How to Stop Topping Golf Ball
My golf coach Garrett Louis, instructor for Top 50 Teacher In America and PGA Teacher Of The Year Martin Chuck’s, Tour Striker Golf Academy in Phoenix Arizona, teaches me how to stop topping the golf ball.
Garrett Louis here with Tour Striker Golf Academy. And today, let’s talk about three things that might be causing you to top the golf ball. Very common, I see it a lot. Very frustrating. I know I’ve been there a few times myself. And so, three common things that I see. One being is we keep our head down. Yes, I said it, you’re keeping your head down too long.
That is one of the biggest myths in the game of golf. And so I’ll hit a shot for you and I’ll certainly try to keep my head down on this one. I kept my head down and I still managed to top that golf ball. So please guys, stop thinking that that’s what you need to be doing. So instead, I want you to feel like when you hit a golf ball, you can follow it with your eyes. You’re going to be able to see it as soon as it leaves the club face. And so, I’ll hit one for you. I’m going to get my nice hands on there, tip over to this golf ball.
All right, so that’s number one, keeping your head down. Number two would be a loss of arm structure, which goes hand in hand with number one, keeping your head down, because when we keep our head down too long, we get closer to the ground. Now our arms have nowhere to go but to separate, and they lift back up. And then, what happens is you hit the top part of the golf ball with a leading edge. And then, there you go, you’re on your way to hitting a top golf shot. So the remedy for that is when you set up, you’ve established a radius to the ground, a measurement. You’ve also established your arm structure.
As we make our back swing, I want you to feel like we’re squeezing these elbows together, not separating them. As we come downward, continuing to squeeze these elbows together. So you can see how I haven’t separated my arms. And when I do that, the club head starts to travel back up towards me. So again, squeezing these elbows together, and then feeling like our eyes can see the golf ball. And I’ll hit one for you. So that would be the second reason, losing our arm structure. The third reason would be hanging back on a trail foot. So not making a proper weight shift. And when we do that, when we hang back on a trail foot, the club head starts to work its way up. And as the club head works up, you end up catching the top half of the golf ball, resulting in a top shot.
So we’ve got to start to understand that we need to relocate a little bit of weight onto our front foot, and then we can add rotation into that, instead of hanging back and then catching the ball on the upswing. So I’ll hit one for you guys, and I’m going to clean this club face off, got a little dirty there.
Put my nice hands on there, take a look. And then feel like I can relocate a bit of weight to my lead foot. So I’d take that all day long. So guys, don’t keep your head down. Maintain some nice arm structure, squeeze those elbows together. And then, relocate a little bit of weight to a lead foot.
