Quote:
Originally Posted by BWillie
I shanked 5 out of like 17 irons that I hit at the range yesterday. I am scared to golf this weekend.
Any shanking stories you guys got?
Typically my shanking comes just after I've played really well. I usually keep moving the ball more and more back in my stance to hit irons more crisp and then eventually it gets too far and the shanks come. Then I have to drop my hands, put the ball further away from me and up in my stance. Then fend off weaker contact for a while to avoid the hosel. I always smash driver when I have the shanks with my irons, strange how that happens.
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You're smashing the ball with your driver because you're coming too far from the inside, which is great for a level angle of attack and hell when you have to hit down on the ball.
I fought the shanks for literally 10 years before doing a complete swing teardown.
Any time I would try to make a small swing change, I'd get the shanks. It took me years to understand why, and it all boils back to this:
When I was younger, like most players, I sliced the ball. My dad kept telling me that I was laying the club off. So, like most golfers, I overdid it. I built a swing with essentially no forearm rotation because I was afraid that doing so would get the club laid off, when in reality you need to rotate the forearms to set the club on the proper plane. As a result, my swing was incredibly steep and required phenomenal timing for me to play consistently. My feet were all over the place; it was a miracle I could ever play. I'd hit the ball dead in the center of the face and pull-hook a 9 iron 70 yards left.
Without seeing your swing on video, it's hard to quantify. Generally what happens is that you are out of balance and on the downswing your body is either moving towards the ball, you're losing your spine angle, or both.
One thing that helped me is to focus on turning my hips on the plane of my spine (that is, *not parallel to the ground, but parallel to my spine). In fact, it's one of the only thoughts in my backswing now. I find that if I focus on turning my hips (instead of the X-factor stuff by Jim McClean that ruined thousands of golf swings) I give my arms and body room to turn and clear on the downswing. Restricting your hips will not give you extra distance--it will only hurt your back and your golf swing.
I can't say this enough: most of the famous golf instructors of the 90s got almost everything about the golf swing completely wrong. Leadbetter, McClean, Rick Smith, etc. were all much, much better at marketing themselves than fixing golf swings.