Why You Need This: In this video, you'll discover how to hit a golf ball dead straight.

Focus is on the club path and club face angle.

Control those two parts of the swing and you'll be able to hit it dead straight.

In the video, I'll walk you through the steps it takes to control your club path and club face.

But, I must warn you...

The steps you'll learn will take you outside your comfort zone.

But the overall goal is to help you develop more awareness of your club so you can control your shots better.

First, let's work on your club path.

Close your club face and practice hitting shots with a club path that's severely in to out.

This should help you hook the ball.

Next, open up your club face and hit shots with an out-to-in club path.

You should be fading your shots.

Remember, the goal of this extreme exercise is get a better feel for your club path and club face.

Once you develop a better feel for the extreme shots, it'll become easier to make smaller adjustments later when you're trying to hit the ball straight.

For example, if your shot starts off straight, then turns left of the target, that means your club face is fine, but you're club path is a bit too much in to out.

Make a slight adjustment to your club path, and you'll start hitting the ball straight.

Watch this video now to finally learn exactly how to hit a golf ball dead straight!

Golf Pros Featured:

Instructors Featured: Clay Ballard    

Video Duration: 10:35

Video Transcription:

Hi guys, I’ve got a great video for you today on controlling your path and controlling your face angle in the golf swing. If we can control those two things, we can hit a dead straight shot.

I’m going to walk you through exactly how to do that. Now I will warn you, I’m going to take you way outside your comfort zone today.

You’re going to do some things that you’re going to feel very, very uncomfortable doing, but it’s going to help you to get much more awareness of our face and the path as we’re swinging through the golf ball and being able to train this.

The first thing we’re going to work on here is path. We need to be able to do this in a certain way, so I set up a stick and it’s in line with my ball. I picked a target about, you know, 100-120 yards in front. I’m hitting a 6 iron here, so I’m going to sail way past that target.

But I put a stick in line with my ball, directly in line with that target. I also put one on the ground here in line with my target, so you guys would be able to see this. We’re going to do a few drills that are rally going to help you to get aware of the path and the face.

It’s going to get a little crazy, but if you work through these drills and you practice them pretty regularly, you’re going to be able to learn how to control this.

So first off, let’s talk about what causes the ball to curve. Now when we’re hitting an iron, about 80 percent of the direction that the ball starts is going to be from the face angle. Let’s imagine that I’m coming through contact and my club is swinging out to the right.

My path of my club is swinging out to the right, about 10 yards to the right of the target. My face is perfectly toward the target. Well that means that since my ball is going to start 80 percent the direction of the face, my ball’s going to start about two yards to the right of the target.

So pretty much at the target, just barely to the right of it. Now the ball’s going to curve away from the path. Since my path, or the direction I was swinging the club was 10 yards to the right, my ball’s going to curve away from that.

That means I’m going to start just barely right of the target, and since my path was to the right, that means my ball is going to curve to the left. That would be how we hit a draw.

Now as a good rule of thumb, we can’t have an exact science, because there’s other factors in there like wind, and where you hit it on the club face itself. But a good rule of thumb is the ball is usually going to curve with an iron about twice as much as the difference between the face and the path.

If I swung again 10 yards to the right, my face was at the target, that ball started a couple yards to the right of the target. It’s going to curve in that 8 to 10-yard range to the left of the target.

So if you watch your ball flight and it starts out at the target and curves away from it, we know our path is to the right and it’s curving to the left.

If it curves say 20 yards, quite a big hook with an iron, we know that my face and path are pretty far apart. If it only curves one or two yards, we know my face and path are pretty close together.

The opposite’s going to happen for a fade. Now if I’m swinging to the left, we use that same example of me swinging to the left 10 yards, my face is at the target, my ball’s going to start a little left and then it’s going to curve to the right.

By setting up the stick this way, now we can practice a couple drills doing this. This is where you’re going to have to trust me a little bit and realize that you may not hit some good shots, but you’re going to get a lot of awareness of what you’re doing.

The first thing we’re going to do here, if you take your normal grip and you hold the club up in front of your body, we’ll see that the face is basically straight up and down, that’s my neutral grip.

What I want you to do is to loosen up your grip and twist the club in your hands until it’s about 30° closed. Now my club face is very, very closed.

Basically if I set this club on the ground 30° closed, I can take my grip and now this face is super, super hooded down. I could really hit a snap hook. I could hit a ball a mile to the left if I let up with the face this closed.

What I’m going do is I’m going to get used to tilting my path well to the right. Now if I do this, my face is set up closed, and now I feel like I’m going to tilt my body to the right. I’m going to have to put the ball a little farther back in my stance just to be able to reach it while I’m doing this.

I’m going to tilt my body to the right. Look how my left elbow kind of comes underneath like this. Now I’m in a position to where I can swing well out to the right. I could probably swing 40 or 50 yards out to the right, meaning my path is going way out to the right.

Now since I’m going so far that way, my face is actually going to be a little to the right of this stick. So if I do this, and I hit some shots doing that, my ball should clear this stick to the right side, and then it should hook well to the left.

That’s going to help you to get a feeling of what a big hook is like, we’re kind of cheating here a little bit to get a big hook.

I want you to go ahead and drop a few balls down right on this target line, get that club face really closed, get the ball a little farther back in your stance just so you’ll be able to reach it when you’re coming this far.

I want you to feel like you’re swinging out toward first base. My elbow is going to be more under this way, my right elbow, to allow me to swing out that direction.

I’m going to go ahead and hit some pretty big hooks here. It’s OK if my stance gets lined up just a little bit to the right as I’m doing this. Hopefully I’ll miss the stick to the right. There we go, I blocked that one a little too much to the right.

I’m really going to try to hook this next one, get it to curve maybe 20 or even 30 yards. So closed club face, ball back in the stance, I’m really swinging my path way out to the right. There we go, that ball hooked about 30 or 40 yards.

Since it started to the right of the stick, I know my face was pointing to the right of the stick. Since it hooked big-time, I know my path was well to the right. I’m going to go ahead and do that about maybe 15-20 times so I can really get that ball working that way.

Then we’re going to do the exact opposite. This is going to be really tough for a lot of you guys out there, to keep the ball, to get the ball to really start close to the stick and go this way. But what we’re going to do is the exact opposite where I open the face about 30°.

So now the face is wide open, and now I’m going to swing way to the left. I’m going to make sure that my club face is actually rotating to make sure that my ball starts just to the left of the stick.

If I just swing square, well my ball’s going to pop off way over there somewhere, so I’ve got to swing way to the left and get that big fade. Now I’m going to put the ball a little farther up in my stance. Again, the ball should start left of the stick, and really hit a big slice with this one.

There we go, that ball turned 10 to 20 yards to the right. So again, I would go ahead and do that, you know, 15-20 times. You don’t have to make a full swing, just do a three-quarter swing as you’re working with this.

Ideally what I want to do there, is I want to get those hooks, and I want to get those slices so I can feel the real extremes.

Once I’m comfortable with that, now I’m going to go ahead and lose this stick, because I wouldn’t want to be hitting this, and I’m going to watch my ball.

This time I’m going to go ahead and make a swing, and I’m just going to watch the flight of my ball and I’m going to realize that the ball starts where my face is pointing, and then curves away from my path. Since we just worked on both of these things, we should be able to fine-tune this.

Now let me go ahead, and I’m going to hit one here and I’ll tell you what the ball flight did and how I’m going to straighten this out to get a dead straight shot. Let’s go ahead and take a normal swing.

There we go, so that ball started just a hair to the left of the flag, and it drew a little bit. So I know my face was basically pointing just barely to the left and my path was a little too far to the right.

If I want to get that dead straight, my face was pretty good but I know my path was too much this way. I need to get a little bit more feeling like I’m swinging right to left, and that’s going to straighten out that ball flight.

I’m going to go ahead and try another one, see if I can hit it a little bit straighter. There you go, much straighter on that one. That one was almost perfect. That time the ball started about toward the target, and faded a little bit too much.

So since the ball starts to my face, started pretty straight, that’s good. My path, I over did it a little bit, I came a little bit too far right to left. Now I’m going to barely fine-tune that a little bit more. I’m going to feel like I’m swinging just a little bit less to the left and see what the result gives me there.

Let’s try one out. Oh, same thing again. Do one more. That time it faded a little bit too much. I’m going to try to get my path a little bit more to the right than that last one so that I get a dead straight shot.

There we go, dead straight, maybe curved a yard or two draw, but I can really fine-tune this. So all you have to know is where does my ball start, and which way is it curving. Starts to the face and curves away from the path.

If I start to get those balls to hook too much, I’m going to adjust my path just like we do with the stick to straighten that out. Play around with it until you get that dead straight shot, it’s going to help you get a lot of awareness of this club.

Do about 30 to 40 out to the right like we did at first, 30 or 40 to the left, and then spend the rest of the bucket trying to hit a dead straight shot, and constantly fine-tuning so that you’ll be able to get that down.

Now two last little tips here with your face angle. If my face keeps on coming in too open, meaning that the ball’s starting too far to the right, I want to feel like I’m releasing this toe and twisting that on over.

You’re looking at the butt end of this grip, I’m going to feel like I’m turning this like a clock. I’m letting that face turn on over. Now my hands are going to feel like, my left hand is going to feel like it’s this way, my right hand comes on top, and that closes the face.

So if you’re looking at this from down the line here, that’s going to roll this face on closed. That’s going to get my face more closed. The opposite of that is more open, I’m going to feel like the face is staying open like this.

Most people don’t have too much of a problem with that, but I’m just going to feel like the face stays a little bit more open, my hands don’t roll over as much to get that ball to start more to the right.

So pay attention to the face, pay attention to the path, and fine-tune those for a dead straight shot. You guys will really be playing a lot better golf, and you’ll get rid of those big misses out of bounds and in the water.

Good luck, work hard, I’ll see you all soon.