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When the club face is closed at shaft parallel in the downswing, it signifies one of a few things. Either the grip is extremely strong (least likely), the arms have straightened too soon, or the body has stopped rotating too soon. Using video can help identify which is the likely culprit in your swing.
Tags: Poor Contact, Not Straight Enough, Chicken Wing, Driver, Member Question, Concept, Intermediate
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This trouble shooting video is coming into the ball with the club face closed.
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Golfers tend to fall into some patterns, whether it's a club delivery pattern, a
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Pat pattern, or creating speed. One of which pattern you can look at is what's
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going on during the release. So what do I look like when I've got the club kind of in
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just past delivery position and what happens to it until it gets to the end of
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follow through. Some golfers will tend to get into a very closed club face
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position, looking something like this at the end of delivery. And you've
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really got a few options. If you're close like this, the most common option
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would be to then break down the arms and kind of chicken wing and hold off any of
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that arm extension. So it looks kind of like this on the way through. And you
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can see it gets into a very narrow position. It's not extremely playable.
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So I wanted to give you a few different ways that you can look at how do I manage a club
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face that is coming in overly close. Well, there's a couple different ways that the club
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face would come overly close. One would be if I had an extremely strong grip and I mean
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I did a lot of the good body movements, but you could see that if the grip is
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extremely closed, there's virtually nothing I can do to correct it.
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Now, throwing that one out because I rarely see that as the option. The next would be
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coordinating some of the body movements, some of the path movements in order to balance
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this club face equation. So if you're coming in with the club face getting really
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close like this, what it usually relates to is the arm timing in direction, having
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not enough either wipe or body rotation, whichever way that you kind of frame that body
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movement during the second phase of the downswing. So if I'm coming in more like this
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and then if I added body rotation and wipe movement, but kept the club in the same position,
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you can see how just like magic that takes the same hand and wrist positions and moves it
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from a closed club face to now a square club face. And that's the way guys like Dustin
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Johnson or JB Holmes who have a stronger grip, but still get the body well open.
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It impacts will have a club that looks fairly neutral at that shaft pair a little checkpoint.
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There are the other option that some golfers do is when they get into this overly club
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closed club face, though then early extend and had an excessive amount of kind of raising the handle
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like so. And that pattern can work up till let's say eight handy cap or so, but it's hard to get
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into the low single digits using that pattern. So I would typically go after adding a little bit
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more wipe, feeling softer arms in transition, a little bit more of the body centered movement.
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The those typically will have a bigger effect on the overall relationship and it will give you
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better arm extension, which hopefully gives us more solid contact. The one piece that you have
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the monitor is if I'm getting the path a little bit to outside in. So some golfers
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will close the club face because they're getting outside in. And if all I did was bring this
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from the inside, you would see that that forearm rotation and move it back to the inside
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would reopen the club face. So some golfers will, well especially if they're working on the
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motorcycle and they have the pattern where when they do the motorcycle the club gets out more like this,
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that will have a very closed look where if I just did the motorcycle and had it coming a little bit more from a shallow
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position you can see that that has nowhere near the same amount of club face getting closed look to it.
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You can always use ball flight and if the club face is getting really close to the target, the ball is always
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going to start left and if it's really close to the path, you're going to tend to see a lot of curved to the left.
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Figuring out which one you fit into, you got to read the feedback and then working on getting a little bit more
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body centered so that I can get my body open that helps the lay that closing in the club face,
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getting a little bit more of the white helps create some of the shaft lean which helps the lay the closing in the club face
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and ultimately helps balance that equation. I rarely see golfers getting too close more commonly I see it getting too open
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but if you struggle with getting it too close hopefully this helps you kind of focus your training into something that
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will have a measurable change on how you're arranging your club face.
