If you'd like to improve your golf game, you'll want to address a variety of issues that can affect your play, including your stance, equipment selection, strategy on the course and, not least of all, your swing. The key goal when swinging the club is to hit the ball to a certain area, and improving your swing path is key to improving your direction. Understanding the three swing paths and how they can hurt--or help--your game, will put you on a path to more birdies than bogeys.
Step 1
Practice an outside-to-inside swing path to learn how to push and fade. Learning how to fade will help you curve your ball around trees or into dog legs. It will also help you identify the causes of the more pronounced slice shot slice so you can correct them when you don't want to slice. A push moves in a more straight line from left to right, if you are a right-handed golfer, while a fade curves.
Stand closer to your ball to get your club traveling from outside of your shoulders to inside. Tee your ball farther back in your stance. Use a weaker grip, which has the palm of your lower hand facing more forward. Move your rear foot slightly forward to create an open stance. Reverse all of these to improve your swing if you are slicing.
Step 2
Practice an inside-to-outside swing path to learn how to pull and draw. Learning how to pull will help you send your ball in a straight line from right to left, if you are a right-handed golfer, while a draw curves slightly to the left.
Stand farther away from your ball to get your club traveling on an inside-to-outside swing path. Tee your ball farther up in your stance. Snap your wrists into your shot, turning your forearms over, earlier than normal. Move your rear foot slightly back to create a closed stance. Reverse all of these to improve your swing if you are hooking, which is a more acute draw.
Step 3
Practice a straight swing path to eliminate hooking and slicing. Beginning with the slice and hook will help you find the middle ground between each to help create a straight swing path. For example, once you know how far away or close the ball you should stand for slicing and hooking, you can place the ball in between those two extremes to create a straight swing path. Teeing the ball higher helps eliminate your slice, according top golf instructor David Leadbetter.
In addition to reversing the things that helped you slice or hook, you can create a straighter swing path with a correct backswing. Start your takeback by moving your shoulders backward, pushing your arms back, rather than starting the swing with your arms, pulling the shoulders back. This will help you coil your body fully and let your arms separate from your body naturally, lining up your body and arms for a swing that goes straight forward, rather than starting from the outside or inside.
Start your forward swing by opening your rear hip and pushing off the ground with your front leg. This will naturally drive your trailing shoulder forward, which will bring your arms forward. This motion is called the push-through motion of swinging, which create more power than the pull-through motion which results when your weight moves backward during he swing, according to biomechanist Dr. Ben Kibler, of the Lexington Clinic Sports Medicine Center.
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