Why You Need This: Today you'll discover "How to Aim Correctly in Golf"

I'd be willing to bet that at some point you've hit a golf ball way off line...

...and then heard one of your playing partners say, "You were lined up over there."

Some days are easier than others to get lined up where you're trying to...

...but there are ways to help get your alignment set up perfectly.

In fact, there's a process you can go through (when you don't have anyone around to help you)...

...that can help ensure you're lined up where you think you are (at the 8:48 mark).

You'll also learn the relationship of your ball position to your lead foot with a driver vs an iron...

...and what changes with your stance when you go from a longer iron to a shorter iron.

This one is packed full of helpful nuggets that are going to make you a more consistent golfer...

...and help you get back on track on the days you're feeling "off"...

 

Golf Pros Featured:

Instructors Featured: Clay Ballard    Quentin Patterson    

Video Duration: 11:28

Video Transcription:

Clay Ballard: Ah, dag-gum, I’d been missing left all day long.

Quentin Patterson: Man, you are aimed that way. Don’t move. Put your feet down.

Clay: What do you mean?

Quentin: I’m going to put this down. You come back here and look at this, tell me where you’re aimed at?

Clay: Ah, I knew something was way off.

All right, so we’re having some fun there, but that’s a conversation that every single person has had with one of their playing partners, every person that’s ever played golf.

We’re going to dive into alignment today and talk about some of the mistakes that you can fall into. If you’re too open, or you’re too closed, and what you should look at there.

Now before I get into that, you really don’t have to be exactly correct with your alignment. I could be a little bit open with my stance and I could play a draw. I’ll actually prove it right now.

I’ll be a little open with my stance, actually significantly open with my stance, and then here I’m going to play a draw.

There you go, see that ball started down the right-center of the fairway and drew right back into the middle of the fairway.

Now, that doesn’t mean that you have to play a draw that way, I’m just saying your stance isn’t everything. Here’s what I would recommend.

When you’re playing well, notice where you’re lined up. When you’re making a really good, fundamentally solid swing, do you have a tendency being a little bit more open like Trevino?

Being square like tons of great players? Or being a little bit more closed, maybe like a Ben Hogan would be?

Learn your individual preference, and then check that when things get off to see if you’re setting up that way. Let me go talk about now, some of the things you can fall into when you don’t get lined up correctly.

A lot of times, especially if you tend to hit a fade, I’ll see players that start to get their stance more and more open.

The reason for that is, when that fade starts to left and fades to the middle of the fairway, if you over-fade, you’re always going to miss to the right, or you’re going to typically miss to the right.

So once you do that a few times, you start to go more and more left. So if I tend to go more and more left, my stance gets pointed this way, that’s going to exaggerate that bigger left to right curve on the golf ball.

You’re going to see here how this alignment stick, my feet are open to that, and that’s going to promote me coming more and more this way. Now that can really affect my distance.

You’ll see on that last drive, 116.8 miles an hour of club head speed, 317 total distance. Let me make the same swing speed swing here, but now I’m going to play a little bit more of a cut swing. Let’s give that a try.

All right, so I hit that one really solid, but because I faded because that face was open, I’m going to lose a little bit of distance. It’s not going to be a ton, but every yard matters. If you can get more yardage, that’s way better.

So 117.5, about the same swing speed. My carry distance went down and my total distance down, went to 282. So you can see when I get lined up too far left, especially if you’re someone that tends to slice, check that first.

Now here’s the thing that most people get wrong when they do that. They change their feet, but they don’t change their body.

So what happens is, if you’re a big slicer, you line up and your feet and your shoulders are both going left. You change your feet to be straight, but look at what the shoulders do.

Instead of being square here, they end up going back to the left again anyways. A lot of times I’ll see players that look like this.

They have a big slice, and this is their setup. Their shoulders are to the left and they just kinda stuck their feet out to the right.

I could have my feet be like this, if I’m open with my shoulders and my body, it’s still not going to be good for my consistency.

So the big thing to check there is once you square up your feet, also square up your shoulders. Feel like if you’re looking from face on, have a little bit of a tilt so my head is looking down a little bit at the back of the ball.

That’s what we call the Stable Fluid Spine at address when we’re talking about that in the Top Speed Golf System. Also, feel like your right shoulder is a little lower and a little bit more to the right than your left.

So now I’m in a pretty good position. If I was to draw a line down my shoulders, it’s going to be pretty square to where my feet are. This makes it much easier to hit a draw.

I’m going to feel like I go a little bit more that way, now I really feel like I can hit that big draw or that nice baby draw and really hammer it.

All right, so dead straight. Got rid of that slice, just in the right center of the fairway. That maybe drew a few yards, you look at the distance on that one, back up to 323, so hammered pretty hard.

Now on the opposite direction, let’s say that I tend to line up too far to the right. Again, one of the things you might be doing is lining up to the right and over hooking it.

So if you line up to the right and you start hitting hooks, hooks, hooks, hooks, and you want to straighten that out. Getting your feet a little more square would help.

Sometimes what players will do again, is they’ll line their feet up square, but then they’ll get their body lined up way right, so now my shoulders are pointing over here. I feel like I’m really coming from the inside.

Well, I’m going to still continue to hook it if I do it that way. We can see how that was a big swinging hook that I hit into the left rough because my shoulders were still tilted that way.

Once you check your feet alignment, make sure that your shoulder alignment is square there too. I don’t want that way over here, or way over here, where things can get off track, I’m going to start hitting those big fades, and those big hooks.

Let’s go to the other details here that are really important with this. One of them I already mentioned.

Once I get my feet and my shoulders square, I want to make sure that I have a little bit of tilt, and my right shoulder is slightly lower than my left shoulder.

If I take this club and I put it on my belt buckle, and put the top of the club at my shirt buttons, I want to tilt away until that line is going to the inside of my left leg.

So again, my shirt buttons are behind my belt buckle, and my spine angle’s tilted slightly away. The reason this is important is because I have to be in this position to be able to get lag and to release that club out in front of this golf ball.

If I’m straight up and down, I’m going to cast. So I want to have a little bit of tilt there. I want to feel like my head is behind the golf ball, and now I’m set up in a pretty dag-gone good position to give this a good rip.

There we go, nice and straight, right down the middle of the fairway. So from there, I’m in a good position with my body, I’m in a good position with my feet, I’m in a good position with my shoulders.

Finally, I want to be in a good position with the ball. I want to really make sure that this ball is toward the instep of my left foot if I’m hitting a driver. That way I can make sure that I’m hitting a little bit more up on it, or at least level with the ball.

Now when I switch over to an iron, if I want to be lined up correctly, I’m going to play the ball a little bit farther back. It doesn’t change that much when I go from a long iron to a mid iron.

So a long iron, the ball is essentially pretty much in the middle of my stance, maybe a hair, a ball, up in my stance, and I have a wider stance here, because this is a longer iron.

Now when I go to a shorter iron, the ball position is still going to be pretty much the same spot, the only change is my right foot is going to be a little closer to my left foot, not quite as wide with my stance when I’m hitting a pitching wedge.

So really the relationship to your left foot and the ball, stays the same with all shots off the ground, whether it’s a 3 wood, whether it’s a 4 iron, or whether it’s a pitching wedge.

The only difference is, as I narrow up my stance, that’s going to make it look a little farther back in my stance because this foot is going from there to there.

So the ball position in relationship to your left foot with all clubs off the ground is going to be pretty much universally the same. If I can do that, then things get a lot easier.

I hit a driver, I can hit irons, I get lined up nicely like I am when I’m playing well. When things get off track, those would be the very first things that I would check.

So now, how do I actually figure out where I’m aimed if I don’t have somebody telling me? Let me walk you through the best way to do that.

First off, when you’re on a driving range, always make sure that you have an alignment stick on the ground. Your eyes are going to tend to shift.

What feels square to you may be way to the right, or it may be way to the left over time. We’re always kind of shifting a little bit.

The good news is, I really never see anybody that aims up way to the right and then way to the left, and then way to the right, way to the left. We have one thing that’s a preference.

So even if you’re only going to hit 10 balls on the driving range before you play, you put this alignment stick down toward your target.

When you set up and look down at your feet in relationship to that stick, you’re going to see if your lined up too far to the right that day, or too far to the left. So that helps out a ton.

Once I start to understand my preference that day, then I can adjust it if I’m not hitting very well.

Once I get out on the course, I would recommend lining up this golf ball, standing behind it, lining it up with the target in the distance, and picking a spot out on the ground in front of the golf ball.

What I can do now is as I set up and address this golf ball, I’m going to align my club face with that spot right out in front.

This is going to be me stepping and not taking my stance yet. When I take my stance, I’m going to look toward the distance.

What happens here, is if I look toward the distance and naturally let my feet get in alignment, I’m going to be pretty dag-gone close to being good because I’m looking at my target in the distance.

The worst thing you can do is going to get your alignment way off.

Even if you line up this spot here, if I’m looking at this golf ball and I take my stance, I could really get off angle there, because I really don’t have a good feel for where my target is in the distance.

So I always want to be looking at the target in the distance as I take my stance, take my alignment. That’s really going to help things.

Then finally, what we talked about earlier in this video, make sure I have a little bit of tilt. If I’m no tilt, straight up and down leaning left, my shoulders are going to be open.

If I’m way too much tilt and I’m way over here like this, my shoulders are going to be too closed and pointing to the right. So a little tiny bit of a tilt, and now I’m in the perfect set up.

So face first, line it up toward the spot in front. Look at the target, line up your feet. From there, little bit of tilt and man, I’m a great position to really let this one fly.

Now one of the things I mentioned in this video is getting that spine angle correct. That’s what I call the number one fundamental in golf.

If I can get my spine angle tilted slightly away from the target, now I can just rotate around my spine in the backswing, and in the downswing.

My head stays more still, my contact with the ground is much more consistent when I’m hitting the irons, my alignment, whether I’m right or left gets much more consistent when I’m hitting all my clubs.

So that’s where I would start first. If you’re struggling with your game right now, or if you just want to get pin-point accuracy and be able to hit the ground over and over the same point, you want to be able to hit your drive straight, that’s the very first thing I’d look at.

If you want to ingrain that for a lifetime, go to the instruction tab, click on the Top Speed Golf System, and then work your way through the Stable Fluid Spine.

Level one, you’re going to get more familiar with this, you’re going to feel better with your clubs. You’re going to start hitting some good shots, but it’s not ingrained yet.

Once you go to level two and level three, that’s when it’s really going to get ingrained for a lifetime, to where you just step up to the golf ball and it’s already good.

You don’t even have to think about it, it’s completely unconscious at that time. So best of luck, I can’t wait to see you in the Stable Fluid Spine, and to help you start playing some of your best golf.

Let’s go ahead and get started.