If it rains... It pours.

[FATC1TY]

So I've been having trouble lately.

Played the other day and felt I was getting on track.

I tried making sure I was set up right, got comfortable and found something I can repeat.. Working on the the swing, but honestly.. I was DRILLING my driver.

NOTHING, and I mean NOTHING went to the right side today. I had one little baby cut shot, but I think the wind took that one a tad. Everything was a draw.... or a hook!!!!!!!

My slice is on vacation, and the hook is house sitting.. When I drilled my shots, I was just on.. I was creaming the ball off the driver, and my irons shots were so-so..

Now I had this insane hook that rears up.. I thought it might be me getting handsy a little, so I held off and swung like I was blocking it, which would be a hideous slice for me usually.

Nope.. Straight, to almost a fade... What the hell?

I was off all day, trying to adjust to all of this. Normally I'm right, now I'm left... It was awkward.. I managed to limp out of it all with a 89, which sucked, but man... 49 on the front, 40 on the back to play catch up.

Any ideas to ditch the hooks? It was more so off the tee I'll say.. Even the par 3's.. I was hookin them, or coming up short.

I was using my regular tour burner.. I'd wonder if the TP with with more open face would assist in fighting the hook.

 

[David Hillman]

:dunno: I'm having a similar problem. For years, I hit a fade/slice off the tee, so I just aimed for the left rough and dealt with it. Now I'm hitting straight pulls with a couple draws here and there, and am totally confused. I try to aim right, but it doesn't feel right, no pun intended.

 

[Wi-Golfer]

Relax & slow your swing down, don't try to crush the ball. Smooth is good & what you want to be. I was rushing my drives today on the 1st 2 holes & as a result the drives were very ugly, playable but short & to the left. Remembered to keep my tempo, slow my swing down & don't rotate my left wrist. It works for me.

 

[zaphod]

Relax & slow your swing down, don't try to crush the ball. Smooth is good & what you want to be. I was rushing my drives today on the 1st 2 holes & as a result the drives were very ugly, playable but short & to the left. Remembered to keep my tempo, slow my swing down & don't rotate my left wrist. It works for me.

He speaks the truth!!!!

 

[natex14]

The old thing to remember, where the ball starts traveling is swing path, where it ends up is how the club face was on impact. If you are hitting hooks, your clubface was turned in.

A lot of us don't keep our arms straight for long enough, so our left arm folds real quick, which causes you to hit hooks, or it gets the back of the hand pointing upwards, and you hit slices. Try thinking of hitting the ball with the back of your hand or the emblem on your glove, and swing down the target line.

 

[Bignose]

The old thing to remember, where the ball starts traveling is swing path, where it ends up is how the club face was on impact. If you are hitting hooks, your clubface was turned in.

This isn't quite right. Both the direction of the swing path and the angle the face makes influences the direction the ball takes. In fact, the face angle has around twice as much influence as the path the club takes.
E.g. if the face is three degrees open, the ball will take off at about a two degree angle.

As an at home example, take your putter, open the face way up and swing the putter in a straight line. It doesn't matter how hard or how soft you swing the putter, the ball goes off at an angle. Again the swingpath direction has some influence, it is just that the face angle has about twice as much. Sidespin occurs due to both effects as well.

A hook can be the result of many different things -- A square to target swingpath with a closed face (your example), an inside-to-out swingpath with a closed face (so long as half of the angle the face is closed is greater than the inside-to-out path angle to the target line), or even an outside-to-in path with an open clubface (though the swingpath would have to be severely out-to-in and only a slightly open face).

This has actually been known since the 1960's, when Cochran and Stobbs published the first edition of their book Search for the Perfect Swing where they used high-speed photography to document the angles and the flight paths the balls did with different paths and face angles. They were among the first to publish the rule of thumb about the face angle having twice the influence of the swing path.

A lot of us don't keep our arms straight for long enough, so our left arm folds real quick, which causes you to hit hooks, or it gets the back of the hand pointing upwards, and you hit slices. Try thinking of hitting the ball with the back of your hand or the emblem on your glove, and swing down the target line.

This piece of advice should also come with a big conditional. If the OP is trying to perform a two-plane, up-and-down, Tom Watson-esque, arms driven swing, the "swing down the target line" advice is fine. But, if the OP is trying to perform a one-plane, rotary, Ben Hogan-eque, core driven type of swing, this advice is awful. A rotary swing ideally should go from inside the line, be on the line for only the instant of impact (0.0005 seconds to be exact) then return to the inside of the target line. If a rotary type swing has the clubhead spending any time longer than impact traveling down the line, the rotary swing isn't being performed correctly. So, the advice of trying to swing down the line is conditional based on the type of the swing the player is trying to perform.

So you don't think that I'm all negative, the advice about hitting with the back of the left hand is good for all types of swings.

 

[natex14]

This isn't quite right. Both the direction of the swing path and the angle the face makes influences the direction the ball takes. In fact, the face angle has around twice as much influence as the path the club takes.
E.g. if the face is three degrees open, the ball will take off at about a two degree angle.

As an at home example, take your putter, open the face way up and swing the putter in a straight line. It doesn't matter how hard or how soft you swing the putter, the ball goes off at an angle. Again the swingpath direction has some influence, it is just that the face angle has about twice as much. Sidespin occurs due to both effects as well.

A hook can be the result of many different things -- A square to target swingpath with a closed face (your example), an inside-to-out swingpath with a closed face (so long as half of the angle the face is closed is greater than the inside-to-out path angle to the target line), or even an outside-to-in path with an open clubface (though the swingpath would have to be severely out-to-in and only a slightly open face).

This has actually been known since the 1960's, when Cochran and Stobbs published the first edition of their book Search for the Perfect Swing where they used high-speed photography to document the angles and the flight paths the balls did with different paths and face angles. They were among the first to publish the rule of thumb about the face angle having twice the influence of the swing path.




This piece of advice should also come with a big conditional. If the OP is trying to perform a two-plane, up-and-down, Tom Watson-esque, arms driven swing, the "swing down the target line" advice is fine. But, if the OP is trying to perform a one-plane, rotary, Ben Hogan-eque, core driven type of swing, this advice is awful. A rotary swing ideally should go from inside the line, be on the line for only the instant of impact (0.0005 seconds to be exact) then return to the inside of the target line. If a rotary type swing has the clubhead spending any time longer than impact traveling down the line, the rotary swing isn't being performed correctly. So, the advice of trying to swing down the line is conditional based on the type of the swing the player is trying to perform.

So you don't think that I'm all negative, the advice about hitting with the back of the left hand is good for all types of swings.

You can't compare a putter with a driver or iron, the swing speed will cause a lot of different things to happen that won't happen at a swing speed of two miles an hour. If you don't believe me, then how can you hit a slice when a ball starts off heading left? The most commone reason is coming way over the top with your clubface open, this is common knowledge.

This isn't just my theory I'm throwing around here. I do teach golf, but my instructor is one of the top guys in Michigan, and he is the one that showed me this. He didn't invent this theory either, the pull out that he showed me on this came from Golf Digest.

Regardless I do agree with you that your attack and swing style can change some of the advice, but most pros and great golfers have the same point of impact stance, even if there backswing and follow through vary greatly.

 

[Bignose]

natex,

The ball lfight laws have been incorrectly interpreted for a long, long time now. The way most people know them -- "Initial direction is the swing path, the curve is the face angle" -- is repeated in many, many places.

That doesn't mean it is right. The physics does not agree. The experiments have been done -- please see the Cochran and Stobbs books for the experiment.

I never said that the putter and the driver are the same. But, the putter allows you to see and control what is happening when you can't see what is happening during a full speed driver swing. That's why Cochran and Stobbs used high speed camera to confirm the physics. And their experiment shows that face angle has around twice the influence than swing path angle.

Basic physics also says the same thing. The only reason the ball is influenced by the swing path at all is because there is some restitution in the ball and clubhead. If the collisions were perfectly elastic, the swing path angle would have no influece at all -- only the angle of contact. This is elementary physics and is covered in any decent university level physics text.

I know that this has been taught a certain way for a long time, but just because some belief has been held a long time, doesn't make it right. Just as a farcical example, for a very long time many people held the belief the earth is flat.

The reason the belief hangs on for so long has been because it is very rare for a person to have only one swing fault. That is, a person usually is swinging outside-in and has an open or closed clubface. And, usually, the amount of outside in and openness of the face isn't very high at all -- sometimes just a few tenths of a degree. And, golf is also funny in that a lot of time when you fix one fault, it fixes several others, too, so when you fix that outside-in swing, it fixes the face angle, too. But, the old rules just aren't right. The physics don't agree with the old rules, and the experiments done to confirm the physics were in complete agreement. The evience to convince you of this is in Cochran and Stobbs, and I sincerly hope that you will read the book. It shouldn't be too hard to find, if you ask at your library, Interlibrary Loan can get almost any book usually for only a nomial fee or no fee at all.

 

[David Hillman]

If you don't believe me, then how can you hit a slice when a ball starts off heading left? The most commone reason is coming way over the top with your clubface open, this is common knowledge.

That may be the most common reason, but it's also possible to hit a pull slice because you had a closed face with an outside-in swing. That's how I do it

I agree with Bignose. The physics is relatively straightforward. The ball will start very close to perpendicular to the clubface, and will turn based on the lateral spin. There's more than one way to generate that lateral spin, though.

Taking an extreme example to prove a point; according to your rule, if I swing outside-in at a 30* degree angle to the target line, but with a 30* degree open face, the ball should start dead left and spin back to the right. I think it's pretty obvious that such a glancing blow is not going to start the ball to the left of the target line. What will happen is the ball will go dead right, and turn even further.

And here's a real-world example I just thought of. Take your sandwedge. Pretend you are in a deep trap, and open the face way up. Swing on any path you want, and see if you can get the ball to start left, without sculling it off the hosel. I bet not.

 

[rubber314chicken]

Any ideas to ditch the hooks? It was more so off the tee I'll say.. Even the par 3's.. I was hookin them, or coming up short.

Try holding the rear leg down a tad longer. I had that problem with my swing, and I just need to concentrate on keeping that foot planted until the turn of my body pull it up.