How To Stop Hooking The Ball In Golf
Advice from Golf Monthly's Top 50 Coach: Try Niven on how to fix hooking the golf ball.
Transcript
00:00Hooking the golf ball, it's something that the world's best golfers struggle with, it's
00:06even something that I struggle with here as well.
00:09We're going to talk about how the shot happens, so the physics of impact, how we can fix it
00:14throughout the swing, and perhaps a little drill that you can go away to do to put into
00:18practice to reduce the left foot curvature in this golf shot.
00:22Now a hook, it's a shot which misses to the left for a right-handed golfer.
00:26If we talk about the impact now and just understand how this happens, it's when the club face
00:31starts to move further away from the club path.
00:34Now if we're hooking the golf ball to the left, the golf ball is going to start to take
00:39off closer to where the face is pointing, so the club face is going to start to point
00:44a little bit more towards the left, and the club path is going to move away from that
00:48club face angle, so the face-to-path relationship is very wide.
00:52The wider the relationship between the face and the path, the more curvature we're going
00:56to put onto the golf ball, and a really interesting thing that happens, for people that start
01:01hooking, they move further and further right, so they aim further out to the right, and
01:05what that does, it moves the swing direction further away from the club face, and then
01:10we add more curvature, so the problem gets worse.
01:13So let's break this down now, so firstly we're going to start with a grip, and what I most
01:17commonly see, when I see people that hook the golf ball, they get their hands really
01:22rotated clockwise around that club, and you can see under motion, under pressure, when
01:27I start to release this club, and the hands return to neutral, you can see how far left
01:32that golf club is pointing.
01:34So really, really, really simple thing that we can do at set-up, is set-up with more of
01:39a neutral hold, so the lead left hand is going to be a little bit more on top of the club,
01:43and the trail hand there, the thumb, is going to be a little bit more on top of that club
01:47as well, and give those hands a little bit of a squeeze together, like you're wringing
01:51out a towel, that's going to give you some good stability of that club face.
01:55Now that's the club face sorted, what do we do with the path, and what do we do for the
02:00club face throughout the swing?
02:02Well I've got a really good little tip that you can do, if you take your regular set-up
02:05here, with a neutral hold, and typically what we see with the stronger club face players
02:11is that they start to hood the club face, and the club face starts to move around the
02:16body, you can see where that club face is pointing, it's pointing down towards the
02:20ground, really good tip that you can do to sort that out, start to put the trail hand
02:24out as if you're going to shake hands with someone behind you, and simply swing that
02:28lead hand into it, and you can see all of a sudden I've got that very neutral club face,
02:33so if we think of the golf swing like a chain, you affect something further on, earlier on
02:39in the chain, at the start, and it will affect where the golf club is throughout the backswing.
02:44So let's just put those simple points into a bit of a hit here, so normal set-up, I've
02:48got my neutral hold, I'm just going to try and feel that the club face is very neutral
02:53in that early phase, and we can see very neutral golf shot there, not much left curvature on
03:03that one at all.
03:05Something that I also typically see through the shot is that people's pivot stops and
03:09the hands start to overtake, so the body's rotation stops and the hands do a lot of overtaking,
03:15you can see as I do that, the hands start to cross over and this club face points even
03:20further left, so another simple tip that you can do through the shot, you're going to do
03:25a full backswing, but then really control the pivot, control how far the arms and the
03:30club head is swinging through, we want no breakdown of the body and the arms here, so
03:37keep that body working through, I'm going to give you one more golf shot here, so we're
03:41going to pop it on the tee, and we're going to try and see if we can do a normal golf
03:46swing, but control how far through we send the hands and arms.
03:54You can see almost that Tommy Fleetwood-esque follow through there, really controlling the
03:59pivot and controlling the hands, two simple things that you can do there to reduce that