Stop Topping Your Fairway Woods - Easy Golf Lesson

Hey everyone and welcome back to the channel. Today I'm going to talk you through how to stop topping your fairway woods. We've all been there, we've hit the perfect drive off the tee, you've got a lovely flush fairway shot to hit into the green but you're going to top it just in front of you. So many golfers tell me that they leave the fairway woods in the bag because they are so frustrating to hit, so today I'm going to talk you through what causes you to top the Before we get started if you could do me one favour, hit that subscribe button and make sure the notifications are turned on. That way you're never going to miss a video and you're going to help me out too, so thank you so much. As always I'm not going to throw a load of technical words at you, I'm going to make it super easy to understand and quick for you to take on the practice ground and out on the course. So let's get into it. Generally there are four key points to why you top your fairway woods, there may be other reasons why but these are the four key points of why you top your fairway woods and what I see most often. Number one is ball position, so why does ball position cause you to top the ball? And the main reason why is because a lot of people compare the fairway woods to the driver and the iron, they forget it's got its own setup. So I see a lot of golfers setting their fairway wood up far too forward in a stance like this, mainly because they do it with the driver to get that up sweep of motion, however now with our fairway woods we want it just left of centre, bearing in mind this is a fairway wood off the ground without a tee, so we want it just left of centre. This is going to allow the club to brush the ground rather than forcing it up in the air because you can see the low point becomes here, that's bad, that's when we top the ball. So ideally we want the low point to be just before the ball and just after the ball, keeping the club super low to the ground. The best way to gauge this is just pop your toes together so that the ball's directly in between your toes like this, take two steps forward and three steps back, this is going to allow the ball to be just left of centre and again it's going to allow you to brush the ground and make contact at the perfect time. Number two is the distance that we stand away from the ball, so again a lot of people compare the fairway woods to the driver when they talk about distance away from the ball, but you can just see if I was to approach my fairway wood like I would with my driver, there's just too much separation between my arms and my body, again this is going to overwork my body, your low point is going to be here, you're going to top the ball, it's just not going to be very nice. So we want the arms to ideally hang underneath our nose or our chin, so not too close, straight down like we would with our irons and not too far away like we would with our driver, just now perfectly underneath our chin, the best way to gauge that, again pop your toes together, place the club straight out in front and all you do from here is just bend from your hips, so where that club lays flat on the ground where the ball ideally wants to be, so you can just see I need to shove forward again, you can check that from here, so two hands on the club, bend from your hips, okay that's about perfect, from there you've got a really good balance, the weight on the balls of your feet, knees are naturally bent, a brilliant angle to your back and your arms are literally hanging in the perfect position. Really quickly before we move on to point three, if you've taken value from this video or a previous video and it's really helped with your game, I'm going to leave a link in the description to my free golf newsletter, this is where I share weekly tips, drills and general advice to get you better at golf, the link will be in the description below, so I'll see you there. Okay so point number three is all about shoulder tilt position like this, again referring back to the driver, we do want that shoulder tilt and that's why a lot of people compare and do this when it comes to the fairway woods, however now with our fairway woods we want less of that, we're not trying to help the ball up in the air like you would with a tee, now we're hitting our fairway wood off the ground, you do want a slight bit of shoulder tilt but not this much, so ever so slightly, again that's going to allow you to brush the ground, keep the club nice and low to the ground to get the most out of your swing, so the best way to gauge this is pop your trail hand on your side and run it about halfway down your side, join the two hands together and you can see how naturally I've got this shoulder tilt, not like we would with our driver, and number four is all about the technique and the low point of the club at impact, so as we've mentioned the low point when you top the ball is generally here or here and you've come up and you've topped the ball way too early, it could be the case that we're way in our way over this side, the difference now with our fairway wood is that it's designed to stay super close to the ground, we don't want to dig into the ground like we see with our irons and we don't want to miss the ground altogether like we see with our driver, so it's an in-between and it's basically gliding off the fairway like this and this is why it is so difficult because the face is super narrow but it's got a long back designed to give you that glide, how the technique should change then, so it is very similar just now that we want to be again keeping the club super low to the ground okay, we don't want to be helping the ball up like we do with our driver nor do we want to be digging into the ground, so we've got that gliding motion here, so how I like to think is I always imagine you've got a tee or a grain of grass or something in front of the ball and the best way to keep this close to ground is imagine you're hitting the ball and then taking the tee tip okay, so if you're topping the ball you're going to hit the top and miss the tee, so keeping it nice and low taking the ball and then the grain of grass or the tee in front, so how does that look with technique, again when I see people topping the ball it's because they're swinging way too fast, they're trying to force the ball to go 300 yards, in doing that it creates this sway and almost moving off the ball, that move I just did was quite dramatic just to show you what I mean but in reality it looks something like this okay, so you see how my weight's moving this way rather than this way okay, so two really good things to think of is pop your club on your chest, work the club head down towards the ground and then work the butt of the club down towards the ground, that's really just making sure everything is staying within your shoulder width, we're not swaying which causes the low point to be here and we're not lifting which again is going to cause you to hit down on the ball when you swing too fast, okay so draw number two is what we just mentioned really thinking that we're brushing the ball and then the tee or the grain of grass just in front bringing those four points together, the key things you want to be looking for is a solid ball position so just left of centre, not forward, not back, just left of centre, a really good distance away from the ball so again not too far away, not too close, just so our arms are hanging underneath our chin, number three is a nice shoulder tilt, again we don't want it dramatic like with our driver, we just want a natural shoulder tilt which is going to allow our body to rotate and thinking that we want our feet just slightly wider than shoulder width so we've got that really good base and then number four is key and it's all about keeping the club head as low to the ground as possible, making sure we're just sweeping the ground on the way through, our low point as well needs to be somewhere along this line so it's not here and it's not here, it's just behind the ball and then we're taking that grain of grass and the teeth so again even if you need to swing to 80% just keep it nice and smooth and create that consistent brushing motion along with the ground, to add to that make sure that you're turning around your body and we're not swaying to hit the ball again, that's going to create a low point which is here, we don't want that, keep your eye on the back of the ball, make sure you're brushing the ground, you're turning around your body and you're going to create a beautiful fairway run just to reiterate this video is all about hitting a fairway wood off the fairway without a tee, there are a couple of changes that need to be made when it comes to using a tee, obviously the first one is selecting the right tee height for you and in doing that we need to have a slightly sweeping up motion so to adjust yourself setup wise we bring the ball ever so slightly forward in our stance, not as dramatic as we would with our driver but just slightly forward as we normally would with fairway wood off the ground, this is going to allow you to take a slight sweeping motion so where we were just saying with our fairway wood keeping it down we want to almost take a slight sweeping motion here so nothing as dramatic as driver and certainly not like a lot of iron, there we have it how to stop topping your fairway woods in four easy steps, don't forget to like and comment on this video and hit the subscribe button it helps me massively so thank you so much, there's lots more videos to come so I'm so excited to take you along with me, see you in the next one!