My mother is great off the tee. The ball’s teed up, and she takes a nice rip at it.
Then she gets to the fairway and proceeds to skull it a few times. It must run in the family because I struggle with thin shots from the fairway, as well.
In this lesson, we’ll talk about 3 major culprits that result in thin and fat shots from the fairway and what we need to do to eliminate these from our bag.
The first culprit starts at the top with our head. If your head moves off the ball in either direction, you’re down. Consistent ball striking will be a challenge.
I still need to monitor my overactive head. It wants to move all over the place. In fact, my trigger to initiate the swing is a lateral move with my upper body off the ball. A continually battle this, but I continually work on improving it with my golf pro and at home in front of the mirror. For me, I need to feel like I coil over my center, keeping my head very, very quiet on the back and through swing.
The second culprit is poor impact where your clubhead wins the race…not your hands. In order to get the ball airborne, we need to strike down and through with our hands leading the way. To make this happen, it is critical to initiate the downswing with our legs. This allows the club to drop in the slot, angles intact ready for a descending strike through the ball.
You can have all the angles in the world, but if you remain flat-footed through the swing, you’re done. A flat-footed swing is super common among women. A flat-footed swing will result in poor impact—fat or thin. So make a conscious effort to aggressively get to your finish ensuring that your back foot is on its toes.
Lastly, if your tempo is fast or jerky, you may suffer from the forward slide, which throws your swing out-of-sync. I suffer from fast tempo where my hips out race my hands. Instead, my legs need to rotate left—not forward—to allow the swing to stay in-sync for solid contact.