How swinging with a shovel can stop you coming over the top

Golf instructor demonstrates drill with snow shovel

Send the bottom of the shovel behind you on the way down.

@athletic_motion_golf on Instagram

With winter snow sweeping through a large portion of the country, and the holidays coming up everywhere, you probably don’t have all that many opportunities to sneak off to the golf course these days.

That’s why it’s the time to pivot into practicing at home. It may sound like the kind of thing that won’t actually help a lot, but you’d be surprised. Sometimes, hitting a golf ball isn’t actually the best way to improve.

Which brings us to GOLF Top 100 Teacher Shaun Webb‘s tip, which you can watch on his Instagram account below.

It’s designed for golfers who tend to come over the top, and the way it works is pretty simple.

First, as Webb describes, you take a big shovel and take your setup, making sure the face of the shovel is facing away from you.

Make your backswing, and you should find that by this point, the back of the shovel is facing towards the sky.

The next step is where it can go wrong for lots of golfers. Golfers who tend to come over the top and hit slices, tops, and pulls often send the club (or shovel) back out in front of them, like this.

The feeling you should be chasing, Webb explains, is one where the back of the shovel heads squarely towards the ground, like this.

That feeling of dropping the club straight down behind you will allow you to approach the ball from the inside, and help you get rid of the over the top move before the new season is upon us.

Luke Kerr-Dineen

Golf.com Contributor

Luke Kerr-Dineen is the Game Improvement Editor at GOLF Magazine and GOLF.com. In his role he oversees the brand’s game improvement content spanning instruction, equipment, health and fitness, across all of GOLF’s multimedia platforms.

An alumni of the International Junior Golf Academy and the University of South Carolina–Beaufort golf team, where he helped them to No. 1 in the national NAIA rankings, Luke moved to New York in 2012 to pursue his Masters degree in Journalism from Columbia University. His work has also appeared in USA Today, Golf Digest, Newsweek and The Daily Beast.