Curing Swing Flaws Helps Reduce Golf Handicaps

Consistency is key to achieving a low golf handicap. If you play well for long stretches, you'll reduce your handicap. If you play poorly for long stretches, you'll increase your golf handicap. But playing well for long periods is a challenge. When your swing is in tune, you'll need to practice and play a lot to keep it that way. When your swing is out of tune, you'll need to know why it's out of tune and how to improve it. But correcting swing flaws can take awhile. So unless you can afford golf lessons whenever your swing goes south, you'll have to be your own swing doctor.

One area where consistency is imperative is off the tee. Good drives key low scores. To diagnose a swing flaw in the tee box, play a few "practice" rounds first. Note the characteristics of your drives. The characteristics will tell you where your swing flaws are. Once you've identified them, you can apply the right cures to resurrect your swing. To help you get started in this process, we've detailed four swing/ballflight indicators below that tell you what's wrong with your swing. Use these golf tips wisely and you'll reduce your handicap without having to attend golf instruction sessions.

High Ballooning Slice

If you're hitting a high ballooning slice, your club is approaching the ball from outside the target line and moving across it. The angle of your descent into the ball is too steep. So even if your clubface is square at impact, your ball will fly to the right, thanks to the sidespin imparted to the ball. To cure this flaw, you need to set up correctly. Make sure your grip is correct, your hips and shoulders are square, and your head is behind the ball. Also, make sure your body is tilted away from the target and your hands are just inside the pleat of your front pant leg. From this viewpoint, the club may look too closed, but it's not.

Tailing Ballflight

In this case your ball starts out well with good distance, but then drifts off line with either a fade or hook. The problem is not the club path or plane. It's with your grip and clubface at impact. To cure this flaw, you must square your clubface at impact and fit your hands to your natural ball flight. If you naturally hit a fade, make sure the Vs in your hands are pointing to your back shoulder. For hooks, a slightly weaker grip, where the V in your left hand (right, for left-handers) points just to the right of the sternum and the V of your right hand (left, for left-handers) points at your back shoulder, reducing your chances of hitting a snap hook.

The Pop-Up

A pop-up is caused by an excessive weight shift forward and a club that approaches the ball from a very steep angle. This delofts the club and makes the topline of the club its leading edge instead of the other way around. Hence, the ball pops straight up. That's most embarrassing. To cure this flaw, make sure your setup encourages a longer, bigger backswing arc, which shallows out your swing plane and reduces the steepness of your downswing. This will also ensure the proper weight shift. Golfers who pop up tend not to shift their weight to the back foot, resulting in either a pop-up or a reverse pivot.

The Pull Hook

If you're hitting a pull hook, your club is approaching the ball from outside the target line inward from a setup that's too open. Instead of having an open or square clubface at impact, as with a slice, your clubface is closed shut. Square up your stance and use a weaker grip, which will help prevent you from over-rotating the clubface. In addition, adjust you left hand (right-hand for left-handers) grip so the V is pointing toward your sternum, instead of having both Vs pointing to your back shoulder. Unfortunately, the pull hook signals a bigger problem—swinging too much from outside the target line across to inside the target line. Ultimately, you'll want to get your club moving inside out.

The golf tips explained above will get you started diagnosing your swing. Once you discover what your swing flaws are using the ballflight characteristic of your shots, you can then apply the cure. Eliminating your swing flaws goes a long way to improving consistency off the tee. That in turn will help you reduce your golf handicap without having to take golf lessons.


Copyright (c) 2010 Jack Moorehouse