A requested repeat…”Keep Your Head Down!”

If you say this to yourself after a topped drive or bladed chip, I will help you rectify this in a moment.

If someone else says this to you, you can immediately discount anything they say because they have no idea what they are talking about…as far as golf is concerned. Their political beliefs are probably warped as well.

This is the most overused, overrated statement in all of golf and it is completely wrong. At one time earlier this decade, David Duval and Annika Sorrenstam were the #1 players in the world and both of them were not looking at the ball at impact.

In over 25 years of golf I have never seen anyone pull their head and cause a bad shot.

In actuality, trying to keep your head down will actually make it much, much worse. Telling yourself to, “keep your head down,” will make your head drop. You will either bury the club in the ground behind the ball or pull your arms in and top/blade the shot even worse than before. The double chicken wing not only makes you top it more, it will make you hit the ball shorter when you do hit it well, but most importantly make you look like an uncoordinated doofus.

There is a simple reason for those topped shots and bladed chips. The human brain has trouble understanding that hitting down on a golf ball will make it go up in the air. At the end of your backswing, the club is way up in the air and you must swing down at the ball to hit it.

The topped/bladed shots are caused by trying to hit up on the ball to try and help it in the air. That causes the right shoulder to drop, the shoulders to stop turning and the arms get shorter and can’t reach the ball anymore.

The solution is to hit down on the ball and continue to rotate the shoulders.

Hitting down on the ball and rotating your shoulders won’t solve the problem on the next shot you hit, because improvement in golf takes time, but you will see a reduction in the number of topped/bladed shots you hit until they disappear completely.

Now back to your regularly scheduled programming on The Golf Channel. Mindless and endless mechanical checklists that will lock up your brain, cause you to play too slow, increase your scores and reduce how much you enjoy the game.