Beginner

Common Beginner Swing Faults

Definition

Nearly every beginner hits topped shots, chunked shots, slices, and shanks. These misses almost all trace back to a small set of setup and contact issues.

New golfers often experience a bewildering variety of bad results: thin shots, fat shots, shanks, slices, and tops. They can come away believing they have many separate, unrelated problems to fix. In practice, most beginner misses trace back to a small number of underlying causes. One is uneven posture and spine angle through the swing. Another is a low point that moves around unpredictably. A third is a clubface whose orientation at impact is hard to predict. Different combinations of these same few root issues produce the different-looking misses.

In a topped shot, the ball is struck above its center, producing a low, weak roller. In a chunked or fat shot, the ground is struck before the ball. These are often two sides of the same uneven low-point problem. The swing bottoms out in a different place shot to shot, sometimes before the ball and sometimes after it rises back up. A shank (struck off the hosel) is not an unrelated mystery fault. It is usually related to weight moving too far toward the toes, or the arms getting too close to the body in the downswing.

For a beginner, "I have five different problems" is not the most productive way to think. The most productive framing is that one or two underlying issues are likely showing up as several different-looking misses. That is exactly why working on fundamentals with a coach or video review tends to clean up several miss types at once. Those fundamentals are posture, ball position, and basic sequencing. It does not require a separate fix for each one.

Example

A beginner who has been topping some shots and chunking others discovers, on video, that their posture is collapsing inconsistently through the swing — one underlying cause producing two very different-looking misses.

Why it matters

Realizing that several different bad shots often share one root cause is genuinely encouraging for beginners. It usually means fixing one thing, not learning to fix five separate problems.

Common mistakes

Treating every different-looking miss as a separate problem requiring its own separate fix, rather than looking for a shared underlying cause like uneven posture or low point.

In SwingVantage Motion Lab

Motion Lab does not see topped, chunked or shanked shots; it reads your body, not the ball or the strike. It does read body patterns that often lie behind them, such as a changing spine angle or hips sliding side to side. When one clip holds several swings, it shows the issue that repeats most. Imported launch-monitor sessions add checks for fat contact and heel or toe strikes.

Frequently asked questions

Why do I hit some shots fat and others thin in the same round?

Both misses usually come from the same root cause — an uneven low point in the swing arc. When it moves too far back, the club hits the ground first (fat). When it moves too far forward, the club catches the top of the ball (thin).