How to shallow the golf club
Shallowing the club is a hot topic, but not a lot of people really know what it means or how to do it. In this video, PGA Professional Jack Backhouse clears things up for you.
Shallowing the club in the golf swing is a great way to stop slicing it, hit a draw and add distance to your drives. It’s a hot topic, but how do you actually do it? In the video below PGA professional Jack Backhouse outlines some ideas about how you can shallow it like tour pros.
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How to shallow the golf club: What does it even mean?
The shallowing of the club occurs at the very start of the downswing, and it is the action of the club head moving back behind is as we start to move back down towards the ball. We want to this as it effectively increases the distance the club travels to get back to the ball, which gives us more club head speed.
This is the complete opposite move the the ‘over-the-top’ pattern we still in the average player, and is a good feeling for someone who wants to hit a draw.
How to shallow the golf club: is there a good place to shallow the club from?
You can shallow the golf club from any top of the backswing position, two extremes would be tour pros Matthew Wolff and Jordan Speith, both radically different swings but both swings feature a shallowing transition.
Shallowing the club from the top is easier from a position where you have a full shoulder turn and full hip turn. Golfers with a restricted hip turn and short swing will generally find it harder to shallow the club as it is a very unnatural move from here.
How to shallow the club: 2 ways to shallow it
There are a couple of ways to shallow the club, and you could do either, or a mixture of both and have success.
The first method is with wrist angles. If you get to the top of your swing and then bow your wrist, this will shallow the club and sent the head more behind you.
The second method is dropping the right shoulder and right elbow so that they are below your left shoulder and elbow.
Both of these moves in isolation may look and feel a bit odd, but when you add in the rotation we all have in the downswing the moves will look a lot more natural and produce the desired shots.
A great drill to help you shallow the club is to put a stick in the ground, at roughly the angle of the shaft 1 foot outside the ball and 4 feet back behind the ball. A golfer would want to feel the club going outside the stick on the way back and then underneath the stick on the way down. Here a golfer will be able to feel which method of shallowing works best for them.
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Jack Backhouse
Jack is a PGA Golf Professional who specialises in coaching, teaching golf to beginners and top-level amateurs for 10+ years. He also loves his golf equipment and analysing the data of the latest clubs on the market using launch monitors, specialising in blade irons and low-spinning drivers despite having a chronically low ball flight.
Although Jack has no formal journalism training, He has been reading What's In The Bag articles since he started playing at 12 and studying golf swings since his dad first filmed his swing to reveal one of the worst over-the-top slice swings he reckons has ever been recorded, which set him off on the path to be a coach. His favourite club ever owned was a Ping G10 driver bought from a local top amateur with the hope that some of the quality golf shots would come with it (they didn't), and worst was a Nike SQ driver he only bought because Tiger was using it.
Jack is a member of Sand Moor Golf Club and regularly gets out on the golf course to prepare for tournaments. Jack uses a TaylorMade BRNR Mini driver, a half set of TaylorMade P7MB irons, MG4 wedges and a TaylorMade TP Reserve putter.
