Why You Need This: In this video, I bust a popular golf alignment myth.

A lot of golfers get confused about their alignments, so I want to show you what's important with your alignment, and also what's not.

You'll really learn how your feet can lie.

I'm sure you've heard that to hit a draw, you need to align your left foot ahead of your right foot.

Sure, that can make it easier to hit a draw or a hook, but is that all it takes?

And should you mess with your feet alignment to hit the ball straight or left/right?

No.

As you'll see in the video, it's not that difficult to hit a slice when your feet are aligned for what most golfers would think would result in a draw.

To hit nice, consistently straight shots, focus on performing The Move in your downswing.

The Move refers to shallowing your club and rotating your clubface square.

This is much more important for your ball flight direction.

Don't get me wrong...

Your alignment does matter for making a consistent swing...

But don't focus on some crazy foot alignment.

What's really affecting your ball flight direction is your club path and clubface.

Watch this video now to bust a popular alignment myth and focus on the moves that matter most for your ball flight!

Golf Pros Featured:

Instructors Featured: Clay Ballard    

Video Duration: 8:03

Video Transcription:

Hey guys, and welcome back. In this video we’re going to talk a lot about alignment. This is something that a lot of people get confused on, I’m going to really get into depth of what’s important and what isn’t important.

We’re going to bust a little bit of a myth here. A lot of times – let me go over what the Top Speed Golf System is about. A lot of times when we’re working on things, we get wrapped up in these tiny details.

We want to get our feet perfectly aligned, if we don’t get them right within a millimeter of being perfectly square, or our posture is exactly perfect, our shoulders are perfect, our setup is perfect, and we can get really obsessed because there is so much information out there on golf.

With our grip, with every little tiny detail, that we want to get it all perfect. When we set up and then when we make a swing, we don’t get the type of shot that we want, and we can’t figure out why it is.

I used to believe that if I got set up perfectly, I had my perfect posture, my perfect alignment, everything was great, that from there, I could just go ahead and swing and everything would almost kind of happen on its own.

Like the swing was automatic from there. In reality, it never really happens. I did that, I got my perfect posture, I used to really work on getting everything perfect at the top of the backswing, and then I came down, and I didn’t hit those pure hit shots like I wanted.

That’s because the downswing is really the most important part of the golf swing. We’ve got to get those downswing movements correct, and we’ve got to get our path and our face angles correct as we’re coming through this ball.

I’m going to give you some tips on how to do this. Today I have my FlightScope out here, it’s measuring these shots I’m going to hit. I’m going to bust a couple of myths about what our alignment is going to do to our path and our curvature of the ball.

So first let’s just go over the general idea here, and this is correct. As I start to get more to the left, so this going perfectly parallel with my target.

As I get open and more to the left, it’s easier for me to swing to the left and to hit a little bit of a fade or even a slice. A lot of times you’ll see players with a big slice, get their alignment over her like this, then hit the banana ball back in the fairway.

It’s also the pretty much true on the opposite. If I get lined up over to the right, I’m going to have a tendency to want to get more to the inside and to really get my path going inside out.

I can go ahead and show you a couple of those, what those would look like. Let’s go ahead in the first one, I’m going to play a little bit of a draw here.

I’ll get my stance lined up to the right side, and I should have a path to the right, and this ball drawing back in toward the middle of the fairway.

There we go, really got that one hooking. Ended up about to where my target at the end, but that was really moving. That should be a perfect example. On that shot we’re going to see 230 carry, 280 total distance.

Oh, unfortunately it didn’t get my path, let’s go ahead and try one more, see if it’ll get my path on there.

Let’s try that out again. I’m going to line up to the right. Shoulders to the right, I’m going to really work on swinging here and letting those hands roll on over. So my face is going to actually be to the left of my path.

There we go. Didn’t get that one working as much, should have tried to turn that one over a little bit harder. Let’s see if it gets my path.

There we go, that time the path was 6.4 to the right. Now I could do the same thing and go to the left, you’ll see how that ball started to curve back from right to left.

As I get my path, or my path means the direction the club is swinging, more to the right, it’s easier to roll that face on over and to get the ball turning over from right to left.

So the same thing is happening if I hit the fade. I’m going to spare you guys the time here, and we’re going to assume that if I line up to the left, I’m going to be able to swing a little bit more to the left, and get that fade going back that way.

I could probably get my path going five or six degrees to the left, and get that fade going back in there.

So what about all the other shots, right?

Sometimes we’ll worry about getting our alignment perfect, and then our path will be way to the right. Let me prove to you that this can happen.

I’m going to go ahead, let’s actually line up to the right here. I’m going to get my feet way out to the right, my shoulders are lined up to the right at address.

I sliced the heck out of that one. That one went way over in the woods. That was a terrible golf shot. Let’s see what that one was. Hopefully got my path on that one.

Yeah, 11.4° to the left. So even though my feet were lined up this way, my shoulders were closed here at address, I was still able to get this club swinging way over top and to the left.

It shows you that alignment is important, it’s definitely easier when we get lined up to the left to hit a fade, we get lined up to the right to hit a draw, but it’s not everything.

What really matters in this is what we call The Move in our Top Speed Golf System. So we have five pieces, we talk about lag, The Move is very important to lag, we need to get the shaft basically shallowing out.

We need to get this club face, the back of my left hand’s starting to bow a little bit as we’re coming down. Look how that starts to close the club face.

You see that club face start to close on down, so now as I get closer to impact, it’s going to be easier to square up this club time and time again. If I can do that, then no matter my alignment I get a feel for what’s happening in my downswing.

I can line up to the right, and I can go ahead and on this swing I’m going to go ahead and I’m going to try to get that shaft shallowing out, get my left wrist bowing.

What that’s going to do here, if you pause halfway down, if I bow my left wrist this is going to kind of cup my right wrist, and that’s going to close this club face a little bit.

From there, that’s squaring up the club face in the downswing, so as I come through contact, now I can get everything almost imagine like the right palm of your hand is the club face.

I’m going to keep that working squarely through the ball to get this nice, straight shot. Here I’m going to go ahead and line up to the right, and let’s see if I can go ahead and get a fairly straight path and a good club face on this one.

There we go, pulled a little bit to the left, definitely OK, just on the left edge of the green. It’s tracking that one, let’s see if it will read it. 0.7° left, so almost dead straight on the path.

Even though my feet were way to the right, we’ll go ahead and hit one more before my iPad overheats there, pretty hot out here today. Hopefully it won’t turn off on us.

I’m going to do the exact same thing with feet a little bit open. Now again here, my feet are open, but I’m still going to have this feeling that I’m shallowing out this club in relationship to my target.

I could open up all the way over here, and I could still…I have a kind of a perception in my mind where I want this club to be moving in relationship to the target.

Shallow that out, meaning that my club is going this way, I don’t want to be coming in steep, and then I’m closing that club face down, and then I’m keeping everything moving on through to the target.

Here, same thing. Uh oh, we lost our FlightScope. Got a little too hot there. We’ll go ahead and hit one more shot.

I’ll tell you what, why don’t you go ahead and line up the camera, bring it over here about a foot so it’s perfectly in line with this ball going to the target. Then we should be able to see the first couple of feet if it takes off straight you guys will be able to see that I hit this pretty nice straight shot.

So I’m going to line up here this time, left, the opposite I did on the last one, but I’m still going to get this club to shallow out, still going to bow that face and get everything working squarely through the ball, and we should see it take off nice and straight.

There we go, I hammered that one right down the middle. That one was the best one of all. So you can see there even though I was open with my feet, that was about a two-yard draw, it couldn’t have been much more solid than that.

You guys don’t worry, I’m not saying, don’t take this the wrong way. Alignment is important, we should all be working on alignment, get it nice and consistent. But don’t think that that’s all there is to it.

I made that same mistake and for years I didn’t hit the ball as good I could have, start working on these downswing drills.

Start working on shallowing that shaft, getting the club face to work the way it should so you can deliver that club squarely through the ball every time. I’ve got a great bonus for you on The Move section.

If you go and watch The Move, for those of you that are members of the website, go ahead and watch the first videos that are in The Move section, we’re going to talk about exactly how to do this.