The swing tips we gave to Tony for more CONSISTENT iron play

In this week’s live lesson we helped Tony with the rotation in his back swing. It was a much more interesting problem than you might originally think, as we had to help him navigate some mental hurdles in order to make the physical changes needed in his swing.

We started out with observing some of Tony’s shots to see what was going on, and quickly noticed that he was swinging very over the plane and to the left of target. This coupled with his open club face at impact was causing the fades and slices that he was trying to get rid of.

We could also see that Tony had a lot of reverse spine angle at the top of his backswing, and that this was a compensatory action due to his lack of rotation. So we decided to do some tests to check the level of rotation that Tony could achieve. It was through this process that we realised Tony’s lack of rotation was in part due to a mental reason, more so than a physical one.

Tony thought that he needed to reduce his movement in the swing in order to swing correctly. We had a great conversation about movement within the golf swing, and how a lot of times it isn’t about stopping movement in general, it’s about stopping the wrong kinds of movement.

It’s times like this where we like to emphasise how important it is to make sure you understand your swing, and why you do everything that you do. Because you never know, you could be in a position like Tony where you realise you were doing something incorrectly. Not because you can’t do it, but because your understanding of what you want to achieve isn’t 100%.

So how did we fix Tony’s reverse spine angle and lack of rotation? We got him to practice getting himself into the top of the backswing position, whilst allowing his lead knee to move in slightly and his head to move as his lead shoulder moves to under his chin. To help with this we got him to flare his trail foot out slightly to allow for more rotation into that trail-side hip.

The key to this lesson was Tony’s understanding of rotation in the golf swing. And as you can see by the photo below, it made the world of difference.

We also went through a couple easy changes he could make to improve his ball striking, the best thing about these tips are they can apply to almost anyone’s game. So be sure to check out the video below to see those.

And if you think this blog has been useful then you definitely need to check out our brand new “Pure Your Irons” coaching plan, it covers 5 aspects of the swing that are going to completely transform your iron play. Be sure to fill out the form below to get access to the first week completely FREE.