5 Golf Gear Warning Signs

Golf Monthly
Golf Monthly
  • last year
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.
Transcript
00:00 (electronic music)
00:02 - Hello everyone, Neil Tappan here from Golf Monthly
00:06 and welcome to West Hill Golf Club.
00:08 In this video, which we are looking at
00:09 the five important clues your golf equipment is giving you
00:13 about the way in which you're swinging the club.
00:15 We're gonna look at everything from the wear marks
00:17 on your glove and your grip, tee marks on your driver,
00:20 and also any marks that you might have on your wedges.
00:22 They're really important clues about the way
00:24 you're delivering the club to the ball.
00:26 Now the advice in this video comes from Alex Elliott.
00:28 He's a PGA professional.
00:30 His tips are really simple and concise,
00:32 really easy to follow.
00:33 Guys, if you're new to the Golf Monthly channel,
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00:41 Is there anything you've missed,
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00:44 that you're looking for?
00:45 Let us know, we'd be more than happy to help.
00:47 Right, let's head over, meet Alex,
00:49 and find out what these five important clues are
00:51 from your golf equipment.
00:53 (electronic music)
00:56 Okay, so number five on our list relates to your glove,
00:59 and the clues that might be there for you to see
01:02 with your glove.
01:03 What are the areas of wear on the glove
01:05 that people need to be aware of,
01:06 and need to try to avoid?
01:08 - Two main areas, really.
01:09 One is that excessive wear to the palm.
01:12 - Right.
01:13 - And then usually we see it as kind of a combination.
01:15 We get excessive wear here, then as a result,
01:17 we get excessive wear along the thumb as well.
01:19 - In the thumb.
01:20 So yeah, look at your own glove.
01:21 Take a moment, get your golf equipment out,
01:23 have a look at the gloves.
01:25 See if you've got any wear in the thumb and in the palm.
01:27 Why is that not good?
01:28 - Ultimately, if I demonstrate now with a golf club,
01:31 if I get a grip that, or take a hold of a club
01:33 when it's too much through my palm,
01:35 one, I'm relying on the thumb and the forefinger
01:37 to kind of take the weight,
01:38 but ultimately it stops us creating a lot of wrist set,
01:41 or wrist hinge throughout the swing.
01:43 And a common thing that I see is that a lot of the time
01:45 that we get this, we then gotta sacrifice
01:47 bending of our lead arm to complete the swing.
01:50 Ultimately, 'cause we can't set the wrist.
01:52 - Hinge your wrist properly.
01:52 - Exactly.
01:53 - So what about the sort of general state
01:57 of your golf glove?
01:58 Firstly, at what point should people chuck a glove away?
02:01 At what point is it redundant?
02:02 And secondly, how long should it take you
02:04 to get to a point where it's redundant?
02:06 - I think if we look at it and said,
02:07 if your glove was wearing very quickly,
02:10 then we might be gripping it too hard,
02:11 and we might then have issues in our grip,
02:13 and just general wear and tear happens too quickly.
02:15 I would say, one, it depends how much rain you play in.
02:18 - Yeah, how often you play golf.
02:19 - Yeah.
02:20 I would say nine, 10 rounds.
02:24 - Fine.
02:25 - And that's for someone that would be probably
02:26 very taken care of their parents
02:27 and wanting to have a nice, fresh, clovery time.
02:29 You could probably get a bit longer.
02:30 - Yeah.
02:31 - But I'd say probably two or three a season
02:32 would be a good--
02:33 - Yeah, fine.
02:33 So more, I mean, nine, 10 rounds, that's quite,
02:36 if you're somebody that is really into your golf equipment,
02:38 you want your stuff to be.
02:39 If you're not, and also, don't forget,
02:41 you can store old gloves in your bag
02:43 and use them when you practise.
02:44 That's a good thing to do.
02:45 - Exactly, exactly.
02:46 - So look out for wear and tear on your glove.
02:48 It could hold some important clues
02:50 as to what you might be doing wrong in your swing.
02:52 (upbeat music)
02:55 Okay, so the next one on the list
02:57 relates to wear marks on your golf clubs.
02:59 On my golf clubs, without question,
03:02 commonly, my wear marks tend to be
03:04 slightly more towards the heel
03:06 than they are towards the centre,
03:07 which is a dangerous place to have your wear marks.
03:11 And Alex, you've got driver there.
03:12 What's the thing for people to be wary of
03:14 with the wear marks on their driver?
03:16 - I think if we say, people to be wary with driver
03:18 that seeing the ball flight could just be due to your strike
03:21 and if you've got a kind of a wearing of your strike
03:24 towards the heel or towards the toe,
03:25 this could have a massive impact on your ball flight.
03:28 - So what you're saying is that you could end up
03:31 seeing the ball drawing or fading
03:33 when actually your swing isn't the problem.
03:36 It's actually the strike that's causing that.
03:37 - Yeah, exactly, 'cause we've got a driver here
03:39 and we've got all modern drivers now, very forgiving.
03:42 They've got the centre of gravity low and far back.
03:44 This creates gear effect in the driver.
03:46 So if I was to hit one out the heel now,
03:48 this would cause the heel of the club
03:49 to kick back a little bit,
03:51 the ball to work in the opposite direction,
03:53 and we might actually start seeing a slice
03:55 or a big fade curvature.
03:57 - And then you'd end up possibly
03:58 putting some drills into play
04:00 or working on your swing,
04:00 thinking that you're coming over the top of it
04:02 when actually that's not the case.
04:03 - Exactly, exactly that.
04:04 And then the same thing would happen from the toe.
04:06 People that are hooking the ball excessively
04:08 could just be that they're catching this ball out the toe.
04:11 Toe kicks back a little bit,
04:12 the ball works like cogs and gears in the opposite direction
04:15 and causes that ball to move right to left curvature.
04:17 - Fine, so how do you work on the quality of strike?
04:20 What's something that we all need to do from time to time?
04:23 Doesn't matter what handicap you are, how do you do it?
04:26 - Foot spray, really, really easy.
04:27 Or even when you go to a driver fitting,
04:29 you can get this face tape that you put on it.
04:31 Now that will affect the ball flight because of friction.
04:33 So foot sprays would be your best option here.
04:36 And just seeing actually, well,
04:37 where am I striking the ball?
04:39 Because with all modern drivers,
04:40 because they are so forgiving,
04:41 it's hard to know where you hit it from.
04:43 - Yes, yeah.
04:44 - So actually getting, okay,
04:45 well, I'm a little bit towards the toe.
04:47 - Towards the toe, yes.
04:48 - Guilty of that all the time.
04:49 - Yeah, and so what?
04:50 Then you can just start to make compensations
04:52 in your own kind of games.
04:54 - I guess another drill,
04:56 an actually easy drill that I would do.
04:57 So imagine I would tee the golf ball up on the middle.
05:00 I would then place a tee just inside this.
05:03 And I would try and take out the inside tee.
05:04 And that would hopefully move my strike
05:06 from the toe into the middle and vice versa.
05:08 Tee a ball up and put a tee just peg
05:11 just outside the golf ball
05:12 and try and take out the outside tee peg as well.
05:14 And again, moving that strike from heel to the middle.
05:17 - I think we can all agree that striking the ball
05:19 from the centre of the club face
05:20 is fairly important when it comes to golf.
05:21 There's some great tips there from Alex
05:23 to help you first identify where your strike pattern is
05:26 and then to hone it in so that you get it
05:28 a little bit more centred a little bit more often.
05:30 Good shot.
05:39 Now one of the most obvious signs to look out for
05:41 with your golf equipment is the tee marks
05:43 that get left on your driver after you've hit a shot.
05:45 Take a look at the sole plate of your driver.
05:47 You'll probably see where the tee is running.
05:49 And Alex, what's the thing that people need
05:51 to look out for here?
05:53 The most common fault that you think people look at?
05:55 - So most common ball flight is left to right slice,
05:57 whether that be for a right-handed player
05:59 or a left-handed player as well.
06:01 And these tee marks will generally run
06:03 from the heel all the way across to the toe.
06:06 And that's on a diagonal motion.
06:08 - Okay, now good question here for you then is,
06:11 why does it start in the heel?
06:12 Why exactly does the tee marks begin on that part?
06:15 - 'Cause it would suggest that we've got a path
06:17 that's travelling from out to in.
06:18 So if I showed you here, over-exaggerated,
06:20 this club head would be travelling from outside the line
06:24 to inside the line.
06:24 So we could imagine like we're grating across this ball
06:27 and that tee is slashing across the sole of your club.
06:30 - So question then, if the person watching this
06:34 hits a fairly consistent fade, is that a problem?
06:37 - No, I mean, what I would say though,
06:39 the more your path is out to in,
06:41 the more diagonal that these tee marks
06:43 will probably become.
06:44 - Fine, so if yours are particularly aggressive,
06:47 they're going kind of sideways across the,
06:48 then it is something you need to sort of work on.
06:51 If that's the case, how do you work on it?
06:53 - A really nice simple drill,
06:55 and what I always try and get people to react
06:57 to kind of a scenario in front of them.
07:00 If we imagine that I place the tree in front of you,
07:02 a lot of people that would have an object in front of them
07:05 would actually go, "Oh yeah, I know how to move it
07:06 "from right to left around that, I can do that."
07:09 So I go, "Right, okay, if we picture we've got a tree
07:11 "in front of us, what would we do?
07:12 "How would we manipulate our swing to do so?"
07:15 - Okay, fine.
07:15 - A lot of people would make that adjustment,
07:17 okay, aim a little bit up the right,
07:18 and they would naturally swing a little bit more
07:21 to the right and have a slightly different
07:23 release pattern as well.
07:24 - Okay, and if you got it right,
07:25 that would mean that the tee mark started in the toe
07:27 and then went towards the heel, is that right?
07:28 - Hopefully, yeah.
07:29 I would say that I would generally want to see it
07:30 go the opposite way.
07:31 Some people may have that if they're a draw of the ball
07:34 or hook the golf ball, they may have it traveling
07:36 from toe to heel.
07:38 But I would say that drill would probably hopefully
07:40 get people close to neutral.
07:41 Even though it feels quite excessive,
07:43 it probably gets them quite neutral,
07:45 maybe even just a little bit off to the right.
07:47 - Okay, go on then, Alex, hit one more for us.
07:49 - So we're imagining we've got our tree just in front of us,
07:51 we're gonna try and feel that we create the opposite.
07:53 So remember before, the tee marks were working this way,
07:56 across the golf ball, we're gonna try and feel
07:58 the absolute opposite.
07:59 - Good shot.
08:09 - Right, so the next one on our list relates to your wedges
08:11 and where the wear marks are around about the sole.
08:14 So Alex, what we're gonna talk about in this part
08:16 is about angle of attack, how steep you are into the ball.
08:20 And there's gonna be two clues,
08:21 it's gonna be the--
08:22 - Divots.
08:23 - Divot on the ground and then where the marks are
08:25 on your wedge.
08:26 Talk us through it.
08:27 - First off, I see a lot of people that struggle
08:29 with that kind of steep contact in the back of the ball,
08:32 one that fires out really low and spinny and out of control,
08:36 is that a lot of the time people get this steep angle
08:39 of descent into the ball.
08:39 So the club would almost get stuck in the ground
08:42 and we create a big divot.
08:43 And when this ground is wet,
08:45 we also take a long, large divot as well,
08:47 especially over a pitching distance.
08:49 So one would be a steep divot, so a very deep divot.
08:53 And then secondly, we'd probably start to see
08:55 a little bit of wear around this leading edge
08:57 'cause that's doing a lot of contact in the ground.
09:00 We start then to see a lot of wear around this area.
09:01 - Okay, fine.
09:02 So if you were using the sole of your wedge
09:04 as so many coaches now teaching the short game,
09:08 you would get more of an even wear
09:10 across the bottom of the sole
09:11 because you'd be using that sole a little bit more often.
09:13 - That would be kind of the overall general statement.
09:16 I mean, the thing that we know with wedges,
09:17 we get a bad line, we might have to manufacture a shot
09:20 and be a bit steeper.
09:21 But as a general rule of thumb.
09:22 - For a basic sort of short game shot
09:24 like the one we're facing here.
09:26 Now, one thing I would say is that over the years,
09:29 people have been told that in order to get spin,
09:31 in order to get that one that bounces up and then checks,
09:33 you wanna be steeper into the ball.
09:34 You wanna kind of drive it in there.
09:36 But actually, that's not what you're advocating.
09:39 - I mean, to create spin, it's something called spin loft.
09:41 So it's a difference between the loft you've got on your face
09:43 and your angle of attack.
09:45 So it's the vector that you create between it.
09:46 Now, there is a mean point at which you go beyond this point,
09:48 it'll drop off a scale and you won't create any spin.
09:51 But generally, more loft and either moving face up,
09:56 so adding more loft, or steepening the angle of attack
09:58 and keeping the same face will add spin.
10:00 Then you gotta understand here is that
10:03 if you move your angle of attack and face by the same amount
10:06 or you're gonna change your trajectory.
10:08 Changing one of these vectors will create some spin.
10:10 - Okay, fine.
10:11 So show us how you play this particular shot.
10:13 - Granted, this is probably like, as a playing point of view,
10:15 it's probably one of my worst areas of my game.
10:17 But the analogy that I like to use,
10:19 'cause I'm one of them people
10:20 that do get steep into the back of the ball.
10:22 I like to think of the bottom of this club
10:23 being the wheels of a plane.
10:24 So I like to feel like I just get the wheels of the plane
10:26 just touching down.
10:27 - Right, okay, just brushing the ground.
10:28 - Yeah, so not crash landing.
10:30 - Yeah.
10:30 - And not a board to the landing and scooping it.
10:32 Just feeling like I'm gonna get it brushing the ground.
10:34 - Okay, good.
10:35 - So it's like you're playing this.
10:36 - Yeah, nice analogy, I like it.
10:38 Very nice.
10:45 Spin.
10:47 Very good.
10:49 And you'll see, I think through the camera
10:51 you should be able to see there's a divot there,
10:52 but it isn't too bad.
10:53 It's not too deep of a divot.
10:55 - No, it's a nice divot.
10:56 - It's a nice divot.
10:56 So something to look out for with your wedges.
10:58 If you do struggle with your short game,
11:00 the chances are you're probably
11:02 a little steep into the ball.
11:03 You're probably hitting down a little bit too much
11:06 into the back of it.
11:07 Clubs gets caught in the turf,
11:08 all sorts of bad things can happen.
11:10 Try and shallow out that angle of attack.
11:12 You could hit a few more shots just like that one.
11:14 Okay, so for the next one,
11:19 you might want to grab your driver
11:21 and take a look at the grip.
11:22 See if there are any areas on the grip of your driver
11:25 where there are wear marks.
11:26 Alex, what's the thing to look out for here?
11:28 - It would be where my top hand, my thumb,
11:31 meets the golf club here.
11:32 Now, if you're someone who excessively
11:34 has excessive grip tension,
11:36 so say for example, 10 out of 10 was strangling it,
11:38 and you had that with the driver,
11:40 we would start to see sort of a wear pattern
11:42 in that same place.
11:43 Another thing, it would be if your grip
11:45 was moving a little bit as well.
11:47 - So your actual grip is slightly changing
11:49 during the swing?
11:50 - Yeah, exactly.
11:51 - Right, okay, I wouldn't have thought that people did that.
11:53 I wouldn't have thought you could hang on
11:53 to the golf club if you did that.
11:55 - It does, ultimately when we grab the golf club,
11:58 our thumb works slightly upwards,
12:00 so it kind of retracts in slightly.
12:02 So any time that some people kind of have a long thumb,
12:05 it's kind of what I call, it's not as stable,
12:07 so it can move a little bit more, a bit more rigid.
12:09 So this again would add to wear on that area of the club.
12:13 But for me, it's where people have excessive grip tension,
12:17 which is one of the main things.
12:17 - Yes, which is what I was wanting to ask you about.
12:19 So as far as grip tension goes, grip pressure,
12:23 what's the advice?
12:24 - A really nice, simple one.
12:25 Imagine your grip now is a tube of toothpaste,
12:28 and it's open at the end.
12:29 We don't want to squeeze the toothpaste out.
12:31 We want to just put enough tension onto that grip
12:34 where we've got our hands lightly on the club.
12:37 - Why don't you want to grip it too hard?
12:39 I mean, I, all fine, but why don't you,
12:42 what's the problem with gripping it so hard?
12:44 - Big thing is release.
12:45 If you were to grip it really hard now,
12:47 this tension then travels up your forearms.
12:49 So it's a lot less of a forearm release
12:52 and arms and body working together.
12:53 We're more likely to hold onto this club face.
12:56 - Okay.
12:57 - Other points are in terms of actually creating
12:58 a turn during the backswing,
12:59 that tension travels up the body.
13:01 - Up the body, right.
13:02 So you can find the tension spreads from your hands
13:03 up through your arms. - Definitely.
13:04 - And then before you know it,
13:05 you're not actually turning very effectively.
13:07 - Yeah, and if we've got that tension on the range,
13:09 we turn to the first tee as well.
13:11 And that's where we're probably gonna be most nervous.
13:13 - Okay, go on then, hit one for us.
13:15 - So I'm trying to feel like I'm gripping
13:16 a tube of toothpaste.
13:18 - Good shot.
13:23 So there you have it.
13:24 Those were our five most important clues
13:26 that come from your golf equipment
13:28 about the way in which you're swinging the club.
13:31 If you've liked what you watched,
13:31 please do hit the like button
13:33 and also leave some comments below.
13:34 Have you got any questions about anything
13:36 we've talked about in this video?
13:37 We'd be more than happy to help out
13:39 and give some answers where we can.
13:40 And have we missed anything out?
13:42 Are there any signs that your golf equipment
13:44 is giving you about your swing
13:46 that you'd like some information on?
13:47 Again, we'd be more than happy to help out.
13:49 But for now, from West Hill, it's goodbye.
13:52 (electronic music)
13:55 (upbeat music)