When amateurs watch the pros play golf on television, they see that all of the best players in the world holding divots when they hit an stony shot, especially a high impenetrable shot. Whence, they try to shine them on the course, but do not get the tailor-made results. Why?
The answer is being a divot, in and of itself, will not improve your golf results.
Hard by seeing the professional golfers holding divots, amateurs will hit the golf course and try to returns divots. Fine, anybody who can swing a golf club can swing it so that it box up a little bit of mother earth. Since, enchanting a divot on its own will not improve your golf swing. However, captivating the honorable considerate of divot will improve your golf swing.
Through a low handicap golfer, I have memories the first time I started taking divots. I hit a few good shots and my playing partner said, " I love how you get that divot. It looks a lot like the players on TV. How do you do that? "
At first I was complimented. After all, he was saying that I look like the guys on TV. However, I was still not getting the exact results that I wanted. In fact, I think I took it to extreme as I remember thinking, " The bigger the divot, the better I look. "
In the end though, I was looking for results not big holes in the ground. Here is how I improved my golf game through a bit of divot analysis.
The reason for taking a golf divot is to ensure a descending blow on the golf ball to create compression, get a clean strike on the sweet spot of the golf ball, and increase spin to control the ball landing, ideally, on the green. Many golf ball reviews suggest that this compression and spin can be drastically improved also by the golf ball that you play. It is ironic - - and seems athletically counterintuitive - - that for a ball to fly high, we need to hit down on it for the best results ( thus creating the divot ) instead of trying to sweep the golf ball like most amateurs do.
As I said, I was successfully creating divots without shooting better scores. One look at my divot told me quite a bit. My divots all pointed to the left. This meant that my swing plane was slightly off and my club head at impact was not square which cost me a lot of distance and many inaccurate iron shots.
Here is how I fixed my problem on my quest to become a par golfer. I waited until the golf course was relatively empty and, when I noticed that I would have the golf hole all to myself for a good 30 minutes, I put 10 balls on the 145 yard marker. I pledged to swing until my divots went straight and not to the left. It took a little while to achieve this.
At first, I was swinging to fast. I intentionally slowed down my swing, made it very deliberate, and ensured all of my divots were going straight. This exercise not only improved my divots but improved my whole golf swing, improving the plane of the golf swing so that I was " hitting out " on the ball as opposed to " across the ball. "
For me, it was imperative to do this on the golf course. The driving range may work but you cannot do this exercise on a golf matt.
Now, though I am far from perfect, I am taking a perfect divot. This exercise has consistently shaved strokes off of my final score and only took me about 30 minutes to do.
Occasionally, I will still revert to my old swing path. However, now I can immediately correct it with one look at the divot. Who would have known? A little whole in the ground can tell you a lot about your golf game.
