Still Looking at Your Divots to Work on Your Golf Swing?

There’s an old saying in golf instruction that says “the divot tells you everything you need to know about a golf shot.” If you’ve got a nice square, shallow divot then the ball went long and straight, right? Take a look at the divot below from a professional golfer and try and determine the ball flight.

If you guessed that the ball went straight, you’d be sadly mistaken. While this divot is dead square to the alignment stick, the reality is that this shot missed the target by a relatively wide margin, and if you had a Flightscope X2, you’d know why. More importantly, you’d know what to correct in your swing. Today, tools like an AI swing analyzer give golfers access to that same level of objective data — without guessing from divots or ball flight alone.

As an instructor who works primarily with professional golfers, correcting the club path and face angle at impact is everything. At the end of the day, my goal for all my students is to have their path be less than 2° in to out or out to in, depending on their ball flight preference. Because the Rotary Swing Tour fundamentals create a shallow angle of attack, these numbers allow the ball to start on the target line and fly with no perceptible curvature. I mention that because if you have a very steep angle of attack and an in-to-out path, you would need to alter these numbers in order to get the ball to start and stay online. This principle is referred to as the “D-Plane” and is beyond the scope of this article, but a quick Google search will give you all the information you need about the D-Plane.

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As an instructor who works primarily with professional golfers, correcting the club path and face angle at impact is everything. At the end of the day, my goal for all my students is to have their path be less than 2° in to out or out to in, depending on their ball flight preference. Because the Rotary Swing Tour fundamentals create a shallow angle of attack, these numbers allow the ball to start on the target line and fly with no perceptible curvature. I mention that because if you have a very steep angle of attack and an in-to-out path, you would need to alter these numbers in order to get the ball to start and stay online. This principle is referred to as the “D-Plane” and is beyond the scope of this article, but a quick Google search will give you all the information you need about the D-Plane.

Getting the path “zero’d out” as I call it, or close to square to the target, takes solid swing fundamentals like those that the Rotary Swing Tour advocates and then fine tuning work that can only be done with a launch monitor like the Flightscope X2. If you base what you’re working on in your swing based on ball flight and the look of your divots, as many do, you will likely spend a lifetime chasing your tail looking for one quick fix after the other. The reason is that most golfers don’t realize what factors are actually causing the ball to fly the way that it does. For instance, most better golfers I work with who have a miss that starts left of the target and goes further left believe they are coming “over the top” since the ball is starting left of their intended line. To “fix” this, they try to swing more out to the trail side and are then confused as it actually worsens the problem. Put them on the Flightscope X2 and the truth can readily be seen. The reality is that they are actually swinging too far “in-to-out” with a shut clubface in relation to their path. This is impossible to see with the naked eye when you are only talking about a few degrees difference and the divots can still look perfectly square like the one above. The cure is to show them the real numbers on how much they’re swinging in-to-out and set about fixing the club path first to get within that critical 2° mark. Any more than that and the ball will tend to start off line and need to curve back unless depending on your angle of attack.

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Read the full article: Still Looking at Your Divots to Work on Your Golf Swing?