From shanks to pure iron shots in one incredible lesson

February 17, 2023

We’ll admit, this week’s live lesson was very different than the ones we usually do. It took a very ‘technical’ coaching path, but this week’s student Ty has been playing a while and was more than up for the challenge.

Ty had a bad case of the shanks, so the focus was curing those, and we did so by making three changes. One to his set up, and two to his swing. The third change was focused around his club head position in the backswing, and is an absolute game changer when it comes to avoid those hosel rockets. So let’s go through them in more detail, and be sure to take notes in case you ever get hit with a case of the shanks too.

Set-up

As you can see from the photo below, Ty’s grip was a bit on the strong side and was what we call ‘palmy’. Meaning that the club was sitting in the palm of his hand and not across the fingers. This was giving him a tendency to shut the face too much at impact, and our first aim was to take the left side of the course out of play.

The first change we made was to adjust his right hand, making sure that the palm of his hand was facing the target as he gripped the club. We also got him to grip in more in the fingers, which we did warn him would feel strange at first, but was well worth the results.

In order to help Ty adjust quickly to this big change in his set up, we got him to hit balls off of a tee peg instead of the grass. We didn’t care about his interaction with the turf, so we took that factor out of play so he could focus on his grip and not the strike.

Swing

Right at the beginning of the lesson, thanks to the FlightScope data, we could see that Ty’s swing was very in to out. And this emphasised swinging out to the right was also contributing to his shanks, as it increased the likeliness of him hitting it out of the hosel.

To work on this was a very simple fix. We used a head cover, placed it next to the ball and used it as awareness for Ty. The idea behind this was that if he hit the ball with an in to out swing path, he would contact the ball with the hosel of the club, but he would also hit the head cover.

So the aim was to miss the head cover every time he hit the ball, in order to miss the head cover, Ty had to change his swing path to be more straight, instead of out to the right.

It took a few attempts, but the beauty of this drill is that it was really easy for Ty to set up himself, and to see when he completed it successfully and when he didn’t. It’s one we would recommend you all try for yourselves too, to give you some more awareness of your club’s position at impact.

Now, this is where the lesson took a bit of a more technical turn, there was one more swing change we made to Ty’s swing to really help him stop those shanks. So to save you reading a 1000 word essay, it’s best you guys check out the video below for the full explanation.

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