The Rotary Swing Book

by Chuck Quinton

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While golfers who hit the ball fat tend to stop their rotation or increase their spine angle too much, golfers who hit the ball thin often lose their spine angle during the downswing and have too much drive of the lower body. One is usually caused by too little body movement and the other is often caused by too much.

If the spine angle decreases during the downswing, often referred to as “coming out of the shot,” the club will not be able to reach the ball as the whole body has moved away from it. There are two common causes for coming out of a shot in the one plane swing, a fear of hitting it left and simply swinging too hard by driving the lower body aggressively toward the target.

Golfers coming from a two plane swing background often feel like they are swinging “over the top” when learning the one plane swing because they are so used to dropping the club to the inside. If the golfer actually does come over the top, the ball will go, or at least start, left of the target. However, in the one plane swing, the golfer swings in a way that feels over the top because there is no re-routing of the club with the arms on the downswing, but the ball goes straight. When faced with a shot that would penalize a ball missed to the left, one planers sometimes don’t stay committed to the shot for fear of hitting it into trouble and will hit the ball to the right as a bail out.

The other common cause of losing the spine angle is when the golfer simply swings to hard and rotates so aggressively to the left or slides the hips so much that it is physically impossible to maintain the spine angle. The fix for both of these misses is much the same, stay committed to the shot, rotate through it and trust it.