Do you struggle with topping your irons?
The top is one of the most frustrating shots in the game and seeing your ball scuttle down the fairway is a very quick reminder that something in your swing isn’t working. We all receive some welcome and generally incorrect advice from our playing partners – ‘you’re lifting your head!’ – and it can quickly seep into your game.
Top 50 coach Ged Walters explains what it is and how you can easily solve the riddle.
‘Topping it is literally just not managing the radius of the circle. So, if you shorten the radius, the club comes away from the ground and closer to you and you don’t hit the properly.
So that can be done by separating the elbows or by extending the pelvis in the wrong direction, so towards the ball instead of towards the target. Or by trying to influence the ball’s elevation, so trying to scoop it and get under it.
All of these will sound familiar to a lot of us.
A real key to not topping it is maintaining your arm structure and trying to hit the ground in front of your lead foot. They would be probably two key components to try and work on. If you can hit the ground in front of your lead foot, then the club’s still moving down to the point where you would be going to hit your shot rather than moving up away from the ground and away from the ball.
What to work on
On the driving range, you could draw a chalk line on the mat and put the ball just behind it and then try and brush the chalk away. So, if you think about the centre of the ball, have that about an inch behind the line.
Then, if you can get the contact with the line, then you’re going to get a better quality of strike and you’re definitely not going to hit any tops. And if you’re hitting the line, you’re not going to hit any thin shots either.
This also just takes the focus away from trying to move the ball and just try and get the golf club to make contact with a particular point.
What about the head?
This is one of the worst pieces of advice. Nobody lifts their head, everyone’s head goes down.
When you’re bent forward and you extend your pelvis, then the extended pelvis will raise the torso, which will give somebody looking at you the visual that you’ve lifted your head. You haven’t lifted your head at all.
What’s happened is you’ve raised your upper body and it’s gone from a tilted angle to a more vertical angle because the pelvis has pushed forward towards the ball.
Think of Annika Sorenstam. She’s looking at the target and she’s going through but, if you were to just hold her head and twist her head in place, she could be looking at the ball as her head starts to tilt.
Dustin Johnson’s the same. His head is moving towards facing the target as he goes through. He retains his height and his posture throughout the swing. So because they’ve got the structure of the arms and they maintain the posture and the pelvis extends towards the target, rather than towards the golf ball, then they have no issues.’
About Ged Walters
Ged is a Golf Monthly Top 50 coach and one of the leading teachers in the North West. For more tips follow Ged on Instagram – gedwaltersgolf
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