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I got the shanks today. HELP

rrpruett

rrpruett

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Well it happened. I got the Yanks just before my Tee time today and it sucked.

Here is what happened. I had been striking the ball very well the past few outings and even yesterday at the range was looking good. :D

So this morning I was invited to a round at one of our nicer country clubs by some friends of mine. I get to the course about an hour early to hit some balls and warm up. Everything is going well I’m hitting the ball good and on target. Then I sort of slice a 6 iron, then another. I think, what happened to those two shots:dont-know:. My next shot is a hosel rocket worm burner from hell that goes off at a 3:00 o’clock angle. I step back collect myself and then try another shot same thing. I start to analyze my take away, my grip, my follow thru, the shoes I’m wearing , what I had for breakfast etc, before I hit again. Same result. I put the 6 iron away as fast as I can get it out of my hands and lunge for a Pw. Praying that it’s just some curse that has come about on my 6 iron. No such luck the PW is also cursed and, and its getting worse.

The guy next to me is starting to look around like he’s in danger of getting a range ball up his butt and take a step back looking for a safe zone.:confused2: He also knows…. that I have the S**ks.

I continue to hit s**nk after s**k slice after slice. My whole swing is going to total crap and its only minutes before Tee time. And to make matters worse, one of my friends has used his guest pass for my round. He only gets one per quarter and now I’m in fear of the worst round of the past year and could possibly be looking to quite after the third hole. I’m not kidding I must have hit 50 balls, not one at the target. I changed clubs but all with similar results.

Now my heart is starting to beat faster. I keep telling myself to slow down but I’m raking ball after ball into my hitting range like a rabid dog just looking for one good shot before we have to Tee it up. I’m trying everything I can think of . Do this, try that, all my irons shots are looking like Ive been playing golf for a week. I grab my trusty driver and low and behold I hit one down the middle:clapp:. Yes the driver is working. I figure I can hit the driver off the first tee straight down the middle, fake a back injury and head for home. Never to hit the cursed irons on this day again.

But the day is sunny and it’s a great day to play golf. So I hit a few more drivers down the middle and with fear and trembling grab for the 6 iron. I feel ……. Fear. The grip seems too tight….. no too loose, too strong, no too weak, Time is running out we are only 6 minutes away and still no iron shot down the middle. I hit the 6 iron S**K. Again SLICE. Again PULL LEFT. And then I feel it. My hips are so far out in front of my hands I have no chance. I start keeping more weight back on my right side and it gets better. Not good but better. I hit two OK shots and run for the putting green. But in my mind I am dreading the first iron shot like a trip to the dentist. :excruciating:

I did not hit a good iron shot all day. But I got through it. I shot an 83 and hit 3 balls in the water two by a very bad iron shot dead left. I had to scramble my butt off to do that. I putted well and hit my driver good all day but my irons, even my short irons were crap.

After the round I go back to the range and what do you know. I start hitting them like the day before. Crisp and on target.

So my question is; have you ever had one of these days and if so, how do you stop or fix it before you get to the first TEE. I know it’s all about the few inches between your ears but sometimes nothing seems to work. :bye:
 
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Moved to swing tips.
 
I've had a bad case of the shanks that I think I am getting over. Same thing as you, one bad shot, then another, then bam the shanks.

I read that part of the problem may be crowding the ball. I've been focusing on good pasture and making sure I'm not too close to the ball. As long as I don't think about my swing I can keep them at bay. I've been in the backyard hitting balls into the net, focused on good contact.
 
I have had this happen before. I try to step back, take some time before my next shot. Another good thing to do is take an empty water bottle and put it just outside of the ball by about 3 inches. If you hit the water bottle then more than likely you s****** it. If you dont hi tthe bottle then there is no way you could S**** it. Hope this makes sense
 
Virtually every problem I run into these days comes back to not making enough of a shoulder turn. If I stop my shoulder turn a little early in the backswing my swing plane gets a little upright and eventually I will end up with too much weight on my toes leaning into the shot a little bit to compensate. Funny how golf swings change over time. My miss hits used to be toe shots a long time back and nothing I did changed that. I did not like that for the clubs I was playing. Now my misses are just slightly inside of dead center, between the hosel and dead center and generally in a much narrower range than they used to be.

I don't think shoulder turn issues are uncommon and in part I think it is the reason why we might hit multiple hosel shots at the range as we get into a groove (good groove or bad groove). These days i go right to trying to see if i have allowed too much arm into my swing, not making a full enough shoulder turn and that is the genesis of most of my bad shots these days, including the dreaded shhhhhhhhhh......... Sorry can't bring myself to say the word.

Usually if I have allowed too much arm into my backswing it is because I have become overly focused on maintaining my triangle on the way back so much so that I have given up some control from my shoulders to my arms. The golf swing is a funny thing.

Anyway I also agree with the idea of stepping back and trying to regroup mainly because it is a good way to shake off a swing flaw. How many times have you been going badly during a range session and put the club down to get a drink of water or something and come back to much better results.
 
Pretty much my range session today. I feel your pain


^^^^^^ I Tapped That ^^^^^^
 
I have found at times that I am standing too close to the ball, but the majority of the time that I have had the s****s is when I try to guide the ball and do not rotate my forearms through impact. Just make sure you hit a golf shot and finish facing the target instead of trying to guide the ball to the target with mostly your arms. I hope this makes sense, it can probably be explained better by others.
 
I was hitting the ball really well today and then I got the bright idea to try to fire my hips through the ball faster. Shank! So my lower body was coming through too fast while my hands were too far behind and hitting it with the hosel. so out came the Mashie M3 to the rescue. Worked out the shanks and instead started thinking about hitting ball first. Shanks gone.


Tapatalk: not just for staffers.
 
Same thing happened to me yesterday, it was awful. The only clubs I could hit were my 50 and 55 wedges, even the PW was terrible. Just one of those days.

About all you can do is try to stay positive about it. I find the more frustrated I get, the more shanks I hit. Also it helps to hit a few "over correct" shots in a row to help get your swing back some. I find when Im slicing ball after ball after ball or hitting hosel rocket after hosel rocket I will intentionally hit big hooks and over rotate my hands for about 4 straight shots, seems to help just a little with the confidence that your hitting shots in which your trying to hit. Then comeback with 3/4 swings and it helps out. Might try this next time it happens just to see if it helps out.
 
I find when I get those pesky s*****'s I am crowding the ball with a flattened swing .
 
Keep your head still from start to finish. Don't let it move until your right shoulder (for right handers) picks up your chin on the follow through. Dead still!
Also, I've had days like this. They too shall pass! Golf has always been and will be a humbling game.
 
Honestly this is what I do because I have been through this every year and I am expecting it again. Just comitt to the shot. Act and swing like your gonna bomb that 6 iron 200 yards. Just swing harder than normal and right through. I find the most times when I get the shanks I keep continuing because I am afraid, Just upon contact I almost stop myself and give it a half-assed effort in hopes of avoiding the shanks. I slow down my swing and try to hit the ball as light as possible. Don't do this. Give it your all and just smoke it.


Another thing I tried doing and did work is a very weird tip actually. Purposely chunk the ball, take a big divot and just chunk that thing 20 yards down the range. Hit way behind the ball and the ball will go straight, I don't know what it is but it brings in some gratifying feeling to see the ball actually go straight. Gradually as you start hitting some better shots hit less and less behind the ball until you start hitting crisp again.
 
I will share my problem in hope it helps you.
I had an emergency lesson couple weeks ago for the xxxxxx. Everything was thin and right.
Pro told me I was going way to far inside on my backswing so when I came through the ball there was no way to square it up.
So I was too far inside on backswing which put the grip at the top pointing outside of target line which equals shots to the right. I am still working on it, but it's a little better.
 
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Dent makes a really good point here. We work so hard to improve our swings and go through so many transitions and phases of development that when we finally have a pretty solid swing we sometimes forget that for all the moving parts to work the right way and put us square and on the center of the club face at impact we have to be committed to the swing. That does not mean that you have to pop your shoe laces swinging but you do have to believe in your swing and swing confidently. That can be pretty tough when the last one just shot sideways off your hosel.

For me, since my misses are now all from the center of the club face in, a tiny little additional change can put me on the hosel.

Sounds like you are a good enough striker of the ball to know where you are on the face of the club and know where your misses are on the face of the club and where they are going. You have a good many options in this thread to think about. I guess my opinion would be that if a hosel shot represents a tiny little miss more than the norm for you then being a little off in your shoulder turn resulting in a small change in your swing plane and a little too much weight on your toes might be where your hosel shot comes from. Your path to correction would be pretty obvious at that point. If most of your misses are from the middle out toward the toe then a hosel shot would be a much bigger miss to your normal swing. I would then offer that it might be more likely that you may well be crowding the ball as some have suggested as I think that would result in a much bigger miss.

If I can offer one word of encouragement, at least from what I have experienced, poor ball strikers rarely end up with the dreaded shhhhh.......shhhhhh.....shhhhhhhhhh.....oh damn, you know what i mean. I think it is a malady that you start to have to deal with once you become a pretty good and consistent striker of the ball.

Best of luck. let us know how it works out for you. Also I don't know if anybody has asked Andy our THP pro about this topic lately. You might search that forum for some advice as Andy is great.
 
I just read Dents response again. I read it quickly when I was out and about today. It really makes sense to me about committing to the shot.
 
I followed a tip I got from the nytimes and it seems to have cured my shanks, more or less. It said shanks come from setting up with too much weight on the heels. Your weight and thus the club moves forward in the downswing, causing the shank. So the tip is to make sure your weight is evenly distributed or is slightly towards the toes at setup.
 
OEM Kevin said:
I was hitting the ball really well today and then I got the bright idea to try to fire my hips through the ball faster. Shank! So my lower body was coming through too fast while my hands were too far behind and hitting it with the hosel. so out came the Mashie M3 to the rescue. Worked out the shanks and instead started thinking about hitting ball first. Shanks gone.
Tapatalk: not just for staffers.
Click to expand...

This is what I was doing my hips were just too far ahead of my hands. I just had to stay back and let my hips wait a little instead od trying to drive them through too fast.

I played again today and not one Shank. All is well. I did not score great but hit the ball better. This game is so strange. Sometimes your ball striking is bad and you do not hit the ball well and score good other days you hit the ball good and can’t get a break. That’s golf it’s a great game and you never know what the day will bring. Every time you Tee it up a new challenge and opportunity await. That’s why we keep coming back, the expectation of that great round or that great shot.

I want to thank all of you for the great comments and tips. I think a lot of them are problems many of us face at times. I know that when I start hitting bad shots I do stop on my golf swing and do not follow through. I also get way to outside in and cut the ball.
 
Well, for the day that you were having an 83's good.

I don't have the shanks usually, but some days I have the 2 inch behind the ball divot. The ball travels about 20 yards then stops. Some times it happens 3 or four times a round. I usually just think about maintaining my wrist angle and sometimes it sorts itself out.
 
The best way for me to fix swing problems is quite the opposite of Dents only because the harder and faster I swing the harder it is for me to tell what parts of my swing are out of whack. I start by working through my swing in steps and verifying that Im in the correct positions. For example I would take my 6 iron and break my backswing down into two parts, I will bring the club back to about waist high and check my angles and correct if needed. Then I repeat this half swing until I am consistantly in the right position and then do the same thing with the rest of my back swing. Then when I start hitting balls I take very slow swings yet still a full swing and hit the ball with about 25% of my power, Im not worried at this point how far the ball is going just that the clubface is making clean contact. For me swinging at a very slow pace allows me to feel what parts of my body are not in sync and allows me to adjust very easily. After making good contact a few times with a very slow swing I then gradually increase the power of my swing until Ive worked up to a full shot.
 
Two different ways to go here, depending on where they occur.

If on the range, switch to a drill where you get a 7 iron, and put a tee about an inch away from the ball on the other side of your address. Try to hit the shot without hitting the tee. If you miss the tee, the hosel has no shot of contacting the ball.

If in the middle of the round, you obviously can't do a drill. I'd try to forget about it ASAP, but if it happens again, time to concentrate on making a full shoulder turn. Pick out a blade of grass near where you would place the tee in the above drill and try not to hit the spot with the toe of your club on your next swing. This visualization drill can also be done during practice swings between and before shots.
 
This is what I was doing my hips were just too far ahead of my hands. I just had to stay back and let my hips wait a little instead od trying to drive them through too fast.
Click to expand...

Interesting.....I will have to remember this one. It has been a long time since I have gotten my hips disconnected from my shoulders and if it ever happens again I hope I remember this thread. I don't experiment with that aspect of my swing any longer so hopefully I won't struggle with that one. I think I am hitting the ball with my irons as far as I am going to hit it so I am not trying to get quicker anywhere in my swing anymore.

Like I said earlier, every error I make these days can for the most part be traced back to a poor shoulder turn and the impact to my swing plane. Every once and awhile I might not get my weight off of my right side fast enough but that is pretty rare these days.
 
we all need to remember a shank is only 1cm away from a good shot, and 2cm away from a great shot :)

i find i start to shank when my arms get disconnected, or my weight falls forward onto my toes. my instructor has shown me this on video and its amazing that once you see it on screen it all makes sense.

1 of the key things i think about is brushing my right leg with my right forearm on the way back (i dont actually make contact but its the thought that keeps my arms connected), then making sure i get my left forearm to my left leg before release. this stops my hands disconnecting on take away, and through the ball.
i also had a tendency to fall a bit forward towards the ball, so i think about keeping my weight central.

i agree with the object in the way as well to make it more visual, i usually put my shoe bag at the ball.
 
First did anybody hear the term Faherty uses to avoid saying the dreaded shhhhhhhh word. Clark hit one and Faherty immediately says, he hit a "sherman tank" instead of saying a s**nk. Gotta' love Faherty.

Anyway when I posted earlier about my own experiences with the "sherman tank", I neglected to mention that until today, I had never hit them one after the other for any period. I have hit one now and again but today was the first day ever where I hit multiple sherman tanks one after the other. I hit about ten of them at the range today before I got it figured out.

In my case today I was too focused on maintaining my triangle and did not make any turn away with my hips in the backswing. I mean I was making no turn away at all with my hips.

One positive that came out of it was that I was able to catalog one more swing flaw and the means to correct it and for something I had never experienced before, ten shots was not a bad turnaround.

That does give me an opportunity to offer something that might help with all sorts of swing related issues. I will preface this by commenting that I think lessons are great. I have taken a few lessons, mainly last year when I was just getting back into the game again. One reason why I have kept the number of lessons I have taken to a minimum is that I wanted to be able to develop an ability to at least at some level mend myself and I felt that too much reliance on lessons would restrict my ability to do so. I have been really stubborn about that and for the most part I can fix things in a relatively short period of time when I go off. Now of course I am talking about the kinds of issues we face regularly in this game as opposed to the kinds of things a touring pro faces in trying to maintain his or her game at a consistently high level. God only know what it takes to face the kinds of issues Duval has had to deal with or even Tiger for that matter. Their stories are really not all that unusual either as the level of play is so high and therefore so difficult to maintain that some number of them always seem to be falling off the tour wagon.

The one thing that I have found to be true in my case with just about any swing issue I have had is that what happens in the backswing is reciprocated in some way in the downswing. While it has always been very difficult for me to pinpoint the initial swing flaw that I have made, it has been much easier for me to feel the reciprocating flaw or correction that I seem to always make subconsciously during the downswing.

For example the other day I was complaining that I was dipping my head and shoulders during the backswing. I could not feel that I was dipping my head in the backswing but I could feel very clearly that I was rising up in the downswing. Rising up was the reciprocal effect from having dipped in the first place. Today I discovered that my sherman tanks were linked to not making any hip turn away in my backswing. The reciprocal effect in this case was I was not turning my hips back in the downswing. How could I when I never turned my hips away in the backswing.

Reciprocity in the golf swing has been the single best tool I have been able to use to cure swing issues whether during a round or during a practice session. At any rate I know how difficult it is for us to feel our mistakes and we cannot climb out of our own skin and see them all that well when we are making them. I think it tends to work at least for me because the reciprocal action is for the most part involuntary. We cannot help but make some effort to correct an error made in the backswing during the downswing. But since it is involuntary you end up able to feel it more clearly and then asking yourself where the heck that came from. Combine that with where the ball goes as a reaction to a poor swing and you have some tools to help you figure out what is going on. In the case of my sherman tanks today, It really came in handy because I could not rely on seeing the ball slicing or hooking as a part of the analysis of what was happening. While my sherman tanks tend to go right, it is not the same as a slice going right.

At any rate if you try to remind yourself about reciprocity in the golf swing you may well end up with another tool to use to mend issues when they do arise.
 
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