Never Hit Fat or Thin Again – The Secret to Perfect Ball Striking

Never Hit Fat or Thin Again – The Secret to Perfect Ball Striking

Tired of hitting behind the ball or catching it thin? In this video, I’ll show you the simple, proven way to eliminate both fat and thin shots from your game – for good. Once you understand and apply this, your ball striking will feel pure, consistent, and effortless.

✅ What you’ll learn:

Why fat and thin shots happen (and the one key cause they share)

A simple adjustment that guarantees crisp contact

How to train for perfect strike every time

Stop guessing at your swing and start hitting the ball the way you’ve always wanted. Watch to the end for my favourite drill to lock this in fast.

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00:00 Introduction
00:28 The Swing Circle
01:24 Raising and Lowering Your Swing
05:54 Moving Your Swing Forwards

We’ve all been there. How frustrating is it? You give it a great drive. You’re in the middle of the fairway and then you’re either fat or you thin your iron shot. It’s demoralizing. It obviously shoots the score straight up. So, what we’re going to do is I’m going to show you how you can avoid hitting fat and thin shots. And it’s actually a lot easier than you think. We’re going to use two really simple drills. So, if we keep this really, really simple, there’s only really two ways that you can fatle thin a golf shot. When we set up the ball, we swing the club around our body and give or take through this bottom section of the swing, we make almost half of a circle, a semicircle shape. So, you will fat or thin the golf ball when that circle that you swing on gets too deep underground or it gets lifted too far above the ground. That will cause fat or thin shots. or if that circle is too far behind the golf ball or too far in front of the golf ball. Ultimately, where your circle is relative to the ball is going to dictate your strike. Great players control that circle and they’re very consistent with that. If you’re hitting fat and thin shots, it means that your circle is moving all over the place relative to the golf ball. The two drills I’m going to do with you today have worked wonders for my students in the past. So let’s start with changing the height of the circle before we move on to the kind of forward or back. Now if I take a setup, put the club across my shoulders and just look at the top of my head. If I make a back swing rotation and my head stays pretty level, so it hasn’t really moved up or down, the relationship I had with the ball has stayed the same. So when I set up, I create an angle around the golf ball and my circle kind of would sit on the ground because that’s where my club is rested. So, if I can make this beautiful back swing motion or I make this pivot, I good angle in my body, I’ve maintained my circle. What so many golfers do as they swing back is their body angles will change. Their hips can often move in towards the golf ball, which causes the head to lift. Now, if you’ve seen your head lifting, it’s not your head. It’s actually your midsection moving in towards the golf ball. And if my head didn’t lift, then I would fall over. So when the hips move in towards the golf ball in the back swing, the head lifts to keep you in your balance. But what happens is our circle gets lifted. So we’ve got a really good chance of thinning it. You are aware of that. You feel that lift in the back swing. You recognize that you’re further away from the golf ball. So what do you do? You drop down in the down swing and very often you fat it. So, we’ve got to get your body rotating on this beautiful motion with good angle to keep our circle where it needs to be relative to the golf ball. So, here’s the drill I’d like you to do. Grab yourself two golf gloves. What you’re going to do is you’re going to pop them into the back pockets on your trousers or on your shorts in this case. So, I’ve got two gloves hanging on my back pockets. What you’re then going to do is find yourself a surface. A wall is great. This is actually the perfect height. So, find yourself a wall. get yourself into golf posture with that you would be for a sort of seven iron and then all you do is you just shuffle back until you can just about feel that wall. The reason I say that is I don’t want you setting up and then leaning back to find the wall. So shuffle back until you can just about feel that wall and I can just about feel that there. Now here’s what I want you to do. Think of these gloves as almost paint brushes and you’re trying to paint the wall behind you. So, as I make my back swing turn, I’m trying to take this glove or paintbrush and I’m trying to paint the wall. And you can see how that glove has moved be more behind me. And it’s more in contact with the wall than it was at setup. So, my feeling very simply is taking my right hip and moving it behind me and actually slightly towards the target. And what that does is it keeps my trail hip against that wall and it helps me load my hips correctly. Now, very, very naturally as I do that, I don’t have to worry about what my head’s doing. My head is staying perfectly still because I’m working that against that wall. And this is an absolutely phenomenal exercise to get you moving better. Just watch what happens as I rotate and my hips come forwards. Suddenly, you see my head going up. I lose that sensation of my paintbrush against the wall. And this is the movement we want to stop. I’m pretty sure you can see where we’re going with this because very often we can make a great turn. We can paint that wall, but in the down swing, the hips move forwards and we know what happens when the hips move forwards. The body angle significantly changes. Head lifts up and that’s going to raise our circle. Thin shots are really common from there. So once we’ve painted the wall on the back swing, we take our other paint brush which is in the other back pocket and there’s a little bit of shift towards the target. You probably can’t see that from that camera, but then we rotate and we paint that wall. Now I would at this point have just made contact with the golf ball and I’m still in contact with the ball. From here, golf ball is gone. It’s already gone 20 odd yards. So from here it’s okay if we then turn and we lose a little bit of contact with the ball. It’s really difficult to stay in contact throughout the goals. But what you can do is you can train both individually. So you can just spend some time working on the back swing move. You can spend some time working on that bouncing move. And then you can go ahead and try and put them together. So it’s paint the wall, paint the wall, paint the wall, paint the wall. And my head is going to stay perfectly still because of what my midsection is doing. My circle is going to be perfectly regulated relative to the ball. Our circle is perfectly regulated now relative to the ground, but we can still thin shots, fat shots, if that circle is too far back or too far forward. Now, it’s pretty rare for it to be too far forward. It’s normally too far back, which will actually cause both of those shots because if it’s too far back, the low point of your swing happens too early. If it happens too early, you catch the ground. If you do that a few times, you start to miss the ground. Club is working upwards. You start to thin it. So I want to give you two little exercises here which are going to help you regulate where it is now forward or back. The first thing we need to do is control it in the back swing. So if I set up, we’ve got to get that ball position correct. You can see that’s just forward of center. I’ve got six iron. That’s a great starting point. So if you take that from my buttons on my shirt, the ball is just forward of that. If when I make a back swing, my hips drift too much or my head drifts too much. Effectively, my circle is drifting in this direction, can I strike it? Of course I can. But I’ve just made it so much more difficult and I want to make the game easier for you. Good golf happens when the golf swing becomes easier and more repeatable. So, this is a great little exercise. This is a little bit like patting your head and rub your tummy, but if you took a setup, if you look at my feet, I should be able to lift up just my toes. So, my heels on the ground, but my toes are just going lift, lift, lift, lift, lift, lift, lift, because my weight is in the middle. Watch what happens if I move my weight onto my right side. Well, suddenly I can tap the left toe, but I can’t tap the right because everything’s on there. So, what I would love you to do is take a setup, nice and relaxed. Tap tap tap tap tap tap tap. Just get tapping. And as you’re tapping, take that paintbrush, which is on your pocket, and just turn, turn, turn, turn, and paint that wall behind you. Now, because I’m still tapping, it’s kept me centered. I didn’t have to think about it. I just had to think about my feet, and it kept me nice and centered. So, in that little exercise, because I was painting the wall and I was tapping the toes, we’re ticking two really important things there. My body angles are good, and I’m centered. Watch what happens if I tap tap tap tap tap tap tap and drift. Suddenly I I stop tapping. So I’ve only gone three feet, but straight away I can’t do that little task which flags up that I must have shifted to my right. Now I say it’s a little bit like pass your head, rub your tummy, but there’s no reason why you can’t just go ahead tap tap tap tap tap make some back swings paint that wall and then just go ahead stop the tap and just go through. It’s gone in the water because I only hit it very, very slow speed, but it was well struck and I kept myself nice and centered. So, the toe tap drill is brilliant. You can’t go at full speed and you probably need to pause at the top before you go ahead and hit it. But, I love that little exercise. And if that does feel a little bit too difficult for you, just remove an element, take the club, put it across your shoulders, and just go ahead and tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap. And just learn how to make this movement without a golf club. And suddenly it’ll start to become a little bit easier. And when that happens, you can start to put the golf club back in. We’re keeping our weight in the center. We know in the golf swing that we shift pressure, but your weight, which is your mass, essentially needs to stay pretty much in the middle of your heels, especially with your iron clubs. So, what we’ve done is we’ve taken our back swing, and we’ve given ourselves a great chance. Down swing is where it all happens. Now, the low point of your swing has to be with an iron target side of the golf ball. It has to be over here somewhere. So our job in the golf swing with an iron is to stay centered in the back swing and then shift forwards to move that low point target side of the ball. If that low point is target side of the ball, you will have a descending attack angle into the ball, which is so key. And if you’ve got that, your iron shots are going to start to feel incredible. They’re going to feel so good off the face. you’re going to enjoy them a lot more and they’re probably going to go a little bit further. So, towel, one of the OG golf drills that you can do. Um, I’ve seen Bryson do this with kind of masking tape on the ground. Most you’re probably not going to have that in your golf bag, but you might have a towel. I’m going to make a centered back swing. And in the down swing, I’m going to keep my hips presentered. Watch what happens. So, centered back swing, hips centered in the down swing. towel went. Ball was heavy in the water. So centered in the back swing is good, but we’ve got to shift in the down swing. If you don’t shift, you’re always prone to those heavy golf shots. So before I quickly tell you how you’re going to do this, let me just hit another shot. And we should see that I’m able to make contact with this golf ball without hitting the towel. Okay, so you can see a much much better golf shot. Slightly missing the green here at the 18th of Sorrass, but the strike was good. Nearly got back on the green and the towel stayed in place. So, how did I do that? Well, very simply, I came to myself centered, but then I shifted. So, here’s I’d love you to practice this. Get yourself a towel. Place it behind the golf ball. Take a setup. And then what you’re going to do is you’re going to get used to hitting some shots with your hips forwards. So, I’m going to take my feet. I’m going to lean onto this foot. You’ll notice where my belt buckle is now relative to my golf ball and my foot. My belt buckle is over the instep of my lead foot. That is significantly in front of the golf ball. That’s going to put some sort of natural shaft lean in. And if I hit some little shots from here, yes, it’s in the water. I probably didn’t pick myself the best place to do this little demonstration, did you? But towel stayed in place. It was compressed. It was struck. It was nowhere near being fat. It was nowhere near being thin. So, what I’m starting to do here is I’m starting to learn what it’s like to be in front of the golf ball at impact. So many golfers who struggle with strike are too far behind the golf ball at impact. Partly because they drift that way, partly because they stay that way, but they’ve probably never ever hit a golf ball being in front of it. And trust me, when you hit a golf ball, when you’re in front of it, it’s going to be almost like a Eureka moment. It’s going to feel so different to anything you’ve done. And you’ve only got to do that a couple of times and you’ll be hooked and you’ll be like, I need to do that over and over again. This is how you do it. So, we go set up on my lead foot, weights here, handles forwards. Naturally, that’s putting the low point target side of the ball. And we start to get these beautiful strikes where we’re never ever hitting the towel. What you can then do is you can go ahead make your good back swing and then work on getting your belt buckle back over the instep of your lead foot. The only difference here is when we’re doing in full swing, our head is going to stay fairly centered. In that little drill, the head went forward as well. But it’s great to understand where your pelvis needs to be relative to your heels.