Diagnosing the Cause of Bad Golf Shots
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Learn how simple it is to diagnose every single bad golf shot you hit utilizing RotarySwing
Hey, guys. Chuck Quinton here. At the root of Rotary Swing is understanding what causes a bad shot. It's that simple. Everything that you do, once you start following the Rotary Swing System, you will always be be able to very quickly and very specifically identify exactly what caused a bad shot, because the movements are so simple that if you add something to them, it's very simple to see where things go wrong. For example ... Now hopefully, you've done a ton of 9 to 3 golf swing drills, because this is the whole golf swing. From here to here is what really matters. The rest of it's just details. That's what we use as a our primary initial diagnostic tool when we're checking to see what's going on with somebody's swing. We're just going to make these little half-swings and I'm going to do them. If I do it correctly ... So I'll just make a little half-swing here. Halfway back.
Now, I'm going through my checkpoints. Head down. Shoulders square. Hips open. Right heel down. Weight stacked over my left ankle. Club face fully released. From your perspective, it's going to look like this. Left arm straight. Club face released. Weight over left ankle. Left hip in neutral. Right foot rolled in. Right heel down. Shoulders back. Chest open. Belt buckle open. Piece of cake. If I do that right, that ball is always going to go exactly where I want. It's going to go straight. It's pretty simple.
But what happens is that we start adding things to these movements that cause us problems. That's what I want to talk about, so that you, when you go to the range, can not only learn to diagnose what's going wrong in your swing, but you can use it to your advantage to start shaping the shot so that you can do what you want with the ball. When we look at this ... I'm going to do one and do it incorrectly, and I want you to try and see if you can tell what I did wrong here. This is a really, really common fault.
Alright. What do you see? If I got paid a dollar for every time I had to fix this one, I'd be a wealthy guy. Right heel up in the air. Where's my chest pointing? Where's my head looking. I was so excited and eager to see where that ball went that I turned my whole body and my head. That rotated my chest. If I rotate my chest, guess what happens to the club face. It doesn't want to release. My body overpowers it. So now, as you come through the follow through, you'll see the club face is open. That's costing me about eight miles an hour club head speed, and the ball is going to want to tend to go to the right, because the club face isn't closing.
This one, pushing from the right shoulder, right hip, trying to open up my chest to get my chest on the ball is one of the biggest swing flaws. As you start going to add speed to it, this is how I'd start to hit a nice, big cut. I'd rotate my chest through, get in front of the ball a little bit. That helps delay the release and hold the club face open. That's how I take this miss and turn it into a positive. If I want to hit a cut shot, open up my stance here a little bit. Nice little five yard fade. I rotated my chest through. That automatically held the face open a little bit. I hit a nice, little baby cut. Perfect. The important thing is, understanding the miss. When I rotate my chest through, my chest has always got to stay back and allow my club to release. My right shoulder is always trying to stay away from the target as long as humanly possible.
Now, I'll make another mistake, and see if I can do this one. So now, I didn't turn much at all. The ball went left, and if you look at it from this side, I just flipped my hands over. This is too much to be able to take much advantage of, but we see this all the time, where golfers, instead of learning to use their weight shift and hip turn to bring the hands down, they just kind of stay static with their legs and just use their arms and flip at it. That's a horrible way to try to hit a ball, because there's no power in it. What I need to do is understand what did I do incorrectly? Didn't shift my weight. Didn't turn my hips. The most important part of the downswing is weight shift and posting up, getting that hip open. That allows you to not have to overuse your arms in the downswing. That's the most common swing fault number two, getting really handsy with it.
Now, what I start seeing when people start doing these movements correctly and are just working on fine-tuning it and they're doing it with just their left arm, we see this all the time. I'll move my club face back here. You can see the club face is really open. This is a really common issue that we see when people are doing the 9 to 3 drill. What's happening here? I'm sustaining the pull with my left arm too long. I don't need to keep pulling my hand through the hitting area. This is when you're trying to add power to the swing with your left arm. Your left arm is a control arm, not a power arm. So this arm doesn't need to keep pulling through the hitting area.
In fact, it's got to stop to allow my wrist to release. That's what gives us all this speed. This is where the effortless power comes in. My hands start to slow down, moving laterally, and my wrists start to uncock and rotate, and take over and pass my hands. Not in a flip and a scoop, but in a rotation move, and that is what gives us effortless speed in the swing. Don't take your left arm and try and pull it through the hitting area. You're just delaying the release of the club face, and again, that's what I want to do when I hit a high cut. It's going to work perfect for that, because it's going to hold the face open and add loft to the hitting area.
With this 9 to 3 drill, you can pretty much diagnose every single swing fault. Now I'm going to chunk one. Watch what happens. So, I hit back behind it. How do I know what I did is right or wrong? Well, I can feel, if I hold my follow-through, that my weight is on my right foot. I look like this. Pretty simple one. Where is my weight supposed to be? How do I know? Take golf club over my first belt loop. Should make a nice, straight line through the center of my knee and center of my ankle. Now, I know that I shifted far enough.
With this 9 to 3 drill, you can pretty much learn every single swing flaw that you're going to struggle with. If you're topping it, this is almost always a wrist scoopy, flippy thing, where you're taking your wrist and trying to help out to hit the ball. Just relax your hand. Let the club release naturally. Start feeling the club swing. I really highly encourage you to use these 9 to 3 drills to start diagnosing shots, learning what it feels like to let the club release, and eventually start using the ball as your feedback mechanism to see whether or not you're doing these little, simple movements correctly, because they'll start to show you, even on these little shots, what you're doing wrong every single time.
Larry
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