Hitting it straighter

Checking your grip, alignment, swing plane and path

by Bob Andrew

Shoulders Squared
Many golfers assume that if their toes are lined up parallel to the target line, that is all there is to alignment. But that is not enough. Your shoulders play a vital role in proper alignment. To ensure that your shoulders are neither open nor closed in relation to your target, hold the head of the club in your right hand and lay the shaft across your chest and left shoulder. Make sure the grip points parallel to your target line.

Parallel Grip
Your hands should work as a single unit to control the clubface. Regardless of whether your grip is "strong" (both hands turned more to the right) or "weak" (hands to the left), your hands should be parallel to one another. Check this by holding the club up in front of you at eye level. The creases formed by each thumb and forefinger should be parallel. If you tend to slice, turn the lines a bit to your right. If you hook, turn them to your left.

Round out your swing
The most common errant ball flight is the slice (from left to right for right-handed golfers). Usually, the slice is caused by an over-the-top swing motion in which the clubhead approaches the ball from outside the target line with a too-steep angle. To straighten out your ball flight and encourage a stabilizing draw, practice swinging the clubhead on a rounded arc so that it passes a foot or two over the ball. This baseball-like swing will help you groove a shallower swing plane, which encourages you to swing down from inside the target line, instead of with the slicer's outside-to-in swing.

Clubface on the Path
Many golfers with directional problems contact the ball with the clubface not directly pointed in the direction of the path of the swing. Usually to the outside and obviously, that leads to shots that slice away from your target. To counter this fault, practice hitting shots in which you try to close the clubface well before impact; the feel you want is that the clubface is actually looking directly at the ball about two feet before impact. Closing the clubface this early in the downswing prevents a last-gasp, flippy, handsy move at impact to try to get the clubface square. This feeling will result in a straighter, more penetrating ball flight.

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