Our golf swings are unique like snowflakes, and each of us have quirks and oddities in our swing, and that’s just fine! There are thousands of of ways to swing the club, and it’s just a matter of finding your perfect, special swing.
Bullshit.
Here’s the truth: good golf swings are remarkable similar. This is due partly to evolved mechanics, and partly due to all the golfers we have watched in our lives. The classic golf swing is almost a part of our shared consciousness, all those Jack, and Tiger swings we’ve all seen a thousands times.
Consider this: an alien comes down to Earth, and lands on a golf course,. They see their first three golf swings, and their Earth Guide (Amanda Balionis) tells them “Those are all golf swings”. And then the final member of the foursome takes the tee, and swings away, and Amanda says to the alien: “Do you know what that is?” The alien would answer with obvious pride: “That’s a golf swing, too!”
I’m not denying there are subtle and important distinctions in our swings, but there’s far more similar in our collective swings than unique. But we have glommed on to the fact that our quirks are far more central and important, when in fact, those quirks are likely the weakest part of the swing.
Let’s take “reverse looping” at the top of the backswing, something I have done “successfully” for several years now. The idea is to prevent an over-the-top move, which is a kind of loop forward, you take the club back higher and reverse the loop in order to encourage an inside-out path. And sure, it can work. It helped me to get away from a subtle OTT problem, and that’s fine.
But these moves are reactions to problems that we are trying to solve. Instead of solving the initial problem, we develop a compensation that covers it.
So, you have likely been working with some sort of compensation in your swing. And that works fine…until it doesn’t. These compensations tend to be imprecise, and have a tendency of getting out of alignment. That can happen to any part of our swing, but if the swing is based on solid fundamentals, we can easily discover what needs to be tweaked. Let’s say you’re starting to slice it a bit off the tee. All things otherwise being fundamentally sound, it’s actually quite easy to see/feel that you are getting quick, or starting too soon from the top of the swing and coming over-the-top. The resulting slice is an indicator that ties directly to the flaw. But if we are looping under already, and then we are quick, we might actually hit a push, and then the fog sets in and we are unsure of how to correct.
What does this have to do with correcting my shank? Well, sorry to break it to you, but you have to get rid of your myriad compensations and return to a basic, simple, fundamentally sound swing. Because not only is it likely that your compensations are obscuring the real reason behind your shank, one of those compensations may be the cause or a contributing factor. It’s hard to diagnose a brain tumor if you’re having a heart attack.
This doesn;t mean that our swings will be carbon copies. There are several proper methods of swinging the club But the number one factor in determining the proper swing method to build is your body. Your physical dimensions, in particular your height and the length of your arms, will determine whether you will exclusively employ a flatter or steeper swing plane. So, the first step is to watch this:
The second factor is your grip. I think the grip is one of the really unexplored causes of shanking the ball. All the grip compensations that occur like weakening/strengthening the grip are often compensations to correct swing plane and clubface angle problems. These compensations have opppsite issues that appear in other ways. The golf instruction literature is littered with strengthening or weakening either the right hand or the left to correct a hook or a slice; bottom line, we make another compensation. Forget all this: use these guides to understand, employ, and groove a neutral, standard Vardon or Interlocking grip:
The third factor is getting rid of a very common swing fault that is actually a huge compensation: early extension. The Titleist Performance Institute has data proving that over 70% of amateur golfers suffer from early extension. (Not surprisingly, 99% of PGA tour players don’t.) Early extension is really a compensation we’re making on the fly to get the club head back to the shaft plane or to square impact. Early extension can push the swing plane forward, and then the hosel ius over the target line at impact. There’s your shank! Check this out:
The bottom line is that if you want to eliminate the possibility of a golf shank occurring, we have to get rid of these compensations we are making. That’s not easy, but grooving the simplest, correct golf swing for our body type is crucial.