Flat Golf Swing
April 23, 2010 by admin
Filed under Tips & Suggestion
The flat golf swing helps to prove out one of life’s little (and sometime’s annoying) truisms: there are a lot of ways to do things wrong, and usually only one way to do them right. Many golfers anguish over the glide path of their shots, and then near-eerie consistency some have in hooking or slicing.
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The anguish is understandable. You spend hours on the practice tees, take the lessons, practice in the mirror, mentally go through your shots a million times, and then you step up to the tee and within moments you’ve sent a perfectly good golf ball off to the graveyard of sliced and hooked balls that rest on each side of the fairway.
There are basic types of swings that result in hooks and slices: an upright swing and a flat swing. The upright swing when done well, remains very vertically oriented, the position of the critical body parts stay in proper alignment and relation to one another, and the arms remain at the service of the torso throughout the swing.
In contrast, in a less successful flat swing, the arms do all the heavy lifting, and in so doing, the body is pulled out of alignment, the relative positions of the hands, wrists, arms and shoulders get pulled asunder and the golf swing more closely resembles that of Babe Ruth aiming for the bleachers with his bat. In other words, the flat swing is caused by swinging at the ball with your arms as the primary power generator.
When a bad flat swing is executed, there are a few tale tell signs. First, the club is generally on its heels (and likely the golfer will be as well) when standing at the address position. This is most frequently the result of standing too far away from the ball, which will ultimately tend to result in a bit of reaching at the moment of impact. Reaching is suboptimal for a number of reasons, including a consequent power drain and the fact that it will cause the ball to be hit on the inside.
Standing too far from the ball and going into a flat golf swing sequence will also result in additional, unwanted wrist rotation (another cause of power dissipation), which will lead to club face that is inverted.
The upright swing path, the toe is at the front and will likely make impact first, in an open-faced orientation. Players that have an upright swing path tend to stand a little too close, which binds up the body movement and forces the arms inward toward the body at the moment of impact. Once in this position, you are more likely to come over the top of the ball.
The thing to bear in mind is not so much that this stance positions are wrong, all wrong, never-to-be done kind of wrong. It is more to raise your awareness of the implications of certain angles of attack, so that you can make appropriate adjustments. Some golfers use both the upright and the flat golf swing successfully, but they make critical adjustments elsewhere in order to compensate for the limitations of the swing.
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Click here for DVD’s to help you perfect your Full Golf Swing
