You will see a lot of quick fixes for fixing a slice. Some work, some don’t. Some have a short shelf life and only make it one or two holes.
If you want long-term relief from your slice you have to do two things:
- First, you have to find and fix the cause of the slice, what is making you deliver the club with a face that is too open coming down and generally too out to and hitting the outside of the ball.
- Second, after you fix the cause, you have to learn or develop a new movement pattern to deliver the club to the inside of the ball.
We see many golfers that come to us wanting to cure a weak slice or cut. It’s not unusual to work with golfers needing to add some speed or power to their game! In this Pro Work episode we dove deep into the work and journey we have been on with Josh, our Pro Work student this month, who came to us first at one of our Retreats and now is seeing the benefits of the work he has done on the range, course and in the gym.
How we went from slices to baby draws
The first thing we did was fix Josh’s set up and grip. Josh’s grip and posture pre-set him in a position that would make it almost impossible to hit a draw.
With the help of Mark Hackett, Golf Digest Best in State Teacher, we got the grip more in the fingers of his left hand. Josh tended to put the club too much in the palm of his left hand and he couldn’t hinge and fold his arm correctly. The club tended to lift outside going back and the face twisted open.
By learning to get the grip more in the fingers Josh was able to learn to hinge the club correctly and allow his right arm to work more efficiently and help square the face and help the club swing more around his body so he had a better chance to deliver the club to the inside of the ball. Here’s a good video showing how to hinge the club and square the face on the takeaway from our first session with Josh.
With better posture, we helped Josh move better his pelvis and hips in a way that would allow him to more easily rotate the body, and the club, more around his body, which made it easier for him to drop the club in the slot.
Because of Josh’s poor posture and grip, his golf swing had too much lateral movement. He tended to slide his hips off the ball, lift the club and twist the face open, which made it impossible for him to come to the inside part of the ball and deliver the club. After his grip and posture changes he was ready to get the club into a better position at the top.
How we got Josh to a better position at the top to hit a draw!
After fixing his set up, Aaron McConley and I helped Josh stabilize his lower body by using a resistance band around his knees.
This is one of my favorite tricks to help people who slice or slide off the ball and teach them to turn and load into trail leg. You simply use of hip resistance band as you’ll see in the video below. Pull it up just above your knees. The trick here is to keep pressure from both knees, pushing out while you move the club back. Initiate the backswing with your chest or sternum moving the club while pushing out with your knees against the band.
What the band does when you push your core and stabilize your lower body is that it reduces your ability to shift and slide off the ball. One of the biggest things I see—folks slice is too much, shift and slide and they don’t have a stable enough lower body. Once we stabilized and helped him learn to turn his chest deeper back, which wound his right hip back more, we could create a place at the top of Josh’s backswing where he could learn to unwind and find the inside part of the ball.
Key shallow the club move: Left knee towards ball
Now that we have Josh’s clubface square, and he’s turned into his right hip and got the club in a position that we can get to the inside of the ball, we had to change Josh’s sequence out of the top of the swing.
Like most golfers whose shot pattern is a weaker fade because of a club path that’s too out-to-in with a clubface that’s open to that path is that the downswing is out of sequence. By that what I mean, is it from the top of his swing he started the downswing with his upper body rather than his lower body. The result was a club that got too far to the outside of the ball had him get onto his front leg too soon and then, as a result, his upper body would back out of the shot falling back on his trail leg.
The move that we taught Josh to learn to shallow was learning how to change his sequence out of the top. Here’s what we did once again we use the resistance band around the knees and doing first slow-motion swings from the top. We had Josh feel like his left knee moved toward the target and stretch the band even more from the top of the swing. What this did was allowed him to shift pressure to the left foot and to have his lower body go first and separate from his upper body, which gave the club time to fall and shallow and find the inside of the ball.
Tour players know how to use the ground and unwind from the ground up on the downswing. Learning to change the sequence of your downswing and how to move or shift pressure correctly so you can find the inside of the ball can be tricky and tough to learn. However, this band drill helped Josh pick it up very quickly and it can help you too!
It was actually quite remarkable and there are some really cool video clips that show how much change was made in a short period of time by changing how he shifted pressure, learned to separate his lower body and changed the sequence out of the top.
The last part of the process was learning to improve his rotation through the ball and also help Josh learn to transfer the work he’s done to paying benefits with lower scores on the course.
How to make the changes stick
One of the hardest things is to learn a new move in a golf swing. What makes it so difficult is that when you put a club in your hand and go full speed your brain goes into performance mode and does what you know how to do, which is your old swing. So in order to make the change and make it last you need to do lots of slow motion drills, which we did. We also used an exercise throwing a med ball which allowed Josh to develop a feel for improved rotation through the ball. By taking the club and ball away it helped Josh learn the new movement and most importantly develop a feel for what the new move is. I think this is critical for taking swing changes to the course.
The better you can hone in on what the new moves “feels” like for you the better chance you can take it to the golf course. Great players know what their “good” feels like and have an innate ability to go on the course and try and make swings “feel” that way. This can help you take your changes to the course as well. Watch the process here as we took the club and ball away from Josh so he could figure out what it felt like to add rotation through the ball and allow the cup to shallow and hit draws. As you will hear in the video Josh was pretty excited when he went from a nine degree out-to-in path to a three degree in-to-out path.
The message to anyone wanting to make a big change and fix their ball flight is to fix the “why you do it” first then train your body to move in a different plane and movement pattern. When you do this, you can make a big change like we did here!