Struggle taking a divot?

[leekgolf]

Does anyone struggle taking a divot? I have a hard time taking a divot and I think it started years ago when I was a beginner. I think I was just jarred by fat shots. Even today, 30 years later, I'm almost afraid to take a divot. On the range, if I take a practice swing and take a divot I'm almost embarrassed that I messed up the turf. I think I self-organized to make a very shallow downswing by coming from way inside to out and getting under the shaft plane. I also developed early extension as a way of then actually hitting the ball.

Does anyone else have a mental challenge with taking a divot?

[Jobu]

You sound like someone complaining that their tee doesn't fly up in the air after their tee shot.

[SNIPERBBB]

It's not something you want to force likes many other things in the golf swing.

[bluedot]

You might need clarity on what your mental challenge actually is. There is a big difference between fearing a fat shot and taking a shallow divot, and for players who typically don't take a proper divot (like me!) the outcome of a shot when I DO take a big divot is always poor.

As to WHY you struggle with a proper divot, which is not at all damaging to the golf course, btw, in many cases it has to do with angle of attack and actually hitting UP on irons. That, in turn, is usually a result of coming up and out of the swing with your spine angle because you aren't clearing your front side properly.

But understand: If you aren't at least taking a small shallow divot with your irons, you aren't hitting down on them properly, and you aren't pinching the ball off the ground like good players do. The result is going to be lots of thin shots and lots of shots that start and stay right of the target, or are REALLY ugly hooks if you flip your hands to compensate for not moving your body properly.

[leekgolf]

@Jobu I'm not complaining at all. I think my inability to create ball and then ground contact limits my ability to play well. Every shot is thin. Some just a little, some a lot. Every once in a while, there's a fat one. I'm working on correcting this. I've been in lessons for a while and lots of changes have been made, with lots more coming according to my teacher. I'm seeing a lot of progress, but still not taking a divot yet. At best I'll just bruise the grass.
@bluedot To your point, on trackman and flightscope I started with a positive angle of attack, even on short irons. Now I have a slightly negative AoA, but nowhere near the range I'd like to be in. I think it's fear of hitting the ground and hitting a really fat shot. I wonder how common this is?

[Jobu]

When you see pros taking divots on tv, they are playing from really tight fairway lies. The ground just barely gets in their way.

[mgoblue83]

Change your intention with specific targeted practice.

Examples:

Put your towel flat on the ground just behind the ball and practice until you can hit the ball without hitting your towel. (Low point control)

Put your driver headcover just outside the ball and practice until you can avoid hitting the headcover. (Neutral path control)

Put a tee in the ground (All the way pushed in) in front of the ball and practice digging up the tee every shot. (Angle of attack control)

[NoTalentLefty]

What kind of grass and how well the course determines whether a divot is even necessary. Most of the courses I play aren’t that kind of grass and the ground is better for plows not golf clubs.

[leekgolf]

I'm playing well conditioned Bent grass most of the year. I play some in winter on Bermuda grass. You can get away with a shallow approach on good Bent but shots will be inconsistent. The Bermuda needs a negative AoA.

[leekgolf]

Thanks, I think I'm going to need to start with small swings and in slow motion, then work my way up from there.

[MonteScheinblum]

There’s a reason in your swing you don’t take a divot. You’d hit it worse if all you did was just adjust to take a divot.

[xmanhockey7]

Until you can get your low point to happen in front of the ball you probably shouldn’t worry too much about a taking a divot. This is actually one spot where I like the tour striker.

[ATLgopher]

This guy

 

let me know if you find a solution

[leekgolf]

Thanks, according to the local instructor who has been working with every other week, it's related to hip stall, EE and flip. I've been working on that for a couple of years and it's improving. I am beginning to think the real root cause is fear of hitting fat. I attended one of your clinics and you were very helpful and fun. I have a lot of swing faults and I started working through them in that clinic. You started me working on changing an inside takeaway and flat shoulder turn with your no turn cast drill. You identified my severe inside out, under plane and flip downswing. I'm past that now for the most part.

I still tell friends of seeing you drive a 400 yard par four. I'd absolutely go again if you came back to Ohio.

[leekgolf]

I agree. I practice low point with chips, pitches and half swings and typically can consistently brush the ground past the ball on chips and pitches. Half swings are a bit less successful. I also use that old drill using two broken tees, putting one where the ball would be and a second broken tee about 4-5" past that. I did 20 of those yesterday on a grass driving range and was able to take a shallow divot and clip both tees with a full swing.

I've been working on changing my swing for two years and I see progress. I'm 66 years old and retired in early July. Since then I play 2-3 times weekly and practice six days per week for an hour to an hour and a half. I'm willing to take a few more years to become a decent ball striker.

If anyone is interested, I will detail the changes made working with Monte and my local pro. It's a long road from an ingrained highly flawed swing!

 

edit: for anyone wondering, I got to a single digit handicap through scrambling, a decent short game, a sometimes hot putter and decent course management. As my club pro said to me 10 years ago, "You have the worst long game of any single digit I've ever known, but I'd sure love to have your short game."

 

 

[bluedot]

Absolutely! The no divot thing is a symptom, not the problem. Your post is a great example of why most of us should see a teaching pro sooner than later, if for no other reason that to help us figure out cause and effect.

When I started working with a top-shelf teaching pro a year ago, mostly because of really inconsistent iron play, the first thing he showed me on Trackman was an AOA of more than +4 with irons, and then on video WHY that was happening; my hip mobility was just nearly zero, so I had to come up and around with my upper body to get out of the way of my arms. Literally, there was no way I could compress an iron properly until I addressed that issue; whether or not there was a divot was just an expression of whether or not I had been able to move my hips properly and stay in my posture with my upper body.

And in my case, the primary solution was a ton of hip mobility work away from the golf course; I'm 68, and I had just lost a ton of mobility despite being fit and playing a lot of golf. It took about three months of that to get to the point where my AOA was neutral of a little negative without "manufacturing" it. Still a work in progress, but it's coming.

 

[MonteScheinblum]

Hip stall, ee and flip are not causes, they are effects. It’s earlier.

[MonteScheinblum]

Interesting. I’ve never seen hip mobility be the root cause, it only created an inability to compensate for something else.

[games]

Same here. Been a picker for years. I blame my mom for yelling at me when I was a kid, taking divots swinging in the yard. LOL.

Seriously, this may be one of the biggest barriers to good golf. But, the more you hit correctly and take a divot, the more addictive the feeling.

[bluedot]

After playing for 30+ years with a homemade swing and being a picker the entire time, even with wedges, I'm now a year into a swing rebuild with a really good teacher. As I've made the changes that we've worked on, my AOA has gotten much better, and now I do take at least a bit of a divot.

What has happened to me on a number of occasions is that I'll think I've hit a shot fat, only to get a GREAT result; a lifetime of only taking a divot when I hit behind the ball has left a LOT of "scar tissue", and I'm still not used to the idea that I'm hitting the ground AFTER the strike of the ball.

In a tournament round yesterday, I hit a hybrid as a layup on a par 5 that I was just knew I had hit fat; got to the ball, and realized I had hit it about 20 yards farther than I had expected. Same thing with a 9 iron third shot into a par 5 on the 18th hole; I KNEW I had hit it fat and I was pissed; got up to the elevated green, and the shot was perfect.

I'm not sure how long my learning curve on this is going to be, but here's what I believe: A divot is a product of a good swing, not the goal. If you try to take a divot with an upward AOA, all hell breaks loose. If your AOA is correct, the divot will follow, and a good AOA itself is a product of a good swing.

[Used2PlayALot]

I modified my takeback this year, where I keep the edge of the club face vertical, and prevent my wrists from rolling over.

I also deloft the club slightly at address.

These 2 things have contributed to taking a divot.

[Krt22]

How do you assess your hip mobility? I have a legitimate hip mobility issues due to genetics (right side was surgically repaired, left side still unfixed.) and fail many of those mobility tests. I can't sit cross-legged, but I can still make a pretty full hip turn. My EE flip stall is/was a compensation for how I pivoted and transitioned, but don't think it's related to any sort of physical limitation.

100% agree with your next post though, that a divot is a byproduct of a good swing. Getting low point in front of the ball while properly shallowing the shaft with arms/wrists vs EE/right side bend is the hard part. Getting over the mental block of not hitting the ground is definitely a tough one to get passed as well

[avguy]

I bet the OP can cut grass (i.e. bottom of blade below ball bottom) easily while chipping around the green. It's your most compact swing. Once aligned toward target with an intended landing area, I merely focus on cutting a swath that way, ball gets in the way flush on face = great results provided no deceleration.

Now, bring that same mental approach to the iron game. Work it longer. Your zone in the air may be the actual target out there towards a landing area. You can than cut grass thru a ball getting in the way and don't worry about divots!

Should be a target-focused approach. I find if a divot is my target/intention, I plow earth to Tibet and jar my lead elbow into pain - cruddier shots. Sabotage City.

Maybe your full practice swings thru grass without a ball are bottoming out fine. Try to forget the ball and ground coming out. Swing away out into that air zone and cut grass doing so.

[games]

I totally understand the feeling of hitting it fat, only to see the result was as good or better than when I hit it solid.

For the OP, a Planemate training aid helps!

Also, try some basic "Stack and Tilt" principles. One core S&T drill is a "low point" drill where you take your stance, straddling a chalk line, and simply take swings with the goal of striking the chalk, but only taking a divot AFTER the chalk.

Finally, I think the faulty mechanics behind my "picking" the ball is caused by replacing proper wrist angles and motion with increased bend in the trail arm. I'm thinking of picking up one of those chipping sleeves to see if it would help me iron out full swing mechanics.

[bluedot]

Sorry for the delay; I just saw this.

A couple of thoughts for you on assessing. Par4Success, which is a top notch golf fitness outfit in Cary, NC, has an online assessment tool that will help. Another thing that you could do is to google videos of the 90-90 hip mobility drill and see how you do with that. Yet another is to simply sit toward the edge of a chair, with your knees relatively close together and with a 90 degree angle between your upper and lower leg, and see how far out you can rotate your lower leg with the foot and ankle and calf moving away from center, which is external rotation. That's important for both hips, but critical for the lead hip. Ideally, you'd be able to rotate the lower leg out to 45 degrees without undo strain or pain.

[juststeve]

Forget about taking a divot. Instead work on having the low point of your swing be in the same place consistently. Then position the ball just behind the low point. You will make ball first contact and the the amount of divot you take doesn't matter.

Steve

[leekgolf]

Well as Monte said above, it's the result of something else. In working with my instructor it's possible we may have found it. Originally, I think it started with an inside takeaway resulting in an overly flat and deep backswing. This put me in a position that really messed up my transition. I then dropped the hands and arms under the downswing shaft plane, early extended, hip stalled and flipped.

He got me taking the club away much better, then feeling like I'm standing the club up with the wrist cock. On the downswing, he has me rotating my hips and shoulders so that I feel like I'm facing the target at impact. This did a few things for me: first it really lets me maintain my spine angle which eliminates EE, it moves my low point forward and makes it much easier to take a divot and finally and maybe most important for me, it creates much more target awareness, With the swing I've had for years, the ball was my target. With this change the actual place I want the ball to go is the target.

It feels like a breakthrough, but I've been playing golf for over 30 years and I don't really believe in breakthroughs and secrets. I kind of believe in slow incremental improvement over a long period of time. I'll have to see how this all plays out.

 

[Krt22]

Yeah that doesnt really work if your low point is consistently too far back, not taking a divot is one's way to compensate and not stab the club into the ground.. There is for the most part a direct correlation between low point and the ball,, with pro divots starting well in front of the ball. Playing the ball way back in this case is a band-aid, will just get you steep, and still has low point very close to the ball. You need to improve the swing to bring low point forward, not move the ball back.

[Jay28]

I had real issue with either not taking a divot at all - or worse fat shots.

I could rarely take a divot after the ball.

My root cause was the right hip and knee moving towards the ball ( I mean outwards, not towards the target, rather the ball itself)

That in turn meant I had to flip to even have a chance of hitting the ball.

I had to really concentrate for weeks on every swing to exaggerate a feeling of the right hip and knee moving backwards away from the ball (that wasn't really happening , but had to feel like it was).

Funnily enough I now have the opposite problem where my divots are 4 inches (sometimes more ) AFTER the ball.

Golf, eh. 😆

Edited June 5, 2022 by Jay28

[Z1ggy16]

We'd need to see your swing but I was just working on this with my coach. Main cause was not bumping into the lead side enough and secondarily, not enough wrist hinge in the swing although he said that wasn't as much of an issue.

 

We worked on putting an alignment stick next to my lead hip and feeling like I pushed through it during the down swing. AoA went from -2 to -5 which is where I wanted to be (8i).