How to Stop Hitting Fat and Thin Shots

Fat shots and thin shots look like two different problems. They're not. Both come from the same cause: your club is bottoming out in the wrong place. Fix the low point — where the club reaches its lowest point in the arc — and both shots clean up at the same time.

Why they both happen

Your club follows a curved arc through the swing. For clean iron contact, the lowest point of that arc needs to be slightly ahead of the ball, which is why good ball-strikers take a divot in front of where the ball was sitting.

Fat: the low point happens before the ball. The club digs into the turf first, dumping speed and energy into the ground instead of the ball.

Thin: the low point happens too early, so the club is already on the way back up when it reaches the ball. The leading edge catches the equator — that clicking, skull feeling.

The reason most golfers flip between fat and thin is overcorrection. They chunk one, tense up, and yank their arms upward on the next swing to avoid the turf. Same root cause, two different results.

The fix starts with weight forward

The most common reason the low point sits behind the ball is simple: too much weight is left on the trail foot through impact.

If you're still loaded on your right side when the club reaches the ball, your arc bottoms out behind it. The fix is moving your weight forward earlier in the downswing — not by swaying toward the target, but by rotating over a firm lead side.

The feel you want: by the time the club gets back to the ball, 70–80% of your weight should already be pressing into your lead heel. Your finish position tells you everything. If you can hold a full balanced finish with your weight over your lead foot, you're moving in the right direction.

Don't change your spine angle

The second cause is early extension — standing up or thrusting the hips toward the ball before impact. When your spine angle changes in the downswing, your arms lose their reference point, and the arc goes unpredictable.

Keep your chest angled toward the ground through the hitting zone. Your head stays level, not rising, not dipping. The club follows the body, and the body stays in posture.

A simple check: after impact, can you still see the divot from your address position? If you've stood up, you can't. That's a sign early extension is costing you clean contact.

The towel drill

This is the fastest feedback you can get at the range:

• Lay a towel flat on the grass, with the front edge sitting 3–4 inches behind the ball.
• Make swings with one goal: miss the towel.
• Clean contact that avoids the towel means your low point is forward where it belongs.
• If you clip the towel, the low point is too early. If you skull it out of fear, your hands are compensating.

Work at half speed first. You're training a feel, not hitting for distance. Once you can consistently miss the towel, take it away and trust the same sensation.

Read your divots

After every iron shot, check where the divot starts. It should begin at or just ahead of where the ball was sitting. If the divot starts behind the ball position, your low point is early — even if that particular shot felt okay.

Golfers who check their divot location every iron shot improve ball-striking faster than those who only focus on the result. The divot is the most honest feedback your swing produces. Poor divot patterns can also reveal fitting issues — irons with the wrong lie angle tend to dig or catch the toe, which distorts where the low point lands.

One thought for the course

You don't need three swing thoughts mid-round. Pick one: press into the lead side first.

That single thought encourages weight transfer and keeps the low point forward. On a day when fat shots keep creeping in, widen your stance slightly and focus on finishing with your belt buckle pointing at the target. That finish position is nearly impossible to reach with your weight hanging back.