But You Didn’t Change My Swing

Near the end of a lesson, my student said, “But you didn’t change my swing yet. What am I supposed to work on?”

Earlier in my career, that would have really bugged me. I would have felt like I hadn’t given him his money’s worth. A little posture work, a better backswing, a downswing feel borrowed from the best players in the world. Surely a proper lesson needed all of that.

But he was hitting the ball closer to the center of the face more often and making better ground contact with his irons. We had changed something that mattered. The changes just didn’t add up to the swing overhaul I once thought I was supposed to deliver.

We spent about 45 minutes of that hour talking through concepts. He asked questions. I asked questions. He hit shots, and we used TrackMan to check our explanations against what the club was actually doing. The conversation helped us decide what to change and gave him a way to understand the result.

He’d arrived with plenty of ideas about what was wrong. He had changed his grip. His hands didn’t feel synced with his body. He thought his posture needed work, and his backswing was going past parallel. Any of those could have given us something to spend an hour on. The first thing I always investigate is impact.

Some of his warm-up shots were perfectly acceptable. After one of the better ones, he said, “See? If I just did that every time I’d be fine.”

Poor fella. It’s a familiar wish. The useful part is figuring out what “that” actually was.

I asked him what a pure golf shot should feel like. He told me it was when everything was working together. I understood what he meant, but that feeling didn’t tell us what to work on when the next shot wasn’t pure.

We started connecting the feeling to things we could observe: clubhead speed, clubface direction, clubhead path, where the ball struck the face, and where the club met the ground. For this lesson, the last two gave us a clear place to start.

He told me he used to take a divot, but lately he was picking the ball off the ground. Contact was low on the face. TrackMan showed his 7-iron attack angle, the downward or upward direction of the clubhead at impact, was around zero degrees and sometimes slightly upward.

On those upward strikes, his airplane was taking off when we wanted it coming in to land. For the iron contact we were trying to produce, the club needed to meet the ball with a descending blow and hitting the ground on the target side of the ball.

I gave him one small setup change and one swing intention.

I brought his right, trail foot in a little to narrow his stance. That also put the ball farther back relative to his feet. Then I asked him to hit the ball higher on the face. His strikes were low on the face, so the intention was to get the clubhead lower to the ground at impact.

The next shot was solid.

“Already? Hold on, I’ll hit another,” he said.

I let him hit about five balls without adding anything, then asked what he thought.

“Just my foot and the face.”

Thank you, come again. Except there was still something we needed to work through.

A few fat shots followed. He was getting the club into the ground, but now he was reaching it before the ball. I took that as useful progress: the club was getting low enough to contact the turf. We still needed to change where that low point was.

I asked him to hit the ground in front of the ball. He wanted to clarify: did I mean the ball first, then the ground?

Yes. And I’m glad he asked.

It would have been easy to assume he understood and move on. I spend my days thinking about this stuff. I can’t assume the golfer in front of me hears a phrase and pictures the same thing I do. His question told me we needed another minute on the concept.

We pictured the clubhead traveling along an arc. The low point is the bottom of that arc. For this iron shot, we wanted the club to meet the ball while it was descending, with the bottom of the arc on the target side of the ball. Getting the club lower wasn’t enough by itself. The location of that low point mattered too.

We talked about how shifting toward his lead side could help move the low point forward. With that shift, and intention to hit the ball higher on the face, TrackMan showed the low point about four inches in front of the ball and an attack angle of about four degrees down. Now we could connect the intentions, impact, and the numbers.

Then he asked, “Couldn’t I just put the ball farther back in my stance?”

“Yes. Now you’re thinking!!”

He understood the relationship. If the swing’s low point stayed in the same place, moving the ball back would put it earlier on the descending part of the arc. We would still need to hit a shot and check what happened, but he could now explain why that adjustment might help.

We still hit some thin shots and some fat ones. But we had more useful questions to ask about them. Where did the ball hit the face? Where did the club first hit the ground? Did the adjustment change what we intended? Each miss gave us something specific to check.

Then we moved from the teaching bay to the grass range tee. The turf gave us visible feedback about where the club met the ground. We could compare what he was trying to do, what he felt, and what actually happened. That’s a comparison he could keep making in practice.

If you’re working on iron contact, start with those same two observations: where you strike the face and where you first strike the ground relative to the ball. Make one adjustment and check them again. A narrower stance was useful for this student in this lesson. Your next adjustment should answer what you find in your own contact.

He came in with a list of suspected swing faults. We hadn’t given him a whole new swing. He had two specific things to practice: where the ball struck the face and where the club struck the ground. And now he understood how to check both.