Why You Need This:

In this video, you’ll discover the difference between a pull hook and a snap hook.

This is the first video in my Never Hook Again Series that focuses on identifying what’s causing you to hook and on how to help you get rid of your hook.

The hook is among the most misunderstood mishits in golf because there are really 2 types of hooks…

• Pull hook
• Snap hook

With a pull hook, you’re actually swinging your club to the left so the fix will entail changing your club path to a more in-to-out path.

A snap hook occurs when you swing too far to the right, and the fix is going to be swinging more to the left.

So the pull hook and the snap hook often get confused because there are opposite fixes.

In this video, you’ll learn how to identify what kind of hook you have so you can focus on the appropriate fix.

Later videos in my Never Hook Again Series get into much more detail about hooking the ball.

First, start out by watching this video to learn about the dreaded hook and begin your journey on straightening out your shots!

What's Covered: What causes a hook, path, face angle, and ball spin theory

Golf Pros Featured:

Instructors Featured: Clay Ballard    

Video Duration: 13:16

Video Transcription:

Hey guys, welcome back. I’ve got a great video for you today on one of the most confusing topics in golf, what I feel is the most confusing topic in golf. That’s the hook.

The reason it’s so confusing is there’s two different types of hooks. We can have a pull hook or a snap hook.

With a pull hook, we’re actually swinging to the left, so the fix is going to be to swing more to the right. With the snap hook, we’re swinging to the right and the fix is going to be to swing more to the left as a general idea.

So very, very confusing, because there’s an opposite fix for each one. So in this video I’m going to talk about how to identify do I have a pull hook or a pull draw, or do I have a snap hook? Which way is my club moving?

I’ve got some great easy tips that are going to allow you to identify this once and for all for yourself, and then a great drill to help you eliminate this and to start getting on the track.

Now later on in this series, we’re going to add some more detail to these videos. So if it’s a pull draw, I’ve got a couple videos for you with the pull draw.

Then also for the snap hook, I’ve got some videos to get you straightened out. If you struggle with those hooks, watch this series, you’ll be struggling no more.

Let’s go ahead and get started.

All right, so first let’s talk about the difference between a pull draw and a snap hook. First, what happens when we hook anything.

Any time we’re getting a hook that means that the hook is when the ball is curving from right to left. That could be a draw or a hook, and usually it’s starting to the left and moving even farther to the left.

First let’s talk about what a pull draw is, and a pull draw is when your path is to the left. So in order to get that right to left curvature on the ball, our path has to be to the right of our face angle.

Let me explain what this means. Everything that dictates where the ball’s going to go as we play golf is what’s happening right as our face contacts the golf ball.

Let’s imagine straight ahead toward the green out there in the distance, let’s imagine that my club face is going a good 30 yards to the left of my target at contact.

So I’m straight ahead here, my face is really closed down, it’s going 30 yards to the left. Now, that ball is going to start about 75 to 80 percent the direction that the face is pointing.

No matter which shot we have, it depends a little bit different on the club, so a pitching wedge a little bit less than with a driver. But just keep in mind that the ball is going to start pretty much wherever the face is pointing at contact.

Now it’s going to curve away from the path. So my face at contact was 30 yards to the left, and let’s pretend that my path was also to the left, but not quite as much as the face.

So this ball is going to start 75 or 80 percent the direction of the face, this first stick here. Then it’s going to curve away from the path. My path is to the right, that ball’s going to start left toward the face, and then curve away from the path which is even farther to the right.

That ball’s going to be kind of a pull hook, starting left and going even further to the left. So let me go ahead and demonstrate this really quick. I’ve got my FlightScope out here, I’m going to take a swing with a 6 iron just to demonstrate this.

We’re going to look at my path going to the left, and my face even farther to the left. This is going to start left and curve even a little bit more. Let’s try that out.

There we go, so that ball started to the left, curved even more, didn’t have a lot of hook on it, so I know my face and path are probably pretty close.

But even with that example, that was enough to get it out of the fairway. So I definitely would have missed the green if I was going into the green. Let’s take a look at my path numbers here.

We’ll see that my club path, so the direction the club was swinging was 4.7 to the left. So a little bit to the left there. Then my club face was 5° left, so my face was even farther to the left of my path. So exactly like we talked about in the example.

The bigger the difference in those numbers, the more the ball’s going to curve. So that one didn’t hook a whole lot. We can see it’s fairly straight on the screen, but it got a few yards of draw on there.

If I turn the face over even more, it’s going to start out farther left and then hook even farther into the trees. You do that with your driver, and it’s going to be 20 or 30 yards into the rough.

So that’s the first scenario which I like to call a pull draw. So my path, the direction that I’m moving the club through contact is going to the left.

Now very similar to this would be a snap hook. Sometimes it’s very difficult to tell the difference. Now on a snap hook, that ball’s still starting a little bit to the left.

Let’s imagine again, that my face at contact is going 30°, 30 yards to the left, not 30°, that would be a lot. So 30 yards to the left. But this time instead of the path also being to the left, let’s bring the path over here on out to the right.

So now I’m swinging the direction my club is moving, is out kind of toward the right side of the fairway, or even the right rough, but my face is still turned down 30° to the left.

Well that ball, again, is going to start about 75-80 percent the direction of the face, so it’s going to start almost the exact same direction that that last ball did, but now since there’s so much difference between these two angles, you’re going to get a lot more curvature on it.

It’s going to start the same direction as the last one, instead of having a few yards of draw, it’s really going to hook off the planet there, and we’ll go ahead and try one of these out.

Let’s imagine I’m going to really exaggerate. My path is going to be way over to the right, and I’m going to let this kind of snap hook as much as I can for a 6 iron, and we’ll see what that looks like on my FlightScope.

There we go, so that one really hooked. Started a little farther to the right of the last one, but really ended up even farther to the left. So I had a lot of curvature on that one.

All right, so there my path was 4° to the right, meaning that my club was moving to the right and my face was 4.4° to the left. So again, my path was to the right, my face was to the left, and you could see that one really started to curve.

So that’s how we identify what’s going to be a pull draw versus a snap hook. I’ve got several things that I want you to look at. So we’re trying to figure out is my path to the right, or is my path to the left when I’m hitting that hook?

A good way to think about this is, let’s first look at my divot. If I have a big divot, let’s look down here. If I’m hitting a ball, a pull draw, my divot is going to be shooting out to the left.

So I have this stick down here toward my target, and now I’m coming over the top, I’m swinging to the left of the closed face and getting that pull draw, then what I’m going to see is my divot is going to be pointing to the left of the direction that I’m lined up.

Really easy to tell if you’re doing that one. Now if I’m hitting a snap hook, my divot is going to be going to the right. Now if you pick the ball clean like I did on these last couple, you’re not always going to be able to tell your divot, or if you’re hitting a driver, you’re not going to be able to tell your divot.

So another way to really look at this, how much curvature did I get on the ball? On the first one, where I swung to the left, I was over the top. I swung to the left, the ball’s not going to curve a lot.

If you do pull it and draw it, it’s just going to be a few yards. Usually if it’s curving less than let’s say 7 or 8 yards, it’s a pull draw, meaning that it’s starting left and doesn’t have a lot of curvature on it.

That’s because both the face and the path were both going to the left, and since there isn’t very much difference in those two angles, it’s not going to create a lot of spin on the ball. You’re not going to get that ball to turn over a lot.

Now the second thing to look at, or also with that, if I’m hitting the snap hook, now all of a sudden my path is to the right, my face is to the left, I’m getting a bigger separation of those angles and getting more spin.

So usually if your ball, as a general rule of thumb, if it’s curving more than say 10 yards right to left, you’re probably looking at a snap hook, or you’re probably looking at that path going on out to the right as what’s causing the trouble.

Now the final ting here that we’re going to look at, is where is my elbow plane, and where is my club in relationship to my elbow plane.

Let’s go ahead and line up this toward the target, and let’s imagine I’m setting up here, and I had to hit a few golf balls, my FlightScope timed out here.

But let’s imagine that I’m setting up to a golf ball right here. I’m going to draw a line, this is looking down my target, and when I’m setting up my camera, I’m going to go ahead and draw a line down my toes and then shooting out toward the target in the distance.

I want to really make sure what we’re doing here now, is making sure the camera is about waist high, lining up down my toes into the target, and this is going to allow me to measure this elbow plane really, really easily.

So here, what’s happening in the downswing? If I draw a line from the hosel of the club up to the bottom of my right elbow, in the downswing, if I’m hitting a pull draw, usually I’m coming down steeper, I’m above this elbow plane.

My club’s working outside of it, and then working in to the left. That’s an over the top, same thing with the slice, except I’m rolling the face rather than holding that off.

If I’m hitting a snap hook, where my path is more to the right, I’m going to tend to see this coming inside this elbow plane.

So if you videotape that, you know, use a swing app, I use Hudl Technique a lot of times, draw a line from the hosel of the club up through the elbow. If your club is coming inside that elbow plane, that line, it’s usually going to be a snap hook or a path to the right.

If my club is starting down over top of that line, it’s going to be a pull hook with my path to the left.

So once we’ve properly identified this, do we have the pull hook, or the pull draw, or do we have the snap hook, now we’re going to go ahead and fix this path.

I’ve got a simple drill to go ahead and get you guys started with this, and then you’ll be well on your way, and I’ll come at you with a lot more detail in the next few videos.

Now that we know which one we have, let’s go ahead and get started with a simple drill that’s going to help you to fix this. If we had the over the top, the pull draw, so our path is going to the left, what I need to do is feel my path going more to the right.

So I’ve got this stick on the ground lined up to my target out in the distance, and from where I’m hitting this golf ball, if I hit a dead straight shot, it should smack right into this stick.

So if I’m hitting that pull draw, my path is going left, what I’m going to focus on is to make sure first my alignment is good, and then I’m going to work on coming a little bit more to the inside.

A lot of times if I’m hitting that pull draw, you may find something like this. My feet may already be a little bit lined up to the left, my shoulders may be lined up to the left, and now I’m coming over the top and hitting that pull draw.

That’s the very first thing I want to check. Are my feet in good position? That’s why I have this stick on the ground, I want to make sure that my feet are either square to the target or if I’m hitting that pull draw, I may even cheat, get a little bit lined up to the right.

Then I also want to make sure that my shoulders are tilted away from the target, so we talk about this in the Stable, Fluid Spine in the Top Speed Golf System on the website, we really get you tilted away from the target like this.

That’s going to help me to square up my shoulders. So if I’m lined up like this almost toward the target with my upper body, that’s going to gear me in a way that I’m going to tend to swing to the left. As I start to get tilted more to the right, I’m going to swing a little bit more inside out.

Watch what that looks like here. I’m going to line up my feet basically straight ahead. I’m going to tilt to the left toward the target with my upper body, and now look how open my shoulders are.

I’m geared up and away where I’m going to swing to the left. Now let’s go ahead and tilt back a little bit more to the right, and now my shoulders are lined up a little bit more inside. I feel like I can easily swing on out to the right a little bit better.

So now, I know that I want to get rid of that over the top, and I’m just going to try to hit some balls that start to the right of that stick and then draw back.

There we go, just like that. Nice, easy swings. We’re not trying to kill these balls, and I can see that that ball started to the right of the stick, so I know I’m in good shape.

Now the opposite of that would be if I’m hitting that snap hook, I’m going too far out to the right. I need to swing a little bit more to the left.

So again, I’m going to check my alignment. Maybe if I’m hitting the snap hook, I’m lined up way over here, and then I’m really turning it on over. I want to get my alignment pretty square, and I may be going too far the other way.

I may be getting too far this way and making it swing inside out which would look like this. Now I’m swinging more that way. I want to make sure that I have that good stable fluid spine, about 6° tilted away.

Just a little bit tilted away, and now I’m going to try to swing more to the left and I’m going to feel like I’m hitting a cut around the left side of this stick. So I’m swinging left, having the face more open, and I’m going to see if I can get it to start to the left of that stick. There we go, little bit to the left.

Work on those drills, hit a few shots. Identify which one that you have, and then go ahead and throw a stick out in front of you. If you’re hitting the pull draw, I’ve got to get the ball starting out to the right of the stick.

If I’m hitting the snap hook, I’m going to go ahead and feel like I’m swinging to the left of the stick, but I’ve really got to make sure that that ball fades back.

I don’t want to have a draw on that ball, I want to feel like this face is staying open as I’m coming through, so that my path is more left and my face is more open. So the exact opposite of what the pull hook, or the snap hook usually is.

Work on those drills, get about 20 correct shots to get you started on the baseline, and in the next few videos I’ll go into great step-by-step drills on how to really iron this out once and for all, so you’ll never have to struggle with those hooks again.

I’ll see you guys soon.