Topping? Chunking? Even Whiffing?
No Problem.  There’s an Easy Solution

When you address the golf ball, where is your club head?  It’s on the ground, right?  It’s sitting right behind the golf ball.  Why then is it so hard to return the club head to where it started and hit the ball squarely on the face consistently?  Like Tommy Armour once said, “Golf is an awkward set of bodily contortions designed to produce a graceful result.”  So true for many, but I want to simplify this for you, so it’s actually not awkward at all.

Think of the center of your chest as your swing’s center point.  When you set up, it is a predetermined distance from the golf ball.  If your swing center doesn’t move closer to or further from the golf ball, your club head will easily return to where it started.  The solution thus lies in maintaining the same posture you established at address.

One of the most common swing faults is what we call an early extension of the spine or a pelvic push.  As the pelvis moves in towards the ball and target, the spine raises as a reaction.  It’s basically when a player stands up during the downswing (it can certainly start on the backswing too) and finds their swing center now further from the ball than it was at address.  The result is commonly a topped shot, thin shot, or even a whiff.  Some players will actually get the opposite result: a fat shot.  As they feel themselves stand up, they then throw the club head down into the ground to make up for the difference.

The solution is easy; maintain the same posture you established at address.  This is commonly referred to across the links as “staying down”.   My suggestion is to keep your right cheek (for right handers) facing the ground as you watch your ball flight and keep your rear end sticking out.

Maintain your posture and you won’t only gain consistency, you’ll maximize your distance as you learn how to rotate properly through the shot.