Is your SHUT clubface causing you to hit blocks?
Believe it or not, this is quite a common theme with better players, specifically because of late reactions from the pivot. Watch and learn from this partial clip of an online lesson I gave a student recently ✌️
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Hello, My name is Shauheen Nakhjavani, Co-founder of Nakhjavani Golf. I have been a golf coach for 10+ years, I’ve given over 25,000 lessons in-person & online, and I have worked with many professional players; including Kevin Chappell, Stephen Ames, Darren Clarke, Calum Hill, Yannik Paul, Eddie Pepperell, Jeremy Paul & many others!
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Now, as you get up towards the top, you see a lot of good things here. Your arms are working around you into a very neutral structure. Your shaft’s alignment, again, kind of in relation to what I said a bit earlier, maybe a little bit on the laid off side, something that we can work through eventually, and we will, you know, in an ideal world, when the back swing gets this long, I typically like to see it just marginally across the line because that does ensure that the shaft is going to reroute towards a shallow direction a lot more consistently. But this is a very subtle issue here and overall the biggest concern really not the lower body not the upper body is purely the face angle here. Now from face on we are going to talk about your body and how it moves and there is some stuff we can discuss but your face angle here in my opinion is way too strong and you’re always going to be fighting hitting hooks when the face is that closed. You mentioned struggling a little bit with a pull down or like trying to offset the pull down. Nothing I see here with how your hand path moves in transition looks like a pull down to me. A pull down usually would get the hand path stuck a lot more to the inside. You would see a lot more vertical drop to the hands and usually the body will be under rotated because the hands are traveling too fast and the body can’t keep up when a golfer pulls down. In fact, I would argue your hand path works back in front of you really nicely. The shaft alignment again is pretty solid here. If there is a concern, it’s simply your face angle. When your club face is going to be this shut in your golf swing, the problem is you’re always going to be fighting this because keep in mind at some point your body can only hold off the forearm so much to prevent you from hitting it left, right? It’s a very like old school mentality of like face is strong, you can just rotate and hold it off. The problem is when you add a lot of speed and any sort of nerves on the golf course, it’s really hard to just hold off and play defensively. It feels like you’re just not allowing your hands and wrist to use any sort of speed and you’re kind of just playing a very protective game. And I don’t believe that’s the best approach. The problem here is if you release these hands at all with how strong that face is, you’re going to hit a hook. That’s what it comes down to. And the other part of the problem is when the face is this strong, you end up delofting the club face a lot. So the bone naturally is going to want to launch a lot lower. Now, you could get away with that with a short iron or a wedge in your hands because there’s naturally a lot of loft on the head. But as you get to longer clubs, five iron, four iron, three-wood, driver, there’s a lot less loft on the face. So the problem is what I tend to see often times from players as soon as they have a face angle that gets too strong is their body starts to tilt back to try to make it work. Essentially, the body reacts to how little loft there is on the face, and you’re trying to find a way to help the ball in the air while also guarding against the left miss. And the more we tilt back to the right, for a right-handed golfer, number one, you’re going to overly shallow the club when you do that. So, it’s really easy to get stuck swinging too far from the inside. Hence why you would hit a straight block to the right or a hook. But then also, the body tilting back to the right not only shallows the club, but it’s a reaction that not only adds loft, but opens the face. The more I hang back, the more the face points to the right. So, your body just ends up reacting to the face angle that doesn’t work with that pattern. Because as you’re coming down here, to me, the shaft’s movement is very good. And I would argue even your pivot up until this point is pretty solid, but the face angle is just way too toe down at this point. It’s just not functional enough for your pattern. So, as you come into this golf ball, when you have the face that strong, you’re going to guard against it. And that’s where you hang back. And you can even see it here. Left shoulder finishes way too high. Right shoulder finishes way too underneath you and too low. And you end up obviously tilting back with the chest. And then you got to flip the hands over to end up saving it. And obviously if you guard against flipping the hands over, you might just block it because your chest is hanging back. So I actually think you have a lot of really good going on, but the bulk of your issues, the culprit really that sets the tone for everything is how strong your club face is. And a lot of that has to do with your grip. And then just to show you this in a little bit more detail, if we look at the face on view, I mentioned your left hand grip may be a little bit on the strong side. Of course, it can always be a little weaker, but your right hand grip to me is really the culprit. You know, when I zoom in here, if I can actually see your left finger is coming up the other side of the shaft, it’s because your hand is wrapping so far underneath that your fingers are coming back on top of it. Um, so really, I would love to see your right hand get more on top in your setup position. So that line between the index finger and the thumb here that kind of points out to your right shoulder, I would love to see that line point a little bit more to the middle of your sternum. So, it’s going to feel like your right hand is going about one knuckle and then eventually maybe even one and a half knuckles more on top of the club. That’s going to seem like a lot obviously. So, we’re not going to make it an instant change because if we weaken it too much too soon, you’re not going to be putting the right body movements together to make it work anyways. So, we do need to incrementally do it. So, it’s one of those things where even if we do have an end goal of where we want the grip to be, we would weaken it slightly at a time. So, we’ll start with half a knuckle to a knuckle and then take it from there and and see if we need to reassess and change it. But then, like I said, what ends up happening is because of that, you know, as you’re going up, number one, the only thing I don’t like about your pivot that I mentioned from face on just looks like too much leaning forward with your upper body and your spine. And usually, it’s very cliche to say this, but every action has a reaction. So, if your upper body starts to lean here in the back swing, you’re not going to just continue to lean here. What ends up happening is your body ends up going the other way coming down partially because of the poor pivot in the back swing, partially because you’re trying to help the face angle that’s so close. So then coming down you end up seeing dropping down and back. So now you can already see the progression where you’re going to work up and back, up and back, up and back where your shoulders going this way through the ball. And obviously then you just have to save it and you’re just not moving your body well through this ball. And when you don’t move the body well through the ball, the arm structure just kind of collapses. It’s the byproduct of it really. So, um really if we can clean up the grip, we’ll get the face angle under control. If we get the face angle under control, it will allow us to clean up the body movements and honestly will make you hit it really solid really
