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What is your golf equipment telling you about your swing? In this video Neil Tappin and Alex Elliott discuss some of the warning signs you should be on the lookout for.
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00:00Hello everyone, Neil Tappin here from Golf Monthly and welcome to West Hill Golf Club
00:08and this video in which we are looking at the five important clues your golf equipment
00:12is giving you about the way in which you're swinging the club. We're going to look at
00:15everything from the wear marks on your glove and your grip, tee marks on your driver and
00:20also any marks that you might have on your wedges. They're really important clues about
00:24the way you're delivering the club to the ball. Now the advice in this video comes from
00:28Alex Elliott. He's a PGA professional. His tips are really simple and concise, really
00:32easy to follow. Guys, if you're new to the Golf Monthly channel, please do hit the subscribe
00:36button to make sure that you don't miss any of our videos. Hit the like button if you like
00:39what you're watching and also please do leave comments below. Is there anything you've missed
00:42or is there any more information or advice that you're looking for? Let us know. We're
00:46more than happy to help. Right, let's head over, meet Alex and find out what these five
00:50important clues are from your golf equipment.
00:54Okay, so number five on our list relates to your glove and the clues that might be there
01:01for you to see with your glove. What are the areas of wear on the glove that people need
01:05to be aware of and need to try to avoid? Two main areas really. One is that excessive
01:11wear through the palm. Right. And then usually we see it as kind of a combination. We get excessive
01:15wear here, then as a result we get excessive wear along the thumb as well. In the thumb. So,
01:20yeah, look at your own glove. Take a moment. Get your golf equipment out. Have a look at
01:24the gloves. See if you've got any wear in the thumb and in the palm. Why is that not
01:28good? Ultimately, if I demonstrate now with a golf club, if I get a grip or take a hold
01:33of a club when it's too much through my palm, I want to rely on the thumb and the forefinger
01:37to kind of take the weight. But ultimately, it stops us creating a lot of wrist set or wrist
01:42hinge throughout the swing. And a common thing that I see is that a lot of the time that we
01:46get this, we then got to sacrifice bending of our lead arm to complete the swing. Ultimately
01:50because we can't set the wrist. Hinge your wrist properly. Exactly.
01:53Fine. So what about the sort of general state of your golf glove? Firstly, at what point should
01:59people chuck a glove away? At what point is it redundant? And secondly, how long should
02:04it take you to get to a point where it's redundant? I think if we look at it and said, if your glove
02:08was wearing very quickly, then we might be gripping it too hard and we might then have issues in
02:13our grip and just general wear and tear happens too quickly. I would say, one, it depends
02:17on how much rain you're playing. Yeah, how often do you play golf?
02:19Yeah. I would say nine, 10 rounds. And that should be somewhere that would be probably very
02:26taking care of their appearance and wanting to have a nice fresh glovery time. You could
02:29probably get a bit longer. Yeah. But I'd say probably two or three a season would be a
02:32good. Yeah, fine. So more, I mean, nine, 10 rounds, that's quite, if you're somebody that
02:37is really into your golf equipment, you want your stuff to be. If you're not, so also don't
02:41forget, you can store old gloves in your bag and use them when you practice. That's a
02:44good thing to do. Exactly. Exactly.
02:46So look out for wear and tear on your glove. It could hold some important clues as to what
02:50you might be doing wrong in your swing.
02:54Okay, so the next one on the list relates to wear marks on your golf clubs. On my golf clubs,
03:00without question, commonly my wear marks tend to be slightly more towards the heel than they
03:06are towards the centre, which is a dangerous place to have your wear marks. And Alex, you've
03:11got driver there. What's the thing for people to be wary of with the wear marks on their driver?
03:15I think if we say people too wary with driver that seeing the ball flight could just be due
03:20to your strike. And if you've got a kind of a wearing of your strike towards the heel or
03:25towards the toe, this could have a massive impact on your ball flight.
03:28So what you're saying is that you could end up seeing the ball drawing or fading when actually
03:34your swing isn't the problem. It's actually the strike that's causing that.
03:38Yeah, exactly. Because we've got a driver here and we've got all modern drivers now very forgiving.
03:42They've got the centre of gravity low and far back. This creates gear effect in the driver. So if I
03:46was to hit one out the heel now, this would cause the heel of the club to kick back a little bit,
03:51the ball to work in the opposite direction, and we might actually start seeing a slice or a big fade
03:56curvature. And then you'd end up possibly putting some drills into play or working on your swing
04:01thinking that you're coming over the top of it when actually that's not the case.
04:03Exactly, exactly that. And then the same thing would happen from the toe. People that are hooking
04:07the ball excessively could just be that they're catching this ball out the toe, the toe kicks back
04:12a little bit, the ball works like cogs and gears in the opposite direction, causes that ball to move
04:16right to left curvature. Okay, fine. So how do you work on the quality of strike? What's something that we all
04:22need to do from time to time? It doesn't matter what handicap you are, how do you do it?
04:26Foot spray, really, really easy. Or even when you go to a driver fitting, you can get this face tape
04:30that you put on it. Now that will affect the ball flight because of friction. So foot sprays would
04:34be your best option here. And just seeing actually, well, where am I striking the ball? Because with all
04:40modern drivers, because they are so forgiving, it's hard to know where you hit it from. Yes, yeah.
04:44So actually getting, okay, well, I'm a little bit towards the toe. I'm towards the toe, yes. Guilty of that all the time.
04:49Yeah. And so what, then you can just start to make compensations in your own kind of games.
04:54I guess another, a drill, an easy drill that I would do. So imagine I would tee the golf ball up
04:59on the middle. I would then place a tee just inside this, and I would try and take out the inside
05:04tee. And that would hopefully move my strike from the toe into the middle and vice versa. Tee a ball up
05:10and put a tee just peg just outside the golf ball and try and take out the outside tee peg as well. And
05:14again, moving that strike from heel to the middle. I think we can all agree that striking the ball from
05:19the centre of the club face is fairly important when it comes to golf. There's some great tips
05:22there from Alex to help you first identify where your strike pattern is and then tone it in so that
05:28you get it a little bit more centred a little bit more often. Good shot. Now, one of the most obvious
05:40signs to look out for with your golf equipment is the tee marks that get left on your driver after
05:44you've hit a shot. Take a look at the sole plate of your driver, you'll probably see where the tee is
05:49running. And Alex, what's the thing that people need to look out for here? The most common
05:53fault that you think people need to look out for? So most common ball flight is left to right, slice,
05:57whether that be for a right-handed player or a left-handed player as well. And these tee marks will
06:02generally run from the heel all the way across to the toe on a sort of diagonal motion. Okay, now,
06:08a good question here for you then is why does it start on the heel? Why exactly does the tee marks
06:14begin on that path? Because it would suggest that we've got a path that's travelling from out to in.
06:18So if I showed you here, over-exaggerated, this club head would be travelling from outside the line
06:24to inside the line. So we could imagine like we're grating across this ball and that tee is slashing
06:28across the sole of your club. So, question then, if the person watching this hits a fairly consistent fade,
06:36is that a problem? No, I mean, what I would say though, the more your path is out to win,
06:41the more diagonal that these tee marks will probably become. Fine, so if yours are particularly
06:46aggressive, they're going kind of sideways across, then it is something you need to sort of work on.
06:51If that's the case, how do you work on it? A really nice, simple drill and what I always try and
06:57get people to react to kind of a scenario in front of them. If we imagine that I've placed a tree in
07:01front of you, a lot of people that would have an object in front of them would actually go,
07:05oh yeah, I know how to move it from right to left around that, I can do that. So I go, right, okay,
07:10if we picture we've got a tree in front of us, what would we do? How would we manipulate our swing
07:14to do so? Okay, fine. A lot of people would make that adjustment, okay, aim a little bit up the right
07:18and they would naturally swing a little bit more to the right and have a slightly different release
07:23pattern as well. Okay, and if you got it right, that would mean that the tee mark started in the
07:27toe and then went towards the hill, is that right? Hopefully, yeah. I would say that I would generally
07:30want to see it go the opposite way. Some people may have that if they're a draw of the ball or hook
07:34the golf ball, they may have it travelling from toe to heel, but I would say that drill would probably
07:40hopefully get people close to neutral. Even though it feels quite excessive, it probably gets them
07:44quite neutral, maybe even just a little bit off to the right. Okay, go on then, Alex, hit one more for us.
07:49So we're imagining we've got our tree just in front of us, we're going to try and feel that we create
07:52the opposite. Remember, before the tee marks are working this way, across the golf ball, we're going to try and
07:58feel the absolute opposite. Good shot.
08:09Right, so the next one on our list relates to your wedges and where the wear marks are around about
08:13the sole. So, Alex, what we're going to talk about in this part is about angle of attack, how steep you
08:18are into the ball and there's going to be two clues. It's going to be the divot on the ground and then
08:24where the marks are on your wedge. Talk us through it. First off, I see a lot of people that struggle
08:29with that kind of steep contact in the back of the ball or one that fires out really low and spinny and
08:35out of control is that a lot of the time people get this steep angle of descent into the ball. So
08:40the club would almost get stuck in the ground and we create a big divot. And when this ground is wet,
08:45we also take a long, large divot as well, especially over a pitching distance. So one would be a steep divot,
08:51so a very deep divot. And then secondly, we'd probably start to see a little bit of wear
08:56around this leading edge because that's in a lot of contact in the ground. We start then to see a lot
09:00of wear around this area. Okay, fine. So if you were using the sole of your wedge as so many coaches
09:06are now teaching the short game, you would get more of an even wear across the bottom of the sole
09:11because you'd be using that sole a little bit more often. I mean, that would be kind of the overall
09:15general statement. The main thing that we know with wedges, we get a bad line, we might have to
09:19manufacture a shot and be a bit steeper, but as a general rule of thumb. For a basic sort of short
09:24game shot like the one we're facing here. Now, one thing I would say is that over the years,
09:29people have been told that in order to get spin, in order to get that one that bounces up and then
09:33checks, you want to be steeper into the ball. You want to kind of drive it in there. But actually,
09:37that's not what you're advocating. I mean, to create spin, it's something called spin loft. So it's
09:41a difference between the loft you've got on your face and your angle of attack. So it's the vector that you
09:46create between it. Now, there is a mean point at which you go beyond this point, it'll drop off a
09:50scale and you won't create any spin. But generally, more loft and either moving face up, so adding more
09:56loft or steepening angle of attack and keeping the same face will add spin. The thing you've got to
10:02understand here is that if you move your angle of attack and face by the same amount,
10:06or you're going to change your trajectory. Changing one of these vectors will create some spin.
10:10Okay, fine. So show us how you play this particular shot.
10:13Granted, this is probably like, as a playing point of view, it's probably one of my worst areas of
10:17my game. But the analogy that I like to use, because I'm one of the people that do get steep
10:20into the back of the ball, I like to think of the bottom of this club being the wheels of a plane.
10:24So I like to feel like I just get the wheels of the plane just touching down.
10:27Right. Okay. Just brushing the ground.
10:28Yeah. So not crash landing and not aborting the landing and scooping it. Just feeling
10:33I'm going to get it brushing the ground.
10:34Okay, good.
10:35Hopefully like you're playing this.
10:36Yeah. Nice analogy. I like it.
10:44Very nice. Spin. Very good.
10:49And you'll see, I think through the camera, you should be able to see there's a divot there,
10:52but it isn't too bad. It's not, it's not too deep.
10:55No, it's a nice divot.
10:56It's a nice divot. So something to look out for with your wedges.
10:58If you do struggle with your short game, the chances are you're probably a little steep into the ball.
11:04You're probably hitting down a little bit too much into the back of it.
11:07Clubs gets caught in the turf. All sorts of bad things can happen.
11:10And try and shallow out that angle of attack. You could hit a few more shots just like that one.
11:18Okay. So for the next one, you might want to grab your driver and take a look at the grip.
11:22See if there are any areas on the grip of your driver where there are wear marks.
11:26Alex, what's the thing to look out for here?
11:28It would be where my top hand, my thumb meets the golf club here.
11:32Now, if you're someone who excessively has excessive grip tension.
11:36So say for example, 10 out of 10 was strangling it and you had that with the driver.
11:40We would start to see sort of a wear pattern in that same place.
11:43Another thing it would be if your grip was moving a little bit as well.
11:47So your actual grip is sort of slightly changing during the swing.
11:50Yeah, exactly.
11:51Right. Okay. I wouldn't have thought that people did that.
11:53I wouldn't have thought you could hang on to the golf club if you did that.
11:54It does. Ultimately, when we grab the golf club, our thumb works slightly upwards.
12:00So it kind of retracts in slightly.
12:02So anytime that some people kind of have a long thumb, it's kind of what I call,
12:06it's not as stable, so it can move a little bit more, a bit more rigid.
12:09So this again would add to wear on that area of the club.
12:13But for me, it's where people have excessive grip tension, which is one of the main points.
12:18Yes, which is what I was wanting to ask you about.
12:19So as far as grip tension goes and grip pressure, what's the advice?
12:24A really nice, simple one.
12:25Imagine your grip now is a tube of toothpaste and it's open at the end.
12:29We don't want to squeeze a toothpaste out.
12:31We want to just put enough tension onto that grip where we've got our hands lightly on the club.
12:37Why don't you want to grip it too hard?
12:39I mean, all fine, but why don't you?
12:42What's the problem with gripping it so hard?
12:44The big thing is release.
12:45If you were to grip it really hard now, this tension then travels up your forearms.
12:49So it's a lot less of a forearm release and arms and body working together.
12:53We're more likely to hold on to this club face.
12:56Okay.
12:56Other points are in terms of actually creating a turn join the backswing, that tension travels up the body.
13:01Up the body, right.
13:02So you can find the tension spreads from your hands up through your arms and then before you know it,
13:05you're not actually turning very effectively.
13:07Yeah, and if we've got that tension on the range, we turn to the first tee as well.
13:11And that's where we're probably going to be most nervous.
13:13Okay, go on then, hit one for us.
13:15So I'm trying to feel like I'm gripping a tube of toothpaste.
13:22Good shot.
13:23So there you have it.
13:24Those were our five most important clues that come from your golf equipment about the way in which
13:29you're swinging the club.
13:31If you've liked what you watched, please do hit the like button and also leave some comments below.
13:34Have you got any questions about anything we've talked about in this video?
13:37We'd be more than happy to help out and give some answers where we can.
13:40And have we missed anything out?
13:42Are there any signs that your golf equipment is giving you about your swing that you'd like
13:46some information on?
13:47Again, we'd be more than happy to help out.
13:49But for now, from West Hill, it's goodbye.
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