How does the club need to be delivered to hit this shot?
From the "Great Golf Questions" series by Alex Nicolson PGA, Founder Premium Golf Ltd.
Context: range or course, pre-shot
Although most golfers rarely consider this, it is EXTREMELY relevant to preparing for your next shot.
There are two primary reasons why.
1) If you want the ball to travel in a certain way to your target, the only absolute is what the clubhead does to the ball through impact. Your body is capable of finding lots of different ways of getting this done, but the physics of the task are set in stone.
2) Our brain evolved to solve physical problems extremely well, but clarity of the underlying task is essential. In the case of a slightly drawn 7 iron to a tight pin position, the underlying task is what that gleaming piece of metal has to do to the ball to make it fly correctly. If the brain “gets” how you need the clubhead to smash through that ball, you’d be amazed, given the right conditions, how quickly your body can adapt to find a way.
The clubhead’s journey is three dimensional, and might initially be hard to conceptualise at first. The club’s path, where the face is pointing and the point of impact on the club are some of the factors that golfers need to influence to hit the shot they want.
Although the terminology and numbers associated with the clubhead’s journey can seem inaccessible to non-coaches (e.g. a Trackman video), it is possible with good coaching and deduction, to form a more intuitive feel for it. This is considerably more useful when you’re actually playing.
The clubs journey to hit a deliberate fade
Focusing on the effect rather than the movement
I find that the average golfer devotes so much attention to a body-related swing thought, that their brain is starved of this vital information - what’s the effect you are trying to create?
The power of this question is it gives the brain a chance to direct your set-up and swing to improve without conscious interference. Kind of how we learnt other sports.
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