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Understand Your Swing Plane/Path
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When you are faced with a ground that isn't flat, you'll want to make small adjustments to your swing. In general, you want to adjust the swing so that you avoid hitting the ground before the ball. To do this, you can make the following adjustments.
Uphill: Angle the pelvis with the slope and swing more in-to-out
Downhill: Angle the pelvis with the slope and swing more out-to-in
Ball Below Your Feet: Swing more outside in
Ball Above Your Feet: Swing more inside out
Tags: Poor Contact, Speciality Shot, Practice Strategies, Concept, Intermediate
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This concept video is visualizing uneven lives.
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So in other videos, I demonstrate what we do on uneven lives, but in this video, I'm just going to use this flat plane here and the whole hoop to show a rough representation of what we're trying to do.
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So if we brought the club in or the whole hoop in, and we assume that we're making a bit of a swing that has a shape kind of like this.
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You can see that there's a certain amount of space here as the club's coming in from a shallow path, and then it's making contacts with the ball, and then there's the low point and then it starts coming up.
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Well, when I have a different lie, there are some swings where this swing shape would have to be adjusted. There are others where this would be fine.
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So here the bottom of the swing is behind it just like so.
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If I had the ball slightly above my feet and I didn't change my swing, you could see that now the whole hoop is coming too steeply into the ground.
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So I want to use my pelvis to angle the swing a little bit more with the slope.
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Let's go back and reset. Here's my normal swing.
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If I was to have a ball below my feet, you can see that the bottom of the swing now move backward, or sorry, downhill line, not ball below my feet.
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The bottom of the swing move backward a few inches behind, back over here, and now I would hit it in the middle of the ball unless I angled my body with the slope and got the low point back out in front.
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Those ones are pretty easy to imagine. I just have to use my pelvis tilt to kind of control the low point.
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Now, the sometimes the trickier ones are if the ball gets more above my feet kind of like this, now you can see that coming from the inside, I have a little bit of extra space where if the ball was below my feet,
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now the club is on the ground, the arc is on the ground back here.
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So when the ball is below my feet, what you'd want to do is have the swing a little bit more outside in just like so.
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And that's part of the reason why when the ball is below your feet, and outside in is more likely to make solid contacts with the golf ball.
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And outside in is going to happen largely because your upper body has bent a little bit more forward, and that outside in path is wide.
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In addition to what happens to the face when it's below your feet, that's what causes a little extra fade, or what a lot of golfers do when the balls below their feet is they hit poles.
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And that's because when the balls below your feet, you're naturally going to swing a little bit more outside in.
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And this little visual helps you understand why when the ball is above your feet like so, it's easier to stand a little bit taller and you can swing a little bit more from the inside and still get away with it.
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So essentially when the ball is above your feet, you can swing more from the inside and you'll have more space for the club to come from here because the ground will be out of the way.
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When the ball is below your feet, if you came from the inside, the ground would get in your way sooner, so you'd want to swing more outside in.
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So if you struggle with either the ball below your feet or ball above your feet, you can work on some of the concepts in other videos on how to get the path either a little bit more outside in or a little bit more outside outside outside.
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Recognize that when the ball is above and below your feet, you're not going to be able to use your legs quite as effectively for power, so it might be a good idea to not try and hit it the normal distance that you would off a flat line.
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If the ball is uphill or if the ball is downhill, you're going to use your pelvis to help shift the low point, but you don't have to change the swing shape.
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If you did want to change the swing shape, then when the ball is downhill like this, you get a little extra margin of air, if you swing more outside in, and if the ball is uphill, you'll get a little bit more margin of air if you swing inside out.
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But those are not required for those shots for this one, when the ball is uphill and downhill, it's more about controlling low point.
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So use this little visual anytime you're facing a trouble shot where you have a weird lie, either around the greens or from the fairway. It'll help you with visualizing how you're going to make solid contact.
