Nothing stalls a good round faster than that dreaded feeling of lifting out of a golf shot. One moment you're poised for a perfectly compressed iron, and the next, your body is standing up, pulling away from the ball as if you've forgotten what you were doing. This frustrating move leads to thin shots, shanks, and slices that leave you wondering what went wrong. We are going to get to the bottom of why this happens and give you a rock-solid plan with actionable drills to keep you in the shot, hitting pure, powerful golf shots once and for all.
Before we can fix it, we need to understand exactly what’s happening. In simple terms, “coming out of a golf shot” is when your posture changes during the downswing. Your spine angle, which you set at address, lifts up, and your upper body pulls away from the ball through the impact zone. Golf coaches often call this early extension, which is a great way to think about it. It’s when your hips and lower body “extend” or thrust towards the golf ball too early, forcing your whole body to stand up to make space for the club to get through.
Instead of rotating around your spine while staying in posture, your body effectively says, "I'm getting out of the way!" This move is a massive power leak and a consistency killer. If you suffer from this, you’ll likely recognize some of these terribly familiar results:
If any of those sound like frequent guests in your golf game, you are in the right place. The good news is that this is a fixable problem rooted in a few common physical mistakes, not some deep-seated talent issue.
Golfers don't come out of the shot on purpose. It's an instinctive, subconscious move your body makes to solve a problem. To fix it for good, we have to understand what problem your body is trying to solve. More often than not, it comes down to one of these four reasons.
This is, by far, the most common cause. A good golf swing is a rotational action. On the downswing, your hips and torso should continue turning aggressively through to the finish. When players come out of the shot, their hips and body stall. The rotation stops, or slows down dramatically, just before impact.
But the club is still moving at 80+ mph. It has to go somewhere! With your body’s rotation blocked, the only available path for your arms and the club is to be thrown "out" and "up" away from your body. Think of it like a centrifugal force machine - when your pivot stops, the energy has to fling whatever is moving away from the center. Early extension and standing up is the result of that stalled rotation.
Many golfers hold a deep-seated, incorrect belief that they need to "lift" the golf ball to get it airborne. Subconsciously, they think that by standing up and scooping with their hands, they are helping the ball up into the air. This often comes with an upward thrust from the legs, like you’re trying to jump through impact. The modern golf swing isn’t up and down like chopping wood, it’s a rounded action around the body.
In reality, the opposite is true. True power and height in a golf shot come from compression - hitting down on the ball with a descending angle of attack. The loft on the club is what makes the ball go up. Your job is to deliver that loft by staying down and through the shot, not by trying to launch it yourself.
Sometimes, the die is cast before you even begin your takeway. How you stand at address can pre-program your body to come out of the shot. If you have too much knee flex, sit back on your heels too much, or are too hunched over, your body will naturally seek balance during the violent motion of the swing. More often than not, its way of re-balancing is to stand up and move forward onto the balls of your feet.
Having a balanced, athletic setup - where you feel your weight on the balls of your feet and maintain a proud chest while hinging from your hips - gives your body a stable platform to rotate around. Without this, your body is just trying to stop itself from falling over.
Many amateur golfers are terrified of hitting the ground and taking a big, chunky divot. They’ve been conditioned by years of hitting fat shots that the ground is the enemy. This fear creates a last-second "pull-up" motion to save the shot. Just at the moment of truth, the body chickens out, lifting the arms and chest to avoid hitting the turf. While it might prevent a fat shot, it brings all the wonderful misses we mentioned earlier (thins, toes, shanks) right back into play.
To be a good ball-striker, you have to learn to love the divot. A divot after the ball is the hallmark of a pure iron shot. Trust that a proper a href="https://caddiehq.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener"-out-style swing will result in a crisp, ball-then-turf strike.
Understanding the "why" is half the battle. Now it's time for the "how." These drills are designed to retrain your body's motor patterns to stay in posture and clear your hips, letting the club deliver a powerful blow from the inside.
This is one of the most effective ahref="https://caddiehq.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener"-and-true drills for fixing early extension. It provides immediate feedback.
Coming out of the shot is often a sequencing problem - the arms start before the body is ready. This a href="https://caddiehq.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener"ll helps you get the feeling of the lower body leading the charge.
This is more of a swing thought or a href="https://caddiehq.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener"-concept that provides fantastic visual and kinesthetic feedback. The idea is to counteract the "lifting" feeling with a "covering" feeling.
Stopping yourself from coming out of a golf shot isn't about one "magic" fix. It's about understanding that your body is standing up and pulling away because it stopped rotating. By focusing on keeping your lower body turning, staying balanced, and maintaining your posture with a feeling of "covering the ball," you can replace this weak move with a powerful, rotational action.
During this process of improving your swing, getting reliable feedback is enormously helpful. When you’re at the range grinding through these drills, our Caddie AI acts as your on-demand coach. You don't have to guess if you’re actually staying in your posture better. You can take a video of your swing, send it Caddie, and simply ask: "Am I still coming out of the shot in this swing?" It will analyze the movement in seconds and give you the straightforward feedback you need to keep your practice sessions productive.
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