So, I’ve been wanting to share this for a while, ’cause it kinda blew my mind when it finally clicked. For ages, I was beating my head against a wall with my golf game. Seriously. My iron shots? All over the place. One day it’s a slice, the next it’s a hook, and don’t even get me started on the chunks and thin shots. It felt like I was collecting bad habits.
I did what everyone does, right? I went online. I watched hours, and I mean hours, of videos. Swing plane this, lag that, wrist angles, blah blah blah. I even bought a few of those training gadgets you see advertised. My garage started looking like a golf lab. And did my scores get better? Nope. Not really. Maybe a tiny bit here and there, but nothing consistent. I was just stuck, spinning my wheels.
I remember trying to get that perfect setup, like the articles say. You know, that whole “80 percent of your weight on your lead leg” for chipping they talk about? Yeah, I did that. Obsessively. And sure, maybe it helped stop some of the really bad duffs when I was close to the green. But my full shots were still a lottery. Then there was the whole “don’t hinge your wrists too early” thing. Man, I spent months trying to control my wrists, worrying if I was over-hinging. It just made me stiff and even more confused. My swing felt like a bunch of separate parts I was trying to glue together.
The Lightbulb Moment
Then, one day at the range, feeling totally fed up, I just started whacking balls. Not thinking too much. And I happened to glance at this older guy a few bays down. He wasn’t doing anything fancy, no crazy athletic move. But his swing looked so… smooth. And the ball just went. Pure. Straight. Every time.
I tried to be subtle, but I was basically spying on him. And I noticed something. It wasn’t his backswing, or his downswing, or even his impact that caught my eye. It was what happened after he hit the ball. His club just seemed to exit low and to the left, like it was chasing the ball down the target line for a bit before swinging up and around. It looked so effortless.
My own finish? If I even paid attention to it, it was usually this weird, jerky thing. Sometimes the club would fly high and to the right. Other times, I’d have this awful chicken wing with my left arm, especially if I was trying not to slice. It was a complete mess, a total afterthought.
So, I thought, what the heck. I’m already playing like a clown, can’t get much worse. I decided to just focus on that one thing: making my club exit low and left, past the ball. Not trying to force it, just thinking about that as the goal of my swing, rather than just hitting at the ball.
Putting it into Practice
The first few swings felt weird. Really weird. I was so used to focusing on a million things before impact. Shifting my focus to after impact felt backwards. But I stuck with it. Just kept that thought in my head: “low and left exit.”
And then… crack.
The sound was different. The feeling was different. The ball actually compressed. It flew straighter. Higher. With a little draw sometimes! I hit another one. Same thing. And another. I wasn’t even thinking about my weight shift, or my wrist hinge, or my takeaway. All that stuff just seemed to… sort itself out, or at least it didn’t matter as much.
It was like my body knew what to do to achieve that exit, and all the prior movements just fell into place better. Suddenly, swinging through the ball made sense, instead of just hitting at it. My old swing, all those bits and pieces I tried to patch together? This one simple thought about the club exit kind of smoothed it all out.
It’s not like I’m a pro now, not by a long shot. But understanding and focusing on the club exit has made a huge difference. It’s simplified things. I’m not overthinking every tiny part of my swing anymore. I just try to get that feeling of the club moving through the ball and exiting in that low, left window. It’s amazing how sometimes the thing you ignore the most turns out to be the key. For me, that was definitely the club exit. Who knew, right?
