How to Stop Hitting Fat and Thin Shots (With a Number)

Fat and thin are not two faults. They're one variable — where your club bottoms out relative to the ball — read from two directions, and both get fixed by putting the low point in the right place: for most golfers that means moving it forward, so you strike ball first, turf after. The Adaptive Golfer practice system measures that with the Chalk Line Low Point Drill, which turns "I caught that one heavy" into a score out of 10 with a pass mark for your handicap band. Below is what's actually going wrong on each miss, the number you should be clearing, and the one-session protocol that tells you whether you moved it.

What causes fat and thin shots?

Both come from a low point error. On a fat shot the low point sits too far behind the ball, so the club reaches the ground before it reaches the ball and you hit dirt first. Thin is the same variable missed the other way, and it has two possible causes: a low point too far forward with insufficient arc depth, so the club never gets down to the turf, or a low point too far back, meaning the club has already bottomed out and is rising by the time it arrives at the ball. Adam Young's breakdown keeps that second cause. It's the one that disappears when fat and thin get treated as separate problems, and it's why the same low point error can surface as either miss depending on how deep the arc is.

Young's framing is mechanical: arc height and low point position, raised or dropped, moved forward or back. One error with two directions. Chase a separate tip for each miss and you'll usually just trade one for the other.

The practical standard is simpler than the mechanics. A good iron strike takes the ball first and the turf after, so the divot starts at or past where the ball was sitting. That's the thing to measure. Everything else is a theory about why.

What score should you hit on the low point drill?

Your target is the band for your handicap, out of 10 shots. The Chalk Line Low Point Drill scores post-ball contacts — how many times in ten the club first disturbed the ground past the ball. The instruction and the score are deliberately different things. You aim to strike the ground at or past the ball, but an at-ball strike is only acceptable, not correct, and it does not count toward your number. Only post-ball contacts score. Chapter 25 of The Adaptive Golfer publishes this table:

The book's table caps at 20–24; the app labels that row 20+ because everything from 25 up belongs in the same band. Your row is a range. Clear the bottom of it and you've cleared it. A 20-handicap should strike 4 to 5 of 10 iron shots past the ball. An 8–13 handicap should strike 7 to 8.

Now notice what isn't there. The table stops at 8–13. There's no row below it — no 3–7, and no scratch row. That absence is the most useful thing on the page.

Be precise about where the cut-off actually falls, because the obvious reading is wrong. The 8–13 band does cover single-digit handicaps; 8 and 9 are in it. What the book declines to set a target for is everything inside 8. Most of our benchmarked drills band all the way down to 3–7. This one doesn't, because low point control is treated as a skill you're expected to own by the time you're inside 8. It stops being something you train and becomes something you have — which is the argument for measuring it now, while it's still a number that can move. The full benchmark tables show you which drills do band that low.

How do you measure your own low point?

Chalk, one mid-iron, about a minute of setup. Draw a chalk line roughly 3 feet long and half an inch wide, running toward you and toward the target, and set the ball exactly at its center. Hit ten shots with one instruction: intend to strike the ground at or past the ball position, not the ball itself. After each one, read where the club disturbed the chalk and write it down as pre-ball (fat), at-ball (acceptable), or post-ball (correct). Count the post-ball contacts only. That count, out of 10, is your score.

The chalk is doing something an obstacle drill can't. The common version of this online is to lay a towel, headcover or stick just behind the ball so a fat strike hits the object. That punishes the miss and reports nothing — a yes or a no, and only for one direction of error. Chalk tells you where you actually bottomed out on every rep, including the reps you got away with. Ten of those is a score you can write down and beat next week.

One warning comes from the drill's own notes: lifting your head to watch the ball shifts the low point early. Keep your eyes on the chalk. The ball flight will tell you what happened without your help.

Does "keep your head down" fix a fat shot?

No, and it's worth knowing why it survives anyway. "Keep your head down" is a swing thought aimed at your own body — an internal focus — and it treats a symptom of an early low point as the cause of it. Notice that the top-ranking explainer on fat and thin shots never reaches for it. It talks about arc depth and low point position instead, because that's what actually changed when the strike went bad. Holding your head still does nothing about where the bottom of the arc is, and the bottom of the arc is the thing that moved.

Attention pointed outward, at a target or a physical object, beats attention pointed at your own mechanics. Wulf and Su's 2007 golf study found that in novices and experienced golfers alike. The chalk line moves the job out of your head and onto the ground: aim the bottom of your swing at a mark, then read what the mark says. Same idea as the gate-and-corridor drills, where the equipment does the judging.

Why do you hit it fat when you come over the top?

Often because path and low point travel together: come over the top and the bottom of the arc frequently arrives early. Treat that as a pattern worth testing rather than a law. If your chalk score is stuck low and your misses curve the same way every time, the low point may be a symptom rather than the fault. Run the Alignment Stick Impact Drill, which narrows the space your clubhead gets at impact, and watch which stick you catch. A repeating clip on the outside one points at path, and the chalk score will often come up behind the path work without being trained directly.

If your path is clean and the chalk score is still low, the low point is the real work. That's a genuinely useful fork in the road, and it costs ten more shots to find out which side of it you're on.

What warm-up makes the strike click?

The One-Handed Swing Drill, and it is deliberately unscored. Ten slow half-speed swings with the trail hand only, attending to the face rotating from slightly open to square. Then five balls with both hands consciously copying that feel, then five with no thought at all — just target and swing. Foam balls are fine, because the sensation is the whole product here. The drill carries no ball-flight target, and we don't invent one for it.

The book is explicit about how you judge it instead. Its measure of success is whether your Gate Drill score improves in the same session when you use it as a warm-up. That's an honest way to run a feel drill: it doesn't get its own number, it has to move somebody else's. If it doesn't, it isn't working for you, and you can drop it without guilt. One caveat. That audit happens in a Gate Drill session, not a chalk line one, so when you use it to warm up for the chalk work below, it's there for feel and the evidence comes later.

How do you stop hitting fat and thin shots in one session?

In one session you can leave with a score, a direction of miss, and one thing to work on for the next four weeks. Five steps, one mid-iron, one piece of chalk, and a stick channel for the last ten shots. Order matters: warm up before you measure, measure before you diagnose, diagnose before you decide what the month's work is. All of it is a single trip to the range.

1. Warm up one-handed. Ten trail-hand swings, five conscious both-handed shots, five free ones. Nothing gets scored here — this drill's own check is a Gate Drill session, and you run that separately.
2. Set the chalk and hit ten. Ball at the center of the line, mid-iron, intending to strike the ground at or past the ball. Record every shot as pre-ball, at-ball, or post-ball.
3. Score it and read the split. Post-ball contacts out of 10 is your number. At-ball marks don't count toward it, though they tell you how close you are. The split matters as much as the score: a pile of pre-ball marks is a low point behind the ball, while thin shots with clean chalk mean the club never got down there at all.
4. Compare to your band. Below your row, low point control is this month's work. At or above it three sessions running, the drill has taught you what it can — move to turf where the divot is visible and require it to start at or past the ball.
5. Check whether it's really a path problem. Ten shots through the alignment stick channel. A repeating clip on the outside stick sends you to path work first.

Then re-score a week later: same line, same club, same ten shots. If the number hasn't moved by the end of a four-week block, stop grinding the drill and re-diagnose — that discipline is the whole point of structured golf practice. Two numbers and one decision, which is more than most range sessions hand you.

Give your strike a score

A heavy strike stays a mystery only until you know where the club bottomed out. See how the diagnose-plan-measure method works, browse the full drill library for the rest of them, then start a free trial and run the Chalk Line Low Point Drill under your own band — every set logged comes back with a Practice Strokes Gained number, so "I was thinning everything today" arrives with a pass mark attached. Everything here comes from The Adaptive Golfer, the published system behind the app.