Dexter’s Coming Over the Top, Part 1

I was going to try making my first video for this post but the weather is not cooperating. (If you saw any of the Wyndham in nearby Greensboro, where they were playing LCP, you know it’s been pretty soggy here.) Since I’ve decided to break this post into more than one part, I may get a chance to make one for the other posts.

This first post focuses on understanding what makes a swing to go “over-the-top.” It’s hard to fix it if you don’t understand what you’re doing.

It’s kind of ironic. Just one week before Dexter made his first post about his over-the-top swing, I did an instructional article for Golfsmith.com about the correct way to make a one-piece takeaway. Not only that, but Michael Breed on The Golf Fix did a segment on how your takeaway affects your plane just a couple of days before Dexter’s post. (I don’t recall if he actually used the term “one-piece takeaway,” but that’s what he was demonstrating.) This is a common problem, and that’s why I want you to understand what’s happening.

First, you need to understand the difference between an over-the-top swing and any other kind of swing. It’s very simple, really:

In most swings, your hands reach the top of your backswing and that's as high as they’re going to go; then they start down. In an over-the-top swing, your hands are going up when they reach the top of your backswing… and then they keep going up.

It’s very easy to say, “Yes, yes, I understand” and totally miss what’s happening here. In a normal swing your hands are traveling toward the top of the backswing at an angle (i.e., your swing plane), stop traveling upward (even though they might still be moving back or down a little), and are then able to start forward and downward again, hopefully on a swing plane somewhat similar to the first one.

But in an over-the-top swing, the hands are traveling almost directly straight up to the top of the backswing. When they get there, they can’t just stop; they have to change direction so they can head forward and downward again. So, just like the poor driver who missed his turn at the last intersection, they make a U-turn at the next opportunity, looping over and forward at the top of the backswing. Voilá! You’re in the wrong lane, and you’ve got a big pull working.

Dexter posted several videos of his swing, all showing a down-the-line view, in this post. Here’s the one I chose to focus on:



And here are a couple of stills I pulled from it, right around the :21-:22 second mark. I’ve added an X to each pic to show about where his hands ought to be, and a black line to show roughly where the club shaft would point. (They aren’t perfect, but they’ll give you an idea. To help fight his over-the-top swing, Dexter has closed his stance a little, which makes it difficult to get things perfect. I settled on making the marks relative to his chest position.)




As you can see, Dexter’s hands have traveled much farther around him (i.e., his backswing plane is too low) than they should be at these points in his swing. His hands are still below shoulder height, even though he can’t turn much further from the ball. They should be at or above shoulder height when he has turned this much. And see how the club shaft is pointing straight back, parallel to the ground? He’s swinging around, not up.

But his hands have to go up; they’re still not at the top of his backswing. So what will he do? He’ll lift his hands almost straight up to the top of his backswing (that’s really all he can do from this position). And now he’s got a problem, because his hands need to make a turn much sharper than 90-degrees to get back on plane and start down. So he does the only thing he can do—he makes a U-turn at the top, looping up and over so he can start down again.

In some cases, because a player is literally pushing his or her hands straight up, they’ve got so much momentum working against them that they have to use their hip (the right hip for a right-hander, the left hip for a left-hander) to counteract that momentum. The hip moves up and away from the target (rather than forward and around, as it would in a correct swing) and tilts the spine toward the target. As a result, the shoulder gets pushed up even higher and the hands loop even farther over-the-top.

Sounds like a real mess, doesn’t it?

But the problem isn’t the backswing per se. Rather, it’s the takeaway that starts the backswing... and that’s a much simpler problem to fix. I’ll explain how we do it in the next post.