My Battle with Getting Stuck
Alright, so I wanted to talk about something that’s been bugging me on the range lately: getting stuck. You know that feeling, right? You get to the top of your backswing, start down, and suddenly it feels like your arms are trapped behind your body. There’s just no room to swing through. It feels awful, and the shots? Usually blocks way right or nasty hooks when you try to save it with your hands. Happened to me a bunch last week.
So, I decided I really needed to figure this out. Didn’t want to keep hitting those terrible shots. First thing I did was just slow everything way down. Took these super slow-motion practice swings in my backyard, no ball. Just trying to feel where things were going wrong. What I noticed, or at least what it felt like, was my hips just weren’t moving. They’d kinda stop turning as soon as I started down, and my arms would just drop straight down behind me. Stuck city, population: me.
Next step, I went to the driving range. Didn’t even grab my driver. Took out a pitching wedge. My only goal was to get my lower body moving first on the downswing. Here’s what I tried:
- Feet Together Drill: Started hitting little half shots with my feet touching. It really forces you to rotate your body through, otherwise you just fall over. Felt super weird at first, but it helped me get the sensation of turning through the ball.
- Exaggerated Hip Turn: Then I went to a normal stance, but I consciously tried to get my belt buckle pointing way left of the target (I’m right-handed) before I felt my arms coming down. This felt really out of sequence initially. Like, massively. Hit a lot of shots thin doing this because my timing was all messed up.
- Pump Drill: Did that thing where you swing down halfway, stop, swing back up a bit, then swing down and through. Tried to really feel the hips leading that second downswing move. This helped connect the backswing to the downswing a bit better.
Honestly, it was frustrating. For the first bucket of balls, I felt like I was getting worse. My contact was all over the place. I kept thinking, “Maybe I should just go back to being stuck, at least I could hit the ball sometimes.” It’s easy to revert back to old habits, even bad ones.
But I stuck with it. Just kept focusing on that feeling of clearing my hips. Didn’t worry too much about where the ball went. Slowly, very slowly, I started to feel a bit more space. My arms felt like they had a path to swing down, rather than getting jammed behind my right hip.
Towards the end of the session, I hit a few solid 8-irons. They weren’t perfect, not by a long shot. But they felt different. They felt… unstuck. There was this feeling of flow through the impact zone that just wasn’t there before. It felt like my body turned, and the arms just followed.
It’s definitely not fixed. I know this is something I’ll have to keep working on. Getting stuck seems to creep back in whenever I’m not paying attention. But now I have a clearer idea of what’s causing it for me – lazy hips on the downswing – and I have a couple of drills I can use to work on it. It’s all about getting that sequence right: lower body starts the downswing, then the arms come through. Simple to say, harder to do, but that’s golf, right?
