Casting Help

AustinMICT · September 5, 2022

Hey Guys, as you can see in the video I am casting the club really bad. This issue has plagued my swing I’ve picked up the sport (~4 years ago) and I would appreciate any input. I’ve got plenty of other flaws as well, so feel free to chime in on anything you guys see. Thanks!

https://youtube.com/shorts/goEjRbQTQM0?feature=share

Valtiel · September 6, 2022

The cast is happening because it needs to. Your hips are significantly outracing your arms which is causing them to get stuck way behind you, causing the cast as a means to get the club to the ball:

Notice how far behind your hands and right arm are in relation to your right hip. You're ripping your hips open so early and fast that your arms can't catch up:

This move is too much too fast and looks like too literal an interpretation of one of these "fire the lower half hard and get your knees separated". You're getting your hips almost square to the ball when the club has barely started down. Adam here to reference the approximate position of his arms when his hips get to square, much further in the downswing.

If you're consciously trying to do this then know you're overdoing it which is causing the casting. If you're not consciously doing this then you'll want to experiment with one or more of the following with the goal of better syncing up your upper and lower half:

1) Think of your lower body, specifically your left side, as a big lever that helps pull your arms/upper half down in transition to start the downswing, not something to be flung at the target as fast as you can.
2) Shorten and/or speed up your backswing. Your hips might naturally want to be really quick, in which case you need a swing length that matches with that. Look at Rahm, Finau, or Horschel. SUPER quick hips and tight, compact backswings to match.
3) Speed up your hands and/or feel like they go first in transition. This is my least favorite approach to this issue because you never actually want to accomplish this, your lower half should always be leading the downswing in some capacity, you just need them to be in sync and you have the less common issue of the lower half being the thing that is quick/early.

As with most things I recommend starting slower with half swings and punch shots to get a feel for both halves (upper and lower) working together. Its the ultimate litmus test because if you can't hit a consistent half shot then you're unlikely to do any better with more length and speed. This is probably the most frustrating part about trying to build and improve a gold swing as a full grown adult, but if you're serious about it then you need to grind for awhile at lower speeds and shorter swings until fundamentals are better ingrained.

Edited September 6, 2022 by Valtiel

AustinMICT · September 6, 2022

@ValtielI really appreciate you taking the time to thoroughly analyzing my swing flaws and providing the frame-by-frame breakdown. That is extremely helpful and it provides a great visualization to see how bad how lower half is outracing my arms. I am not mindfully attempting to fire my hips this quickly, and this issue is something that I have been fighting for as long as I have been playing, which is about 4 years. It makes perfect sense that the resulting cast is due to what is going on with my arms so radically behind my lower half during the downswing. Do you think I should also implement more of a lateral bump towards the target to get my lower half calm the violent hip fire? Perhaps that is what you are alluding to with your 1st suggestion to remedy my issue. I am sure that you saw this in the full video as well, but my right foot doesn't stay planted in the downswing neither like you see the pros do. I am sure this isn't helping my swing and I need to work on it. Thank you again for your insight, and I am going to work on your suggestions to try to get my arms more in sync with my lower half in my downswing. They are so remarkably out of sync right now.

Valtiel · September 8, 2022

On 9/6/2022 at 3:14 PM, AustinMICT said:

@ValtielI really appreciate you taking the time to thoroughly analyzing my swing flaws and providing the frame-by-frame breakdown. That is extremely helpful and it provides a great visualization to see how bad how lower half is outracing my arms. I am not mindfully attempting to fire my hips this quickly, and this issue is something that I have been fighting for as long as I have been playing, which is about 4 years. It makes perfect sense that the resulting cast is due to what is going on with my arms so radically behind my lower half during the downswing. Do you think I should also implement more of a lateral bump towards the target to get my lower half calm the violent hip fire? Perhaps that is what you are alluding to with your 1st suggestion to remedy my issue. I am sure that you saw this in the full video as well, but my right foot doesn't stay planted in the downswing neither like you see the pros do. I am sure this isn't helping my swing and I need to work on it. Thank you again for your insight, and I am going to work on your suggestions to try to get my arms more in sync with my lower half in my downswing. They are so remarkably out of sync right now.

No problem, i'm glad that made sense.

You're doing a pretty specific type of rotation/pivot that requires certain things, and *more* lateral bump towards the target is actually the opposite of what you want. I'll explain:

You have what would be considered a very "centered" pivot/rotation. You don't go move laterally out of the box your hips established at address, which move people do. Bryson is one of the few that doesn't, and the main purpose of this type of rotation is to have LESS lateral movement overall:

If you choose to maintain this type of centered pivot then you'll want to feel like you slide towards the target much less than you do now, because the only reason you do this is to get your center of gravity in front of the ball to keep your low point ahead of it and to achieve an element of shaft lean at impact, and you're already far closer to this via staying centered in your backswing. Bumping towards the target more would only exacerbate the problem you currently have.

A quick note about that as well, one of the other issues in the first set of gifs is that you max out your hip rotation very early in the backswing which likely contributes to you then going very early in the downswing. You'll probably want to feel like these things happen much more together to start with.

Edited September 8, 2022 by Valtiel