Golf shank: telling the two causes apart

The last fifth of an inch of the clubhead

About 0.2 in (5 mm)From a filmed heel strike to a full hosel rocket, per Adam Young

A shank is a strike, not a swing. Bradley Turner of Keiser University's College of Golf defines it in one line: the hosel contacts the ball instead of the face. The hosel is the socket the shaft drops into, a cylinder standing at the heel end of the head, and a ball that meets a cylinder leaves at an angle no groove was built for, squirting right of everything you aimed at.

Adam Young filmed one player hitting a deliberate toe shot and a deliberate heel shot in one lesson. The two strikes sat about three inches apart. The heel one was a shank, and his note on it is the sentence to keep: about 0.2 of an inch further toward the heel and it would have been a full hosel rocket. Two tenths of an inch is a shade over five millimetres. That is the entire margin.

Cause one: all of you arrives nearer the ball

12 mm heel, 18 mm toeStrike locations Young measured when he aimed at the heel and the toe

When Young set out to strike the heel on purpose, four things moved with him: seat further forward, head further forward, chest less open, hands further out toward the ball. He measured that pair of swings at 12mm heel-side against 18mm toe-side, a 30mm move across the face. His caution matters as much as the number. One move by itself does not make a strike pattern; what decides it is how many of those variables appear, in what amount, and whether they cancel.

Turner reaches the same family from the other end: a body that has drifted toward the toes and carried the hands out with it. He adds where it shows up most, on less than a full shot, the soft wedge above all. Hips thrusting at the ball is early extension and has its own guide. On video, the check is head and hand position at impact against the same frame at address.

Cause two: the heel gets there first, from inside

Ed Ibarguen, writing in Golf.com, splits the fault in two and calls the first the better player's shank. His description of it: the clubhead swinging on a path that is too shallow, severely inside-to-out, so the hosel is travelling directly at the ball. The face has had no room to square, so the neck arrives where the middle was meant to be. His patch sits at address rather than the downswing: tilt the spine more toward the ground, so the shoulders turn steeper and the arms lift higher.

Tyler Ferrell breaks the same delivery into four checks in order: early extension, a clubface still open through transition, a lead arm working too horizontally around the body, and a trail arm straightening early and pushing the club out. Ibarguen's second type runs the opposite way, the heel crossing the target line with the hands tossing the head through impact. Two coaches, two counts.

Why it turns up with no warning

Young's account of the suddenness is about equipment rather than nerves. Modern clubs are forgiving enough, he writes, that you can hit really close to a shank and it still feels fine, so a heel-biased pattern gets grooved without announcing itself. His description of the player it happens to: they believe they hit eight or nine shots out of ten flush from the sweet spot, and then out of nowhere, in pops a shank. The toe swing and the shank in his lesson were, on a gross motor pattern scale, identical.

The two-cause story is a story about path, and Young has published an objection to it. An off-line path direction, he writes, is not the causal factor for a mis-strike. Any path can hit any strike: you can swing in-to-out and find the toe, and swing in-to-out and find the heel. Nor has anyone published how often each cause is responsible, or how a shank spreads across a round once the first one lands. Turner counts three causes, Ibarguen two, Ferrell four.

Mark the face, then build the gate

Measure the strike before you touch the swing: the strike is the fault, and the rest is a hypothesis about it. Young's test needs a marker pen. Draw a line down the heel third of the face, put a dot on the ball, hit ten shots, and score a point for every mark that lands toe-side of the line. Foot spray shows the same thing as a pattern rather than a score.

Then the gate, which gives you something to avoid rather than something to think about. Turner sets a soft barrier, a swim noodle, on the outside of the ball, a few millimetres beyond the toe of the club at address. Young uses a second ball in the same place, with just enough room for the clubhead, and asks you to strike the inside one alone. Catch the outer object and the head arrived further from you than you believed.

The gate cannot say which cause put it there. That is the video: film face-on and down the line, and read whether the body came in. Pebble Swing takes joint angles out of the frames, which covers the body half of the question and none of the strike half. Marks on the face answer that.