Last week we covered two of the most important factors when it comes to ball striking efficiency. AOA and Low Point. It is possible, by just getting to grips with these concepts it can begin enhancing your strike, and if it has, stop reading now. The less information you need to play your best the better! However, as I mentioned last week, this isn’t always the case. If you’re like me and you need to go more in detail as to what needs to happen and why then this article is for you.
The Story Until Now
Up until now we’ve mostly been discussing what we call the impact factors, such as Club Face, Club Path, Angle of Attack, Strike, Speed and so on. These are often not discussed as much as I think they should be (probably because they might not be as exciting as the latest training aid!) but once we understand them we can start to become our own best coach. They are vital to understand because any golf instruction video you’ve ever seen is helping you achieve one or all of these impact factors (at least I hope they have been!).
When you can link a swing exercise or a swing drill you are working on, with the factor at impact you’re trying to improve, that journey and process becomes much easier and potentially faster! This may sound obvious, but often times we can hear a tip or a drill, start working on it and not know exactly what its going to change at impact.
Lets Get Into the Good Stuff!
The great news is, now that you’ve stuck with me through all the not so exciting (for me it is!) sciency stuff we can get into some more practical application now, and there’s no better place to start than where we left of last week- Improving your strike!
This Week we’re Going Visual
I’ve included an instructional video below going over (in quite a bit of detail) what the body needs to do in order to achieve a functional Low Point and Angle of Attack- See, we’re talking the same language now!
The Problem
As we now know, achieving a consistent low point and an effective attack angle is crucial for consistent ball striking. This can be difficult to achieve because often to fix it players can hear either – ‘Hit up on it more’ or ‘Hit down on it more’, depending on their tendencies, or even worse- ‘Keep your head down!’
The problem with simplifying it like this is we need a balance of both. We need elements in the swing that create a steepening motion of the club and we need elements in the swing that produce a shallowing motion. Often a player will have too much of one or the other. When these elements are out of balance, we get all types of compensatory movements through impact and an inconsistent strike. By not uncovering which elements are out of balance for you, improvement, if any, will be very slow.
What you’ll Learn
In the video below (It’s around 5 mins so put the kettle on and get that notepad out!) I’ll go over in detail with you what these elements are and most importantly when each of them happen.
One of the things you’ll see in this video is, in an effective swing that produces a functional Attack Angle and a Low Point, the hands travel up through impact as the club-head is travelling down. This I feel is one of the difficult things to grasp and to achieve, however, I’m hoping this video will help clear some things up for you and have you striking the ball clean and compressed every time.
The player I’ve used is Brett Rumford- Mostly known for his crazy good short game but his golf swing is seriously good too!
Video Break Down by the Minutes
0.00-0.50 Intro (More of what you’ve just read- so you can probably skip this part!)
0.50-2.00 The Steepening elements- Pressure/ Lead Hip Movement/ Lead Shoulder Movement
2.00-5.00 The Shallowing Elements- Lead Shoulder Movement/ Lead Hip Movement/ Hand path
Hope you enjoyed this weeks article and found it helpful. Let me know in the comments below or you can share it with a friend you think it may help!
Speak Soon,
Coach