Hundreds of videos on Youtube. Countless pages in thousands of books. Lesson tees across the world. The best teachers of golf, the men and women who shore up the foundation of the game, even the 29,000 PGA of America Teaching professionals, all have one thing in common: they don’t seem to agree on how to fix a shank.
And the reason they’re unsure is because they may not quite understand what it really is, at least the ones who make videos and write blogs and publish books. Now, before you go all Greg Norman on me, I have nothing but respect for all these men and women. The vast majority of them have forgotten more about the game and the golf swing than I will ever know. They are the stewards of the game, and the concepts they have taught are mostly rooted in proven experience and acquired knowledge. (Well, the old ball flight rules they taught for decades were completely wrong, but let’s put that aside). But when it comes to the shank, they seem to go out of their way to contradict each other. Here’s an example list of things that are claimed to cause a shank:
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- an open clubface
- a closed clubface
- an inside-to-out swing path
- an over-the-top move
- right arm not clearing the right hip
- flipping or casting
- standing too tall
- leaning over the ball
- keeping the club outside the hands
- an inside takeaway
- weight on your toes
- early extension
These are are all possible swing issues, and these credible, invaluable golf people might be able to help us solve these for all kinds of other reasons, but unfortunately for those of us who shank the ball, they haven’t asked The Five Whys.
You see, Sakichi Toyoda was the founder of Toyota. He developed a root-cause analysis process called The 5 Whys. It works like this: when a problem occurs, ask “why” five times to try to find the actual cause of the problem, rather than treating the symptoms of a problem. By the time you ask “why?” 5 times, you have usually gotten to the heart of the problem. The 5 Whys concept is used to bring a structured method to fixing issues in all sort of situations, even to fix your shank.
The second concept we use to help us determine the cause of the shank is the Principle of Parsimony, aka Occam’s Razor. This is the idea that all things being equal, the simplest explanation for something is usually the best.
The below button will take you to our explanation for what causes a golf shank to occur. Each “why?” question is presented simply, and each answer likewise. If you want to hear the reasoning and logic behind each answer, then click on the “Learn More” toggle and have at it. If instead, you just want to fix your golf shank, it’s laid out there in a simple, easily digested format.
