Tip Tuesday: Achieving the Proper Impact Position

The golf swing can be a fickle thing, and one of its most important parts comes in how you make proper contact with the golf ball. Scott Tanguay from The Coastal Golf Academy in Myrtle Beach, S.C. is here to show you some practice techniques that will help you achieve proper impact position.

Scott Tanguay:

Hey guys. Scott Tanguay here at the Coastal Golf Academy. Today, we want to talk about making the proper impact with the golf ball. What I see a lot with my students is they’ll get in the address position and then actually copy that same look when they strike the ball. That leads to a lot of inconsistent results, topping the ball, hooking the ball, slicing anything. You name it. What we want to do is when you’re at impact, it’s a much more dynamic position. So if this is my starting position at address, when I hit the ball, you see there’s a little bit of leg action. We got some shift, we have some turn, and probably most important, we’re getting that shaft leaning forward.

Now, an important thing to understand is for all this to work, we’ve really got to make sure the face is square. A lot of people struggle with this because the face is too open. So make sure you got that face more shut. Make sure your grip’s pretty good, and then you can start working on looking more like this when you hit it. We’ve got an impact bag here. The goal with that would be, I don’t want to hit the head into the bag first. I almost want to feel like the shaft is going to hit first, and I kind of get into this look here.

What that’s going to do is really make much more solid contact. It’s going to hit it a little more up into the middle of the face instead of off the bottom. If we’re back here, you get a lot of inconsistent shots. You can scoop it high. You can blade it. It could really go anywhere. So we’re here. We come in. We want to feel like that shaft hits it first, and then we try and translate that to the ball. Another way you can do it without the bag is just kind of get into that pre-impact position. This is one of my favorite drills. You start ready. You kind of get into that impact position, and then you can actually kind of swing from there. So we’re here. I want to look more like this when I hit the ball. Then you’ll get a much more controlled straight flight.

Better contact, better shots. Give it a try!