitting area with the club face.

The trick is the tour pros have about one-fourth the amount of rotation happening through impact that the average amateur golfer does. These days with launch monitors we can measure everything, and we can do it all to within a tenth of a degree, so understanding this stuff is really, really easy these days if you take a look at the data.

The problem is, there’s still so many golfers that have been lured into this misinformation about the old-school nine ball flight laws that so many people still believe, even though TrackMan proved them dead wrong. My take? Science never lies, the data never lies, and video never lies, and the simple fact of the matter is the tour pros are doing something different than what you’re doing, and today I’m going to explain to you what that difference is and show you in a bonus video how to fix it.

Here’s the simple truth of the matter that, again, data doesn’t lie. Data is your best friend. So, as a typical amateur comes into impact, the club face, in most cases, because they’re swinging steep and over the top, the club face wants to stay open, which I’ve talked about a lot. It’s like if you’re swinging an ax straight up and down, thankfully that ax doesn’t want to rotate, it wants to come straight down vertically.

However, if you took that very same ax and started swinging it horizontally across the ground, what does that ax want to do? It doesn’t want to do this, right? It’s naturally wanting to rotate around, which is why, as I talked about in my last video, all tour pros release the club the same way. Your forearms have to cross over. There’s a lot of instructors out there that want to teach you to rotate and hold the face off. That’s just holding off the release, no tour pros do that. Take a look at the video in the description if you don’t understand this.

Again, because the golf club is being swung on an incline plane, it wants to rotate. The toe wants to rotate around the hosel. Now, the trick is amateurs are rotating way more. Why is that? Well, as you start swinging down steep, start chopping wood, that club face wants to stay open, and as you come into impact, your proprioception just senses that this thing is way open, I’m going to slap the ball way off to the right. So, as an amateur comes in like this, they try and flip it with their hands at the last second to try and save the shot.

Obviously, you don’t see pros doing that. They wouldn’t be a pro, because nobody can time the release like that consistently. The club naturally wants to rotate over, and that’s what you’re trying to allow to happen, not make happen. You don’t force the release. The release happens as a byproduct of doing other things, and you’re just getting out of the way and letting the club face turn over.

But, as I mentioned, the trick is that the pros still have face rotation, but instead of 1,200 to 1,400 degrees of rotation per second, the tour pros average between 200 and 300 degrees of rotation per second. That’s a huge difference. In other words, their club face is still rotating through the hitting area, but it’s only rotating at 200 to 300 degrees per second, and the average amateur is rotating it 1,000 to 1,300, 1,400 degrees of rotation per second.

Which one do you think is going to be more consistently accurate? Obviously, the one that has the least amount of rotation but still doesn’t hold off all this club head speed, because the release of letting that club face turn over is worth about seven miles an hour free club head speed. By holding it off, you’re literally holding off about seven to eight miles an hour club head speed. Can’t give up that kind of speed these days. The pro game is a power game. All golf is a power game. These golf courses are so long you have to move the ball pretty far.

So, how do they do it? How do they get the club face to still release with some speed but rotate less than what the average amateur’s doing? Well, that’s exactly what today’s bonus video is going to talk about. Talk about how do we square the club face early in the downswing, because the club face is always rotating throughout the entire golf swing.

If you want to have a proper release but still have way more consistency, just like the pros do, and get the ball to come out on your line every single time, take a look at this bonus video. It’s down in the description, or click the I card you see up here. Make sure you subscribe if you want more great video tips like this, and I look forward to helping you with your game in the future.