Here's a secret that saves golfers a lot of confused range sessions: thin shots and fat shots are the same miss.
Both come from a low point that wanders. When the bottom of your swing arc lands behind the ball, you hit it fat. When the arc bottoms out too high, the leading edge catches the ball's equator and you send that stinging, knee-high bullet across the green. Same variable, two directions.
That's why they so often show up together. You chunk one, your brain quietly vows never to touch the turf again, and you pull up through the next one — blade. Then you overcorrect back down. The pattern isn't two flaws; it's one unstable measurement.
The variable is your head height
Your head is a reliable stand-in for the center of your swing. If it stays at a steady height from address to impact, the arc bottoms out in the same neighborhood every time. If it dives downward in the downswing, the arc digs early. If it rises — the pull-up — the arc lifts and you catch the ball thin.
Small movement is normal; every athletic swing has some. But when your head is changing height significantly on the way to the ball, clean contact turns into a coin flip, because you're asking your hands to re-find the ground on every single swing.
CoachVision tracks your head's height frame by frame from a normal phone video, so you can see whether you're a diver, a riser, or — most common — someone alternating between the two.
The drill — 9-to-3 Ladder
This is the single best strike drill in golf, and it earns that title by shrinking the swing until the low point has nowhere to hide.
Take a wedge. Swing your hands from hip height in the backswing (9 o'clock, if your body were a clock face) to hip height in the follow-through (3 o'clock). Smooth pace, quiet body, steady height. Your target on every rep: strike the ball, then brush the turf just after it — that brushing sound is your proof the low point sat in front of the ball.
Hit 20 balls this way: the first ten with the wedge, then ten more with a mid iron. The mid iron will test you — its longer shaft exposes any leftover diving or rising. If the brush disappears or the contact scatters, shrink the swing again until it comes back. That's the ladder: earn each rung.
Don't rush past how boring this drill feels. Boring is the point. You're teaching your body that contact isn't an event to be managed — it's a byproduct of a center that stays put.
Thin shots sting twice — once in the hands, once in the pride. But you're closer than the shot suggests: the same session that fixes your fat contact fixes this one, because they were never two problems to begin with.