The swing, position by position
Golf impact position: what good ones share
Four things turn up in almost every good player's impact frame. Here is what each one does to the ball, and which of them you can check yourself.
The hands arrive before the clubhead
20.2°PGA Tour dynamic loft, 6-iron
Pause a face-on video on the frame where the club meets the ball. Draw a line straight up from the ball. With an iron, the butt of the grip sits on the target side of that line. The clubhead has not caught the hands yet.
That shape does one job: it takes loft off the face. TrackMan calls the loft the face actually has at contact dynamic loft, and their PGA Tour average with a 6-iron is 20.2 degrees, well under the loft stamped on the club. Less loft delivered means a lower, harder flight and less spin.
How much lean is right is less settled than it sounds. The coach Adam Young writes that tour players all lean the shaft forward at impact, and that the job is getting lean the right way rather than simply getting more of it. Check yours, do not chase a number.
A lead wrist that is flat or bowed
Look at the back of your glove hand in that same frame. Flat, or bowed slightly so the knuckles turn a little toward the ground, is what skilled players show. HackMotion's page on wrist position at impact describes the same shape.
Cupped is the opposite: a crease across the back of the wrist, palm tilted up. Cupping puts loft back on the face and tends to open it. That is the weak, high shot that lands short of the number.
The wrist and the hands are one picture seen twice. You cannot get the grip ahead of the ball with a cupped lead wrist, so fixing one usually fixes the other.
Hips open, chest well behind them
30–40° openTour hip rotation at impact
GOLFTEC's Nick Clearwater, using their OptiMotion motion capture, says tour players' hips are 30 to 40 degrees open at impact, and that not many players fall outside that range. The chest is nowhere near as open.
Open hips do two things. They clear space so the arms can pass down and past the body, and they carry the bottom of the swing arc forward of the ball. What starts that rotation is the change of direction, a separate subject.
Hip and shoulder angle is what Pebble Swing measures off the frames of a face-on video.
Hear it
Three clicks: takeaway, top, impact. Start at the tour beat and move to whichever one you can actually swing to.
Weight already on the front foot
The lead leg has straightened and the head has not drifted back toward the trail foot. That is weight into the front foot, and it is there before the club reaches the ball.
Weight forward is the same idea as open hips, one level down. It moves the low point of the swing arc ahead of the ball. Where that low point ends up is the subject of fat and thin contact.
The driver breaks the pattern
Everything above describes an iron off the turf. With a driver the ball is teed and you want to catch it on the way up, so the hands sit close to level with the ball and forward lean drops toward zero. TrackMan's tour average dynamic loft with a driver is 12.8 degrees.
The hips and the weight do not change. Only the shaft angle and where the low point sits relative to the ball.
Questions
- Should I try to add forward shaft lean?
- Not directly. Leaning the handle at address or shoving the hands forward through the ball usually shuts the face and produces a low hook. Lean tends to show up on its own once the weight and the hips get forward.
- Is a bowed lead wrist the same as a strong grip?
- No. Grip is how your hands sit on the club at address; wrist flexion is what the joint does during the swing. A strong grip can make a flat wrist easier to hold, but one does not guarantee the other.
- My hips are nowhere near 30 degrees open. Is that a problem?
- That band is measured on tour players, not a number to hit. Look at which way your belt buckle points in the impact frame. Still square to the target line means the arms have nowhere to pass.
Sources
Every number on this page comes from one of these.