Why you hit it fat one swing and thin the next

The ball is not the bottom of your swing

3.7° downPGA Tour 6-iron attack angle

TrackMan's tour averages put the PGA Tour attack angle with a 6-iron at 3.7 degrees down, and the LPGA Tour at 2.3 degrees down. The club is still travelling downward when it reaches the ball. The lowest point of the arc comes after it. Ball first, turf second, divot on the target side.

Fat is that low point arriving early: the arc bottoms out behind the ball and the club digs. Thin is the club reaching the ball while it is still too high, either because the arc has already bottomed and started climbing, or because the whole arc is riding above the turf.

Arc height is the second variable

Low point is not the only variable. Arc height matters too, meaning how deep the club swings relative to the ground. Adam Young makes the point that many golfers who hit both fat and thin do not have a low point stuck behind the ball. They have loose arc height control. The bottom lands in roughly the right place, but too deep on one swing and too shallow on the next.

There is also a loop. You hit one fat, it stings, and on the next swing your body lifts the club through impact without asking you. That gives you a thin. The thin frightens you back into digging. A player can bounce between the two for eighteen holes and walk off convinced they have two separate problems.

What moves the low point forward

The low point sits roughly under your lead armpit. That is David Kuhn's line in GOLF.com, and it is the most useful sentence on the subject. Wherever your chest is at impact, that is where the bottom of the arc is. Leave your chest back and you leave the low point back with it.

So this is a body fix, not a hands fix. Pressure has to arrive in the lead foot during the downswing and stay there. Hanging on the trail side bottoms the arc behind the ball. Standing up and pushing the hips toward the ball moves it too, which is early extension and has its own guide.

What no phone camera can tell you is where the divot started. The turf answers that one.

Two things to test at the range

Lay a tee on the grass, or draw a line in a practice bunker, and put the ball just behind it. Hit shots and look at where the mark begins. You want it starting on the target side. This shows you where your low point actually is, which is usually not where you assume it is.

Then the counterintuitive one. Adam Young ran a test with 24 complete beginners, split into three groups, each practising three one-hour sessions in a week. The group that aimed only at the middle of the face got 16% better at finding it. The group told to hit five shots off the toe and five off the heel got 24% better. The group that did both, misses first then the middle, got 30% better.

Apply it to the ground instead of the face. Five swings hitting deliberately behind the ball, five deliberately thin, then aim for the middle. That is the mix that finished best in his test. It is his own data on beginners rather than a controlled trial, so judge it on your own divots across two or three sessions.