Bubba's outwards release

Back to Bubba and he is in the camp of roughly 50% of golfers who play with what’s called an ‘Outwards Release’. This means that his club face is aimed at the target for the tiniest fraction of a second and a straight shot would be an accident. Instead, like everyone else of this style swing, he plays golf with shape on the ball and in Bubba’s case he harnesses this and shapes the ball enormous amounts in both directions on purpose throughout each round.

It’s always amazing how much a golfer has to massively exaggerate a movement to just make a tiny difference in shot shape. A good example this week was a 6 handicap golfer who was in for an iron fitting and was generating very low flighted hooks and very low spinning shots. Whilst being great for distance, his 13+ degree in-to-out swing was still a glancing blow and would eventually cause various bad shots such as thins, hooks and shanks. He demonstrated to me how he plays a fade (remember this is a golfer who successfully manages his game and shoots low scores) and his swing went from 13 degrees in-to-out, to 10 degrees in-to-out which would still be classed as extremely in-to-out. In the golfers mind they had made a huge change but in reality they had only made 10% of the necessary adjustment to play a genuine fade shot.

If you are working on your game (and who isn’t?), always try to overdo whatever fix it is that you’re applying, overdo it a bit more on the next shot and then overdo it 1 million percent on the next shot and you’ll be there. If it doesn’t work within three shots, you’re working on the wrong thing. Remember - every ball flight miss is fixed in a maximum of three shots if you apply the correct fix.