Top Teacher: Change your swing thought to this if you’re hitting it thin

Katie Dahl, a Golf Digest Best Young Teacher, has gotten this issue a lot: “I keep hitting it thin.” Students come to her thinking that they’re standing up at impact. Often, a well-meaning friend or spouse has passed along the age-old wisdom of telling them that they’re not staying down through impact.

This is a really common assumption because if you’re hitting it thin or topping it, you’re not hitting the ball high enough on the face. You’re hitting it low on the face because your chest is coming up at impact, right? Wrong.

If you’re hitting it thin, your issue probably has nothing to do with your upper body, Dahl says.

“Almost every time it’s a player with a very passive lower body action,” Dahl says of the golfers she’s seen hitting it thin. At impact, the lower bodies of her students who are hitting thin often look the same as they do at setup.

“This is very different from a pro who has shifted four to six inches towards the target already at impact,” Dahl says. “It’s not that they are not low enough—it’s that they are not left enough (for right-handed golfers). They are not getting to their lead side soon enough. So the club is bottoming early and the low point of their swing arc is before the ball, causing the club to rise through impact and then miss it thin.”

If you’ve been trying to cure your thin shots by thinking stay down, Dahl says to instead think swing forward or brush through. These thoughts have helped her students focus on the body’s move towards the target and kept them from thinking about keeping their chest down. Because that’s likely not the issue to begin with.