Why You Don't Hit Driver As Straight As You Should - Simply Do This

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Transcript Summary- 

How often do you step up with driver, hit one great shot down the middle, then the very next hole it slices or hooks — even though it feels like the same swing?

Most golfers then go searching for random tips online, but the real key to hitting straighter drives comes down to one thing: understanding face-to-path.

Every golf swing moves the club on a circular path. Good players keep that circle fairly straight and match the clubface to it, which keeps the ball flight consistent. Most amateurs, however, have circles that are too far left or right — and that’s what causes pulls, pushes, slices, and hooks.

So, the first step is at setup. Check your forearms. If your trail arm sits on top of your lead arm, you’ve already built in a slice path. Balance the arms so the face and forearms are lined up together — that’s your foundation for a straight drive.

Next, develop clubface awareness. Most golfers lose track of where the face is during the swing. Simple drills or feedback tools like HackMotion can help you feel when the face opens or closes so you can keep it square.

Finally, get your swing circle online. Imagine pouring water out of your lead ear on the backswing and out of your trail ear on the downswing. This helps your shoulders move on the right plane and keeps the circle directed toward the target.

Put those three together —

1️⃣ Align face and forearms,

2️⃣ Build clubface awareness, and

3️⃣ Keep your swing circle online —

and you’ll start hitting driver much straighter and more consistently, just like my student Bob did.

Full Transcript - How often do you grab your driver, you step onto the tee, and you hit a lovely drive straight down the middle of the fairway, but then maybe on the very next hole, you start seeing the ball slice off to the right or hook to the left with what you feel is exactly the same golf swing. Now, if you're anything like my students, what they will often do, they'll jump onto YouTube, and they'll start to try and figure out how to stop slicing driver? How to hit driver straight? In order to get that consistency, but often trying random golf tips that very rarely work long term. In this golf video, I want to share with you the one thing that I share with every single one of my students and it helps them hit driver so much straighter. In fact, no matter your age or ability, this is something you should all work on. I've just had a research student mine, Bob, come and see me, senior golfer, and in in his own admission has many, many injuries. In fact, is due a hip replacement. So, he has an unorthodox golf swing as a byproduct of all these different ailments, but that didn't stop us helping him hit driver longer and go from a big pull to the left every so often and a big slice to a beautifully straight driver shot. All from focusing on the exact golf tip I'm going to share with you in this video. And that one thing is understanding face to path. And if you can understand what I'm about to share with you, you will learn how to hit not just your driver, but every club so much straighter. So, what is face to path? Well, your golf club, as mine, when you're swinging, you're always creating some form of circle with this golf club. Now, with the better players, that circle is pretty straight. It's kind of pointing directly towards the target, right? What you'll also see with the good players is it doesn't just point towards the target. the face is also lined up to that circle. So when the club comes down, it's pretty square to circle. And that's how we hit a reasonably straight shot. It doesn't have to be perfect. Some of the good players can have a circle that's slightly angled this way and they create a little bend, but not much. Some players have the circles this way, point a little bit to the right, and create a curve that curves to the left. It doesn't matter, but they're in a very tight window. What I'm finding with amateurs that come and see me, and say this was the same with Bob, is is their circles are excessively one way or another. If they're excessively this way, we swing too much this way. If we line up that club face with that circle too much, we hit a ball that goes straight to the left. If we then open the face, we produce side spin on that slices out to the right. Vice versa, if we get our swing circles excessively heading over to the right and the face is aiming in that direction as well, we'll hit a push. If we then randomly close it, now we hit, we create a spin, we now start to create, look, a hook that flies off to the left hand side. So, we need to today, what we're going to do is going to help you get a swing circle that is much, much more online. And the second thing I'm going to teach you how then to line up the face to that circle so you can start to hit driver strike. So here's the first thing I want you to check because most people without you realizing you've already got a bad shot built in to your setup. Right? So the first thing I want you to look at is this. Look at the club face here. Right now for a lot of people they go look at that and go that's straight. Yeah. I don't understand why that club is the ball is slicing right because that club face lined up. I say, "Well, yeah, but take a look now at your forearms." And they look down and they go, "What am I looking at?" Well, look at this. The face is lined up to the target, but if you look from here, can you see that my lead arm? You can, right? But my trail arm is on top. So, my trail arm is above my lead arm. That then forms a circle look that is pointing left of where my face is pointing. So, without me realizing, a lot of my students realize, they have set up, look, a swing that's swinging to the left while the face is aiming towards a target. So, they've set up a swing that's going to create a slice without them even knowing, right? And what I want you to do now, if you can do this with me, you can feel how to set up correctly. So, when you do this, this is a slice setup, right? where the lead arm is pointing to the sky and the trail palm is pointing to the ground. What I want you to do now is simply reverse this process. Turn them like this. Now if we excessively do this, right, we have what I would class now look is the opposite, right? Lee arm on top, trail arm underneath, and this would be called a hook. Now the face is pointing towards the target. But now where are the forearms going? Now the lead arm is above my trail arm. Right? So now the path is heading to the right of where the face is going. This would create a hook. This is a great feeling. By the way, if you happen to slice, right? But what we're going to do is we're going to neutralize this. Right? What I want you to do now is this. To neutralize it, keep this position. Turn your lower arm, lower part of the arm, this section here, this way. Grip the club and take this arm, the lower part, and turn it this way. And now look, you have the face and the forearms beautifully lined up. So, what you're doing now right at the start of your swing is you're making sure that the face and the circle are more lined up and giving yourself the best opportunity. Look, to hit driver straight. So, that is step number one. We're going to turn them like this there. Turn that back. Grip the golf club. Turn this underneath. Turn the lower arm back down. Grip the golf club. Now, we're in position to hit that driver lovely and straight. Of course, you could ruin it from here, and I'm going to show you one thing to focus on in a second. But this lays the foundation for a beautifully straight drive.

So, step one, make sure that you at least the setup, you've got your face and those forearms lined up doing this drill. Right now, you and I both know that that is a great foundation. For many of my students, that works a treat, right? It really does. But you can obviously somehow lose it in the back swing and during the swing, right? So, what we as pros take for granted and a lot of coaches do is that we have an incredible skill and we have club face awareness, club head feel, right? A lot of my students don't. So what often happens is is they might take they might be set up beautifully here but then somehow they open their club face in the back swing or opening in the down swing and they don't realize they're doing it right. So couple things I want you to practice to kind of develop this skill. The first one you can do right in the comfort of your own home right is is I can close my eyes spin this shaft around and you know what that's straight right there. Perfect. Right? because I have feel, right? I have a feel. I've developed that over years of playing, right? But luckily, it doesn't have to take that long these days. We have technology and um certainly for a recent student of mine, Sarah, you know, she was basically getting the club face open at the top of a back swing. So, what I did is I just used HackMotion, a simple training device that helps students become aware of where their club face is. And the way it kind of works is when you get get yourself set up here, it sets up your address position here. And then when I take my back swing, hear that noise, it's telling me it's in the wrong place. Now it's the right place. Now I can't see that, but that sound and actually the vibration from Hack Motion is telling me that's where I need to be. Now for Sarah, this is all she really needed. Because if you have a face that's open at the top, you're going to either slice it miles over to the right or your body's going to react to that face and start swinging heavily to the left too, right? So, we want to make sure that we're in a great place. Using devices like Hack Motion will speed up your uh your rate at which you can develop this kind of feel of where that club face is. Now, what you might not have realized is what we've done so far is only done one thing. We've lined up the face and the paths together to help you, as we said, hit much, much straighter shots, but there's one thing I haven't covered yet, and it's very, very important. This is what we did with Bob. Yes, your face and path are lined up, but the problem is is if your circle is heading in this direction, and we've lined everything up, everything's perfect. Where would the ball go? That's right. Straight left. Likewise, if we line the face and the path up here and we swing in this direction, where would the bog go? That's right, straight but out to the right. So, if we don't fix the next thing, which is the circle and get this lined up, you will simply resort to flicking your wrists and opening up the face again. Make sense? So, let's just finish off now with one final really simple thing that you can work on to try and get that circle online every time. You've got the face to path lined up. Now in setup, you got some feel of where that face is. Okay, super important. Now to help you do this and keep it really really simple, I want to give you what I gave we gave Bob and actually what I mentioned on a recent video because it is super simple. So to have a circle that is kind of online, what you'll notice is people who have a really consistent arc, you'll see that the lead shoulder goes down and on the way back so that the shoulders work on a beautiful circle here. And as they're coming down into impact though, you'll see the trail shoulder now goes down here, right? To help the the shoulders work on a circle. But what I've personally found is with my students is it's quite hard to often feel these shoulders, right? So I just get them to imagine they're almost pouring water out of each ear. So the lead ear on the way back and then their trail ear on the way down. And it really helps them move their shoulders on a circle and therefore help them again keep that straight circle towards the target. Now with Bob, what you'll notice is the first thing he does is this lead shoulder doesn't go down. What he actually does, he starts to work around. So he pulls the club around here, then it goes down. So he creates a loop that throws all the energy of the club out. He comes down into impact here and he comes across the golf ball. because we've got his face and club lined up, he hits this straight pull to the left. So, all I did with Bob was super simple. We got himself set up here. I got him in a sense pouring water out of the lead ear. Get this lead shoulder working downwards on on the way back here. So, he was in a better place. He didn't need to come over and then just got him to continue to work the shoulders and the ear down towards the ground on the way through. As a byproduct, the ball simply goes straighter. Why? because everything is more lined up. Okay, so make sure your eyes are pointing down towards the ground here, right down towards the golf ball. And then just imagine you're pouring water out of your lead ear on the way back and your trail ear on the way down. The less flexible you are, the more you're going to have to move and tilt that head almost in this direction. The younger you are and the more flexible you are, you probably won't need your move your head very much at all. Okay, but all these things super super help. So set up, make sure the face to path are organized, develop a feel of that face, whether you do it sat on your living room or whether you're using hack motion. And then once you've done that, start to develop that circle here by pouring water out of both ears. Look, one, two, three. that will help you to line up the face to path and get that window so you can hit much much straighter drives. If you think this video is going to help, give it a thumbs up. Maybe share it with one of your friends. And remember, look, if you like the idea of having a hack motion, they're certainly one of my partners. Click in the description box below or even the top comment. I've got a a nice little discount for you. Um, and of course, look, if you're new to the channel, press that subscribe button and the bell. If you want to know how this applies to irons, click this video out right here. But until next week, have a wonderful golfing week.