Why You Need This: How would you like to Turn Your Slice into a Draw?

Have you tried in the past and given up hope?

Did you try to change your alignment by pointing your feet to the right, and that didn't work?

Have you tried to point your shoulders more to the right to help get that draw and still couldn't get it to work?

The over the top motion still sneaks into your swing no matter how hard you try....

You've even tried "releasing the club", but that pesky fade is here to stay.

What if I told you your right big toe, back belt loop, and right hand knuckles could solve all your problems and get you a powerful fade?

That's exactly what we will do in this video.

Let's get started.....

Golf Pros Featured:

Instructors Featured: Clay Ballard    

Video Duration: 22:01

Video Transcription:

Let me ask you if you’ve had this experience before. Maybe you’re struggling getting a little bit of a slice, it doesn’t have to be a huge slice, maybe it’s just barely the ball’s starting to barely leak to the right.

Do you feel like when you swing really hard, even if you catch it really solid, the ball just doesn’t go quite as far as what you’re seeing with your competitors.

You hit it right on the sweet spot, it sounds good, it feels good, but then it really just doesn’t get the distance like you’d like for it to have.

You’ve probably even tried to fix coming more to the inside, swinging a little bit more inside out. We’ve all heard that before. You’ve tried it out, I almost promise you you’ve tried that out dozens of times.

It didn’t really work quite that well for you, we worked on releasing that golf club, releasing the face, turning it over, maybe that hasn’t work as well for you either.

If that sounds like you, if that sounds like the symptoms you’re having, this is going to be the perfect video for you.

Now where most people focus on to fix the slice is what the club is doing itself. We want the club to swing more out to the right, we want the club to turn on over, but the part that we’re missing is the part that controls the club which is our body.

Now I’ve got a great set of drills that I’m going to work you guys through. We’re going to talk about some tricks on how to set up your feet, your hips, your shoulders. Some things you may not have heard before, that are going to make hitting that draw a lot easier.

Let’s go ahead and get started.

OK, so let’s jump right in here. Now in this video, I’m going to do something a little bit different. We’re going to talk about one of the tools that I use on a daily basis that I would never give a lesson without, and really has opened up my eyes to the science of what’s happening through your golf swing.

Really helped me to become a much better teacher, and that’s my FlightScope. This is their newest version of the radar, it’s called the X3, and this thing is pretty dag-gone cool.

It’s an expensive piece of equipment, one of those will run you about $18,000 if you want to buy one yourself from FlightScope.

FlightScope’s the brand, but this is a radar that emits a radar field and it sends out something crazy like 10 million electromagnetic waves per second.

What that does, is it shoots out in front of that box and it’s tracking everything that’s happening through this golf ball here.

So whenever I go to hit a golf shot, it’s bouncing those waves off this club head. It’s finding which direction the club head’s moving. Is it moving to the right or to the left?

How fast it’s going. What’s the angle on the face? It’s measuring the ball as it flies through the air. It actually bounces little waves off the seam in the middle of the golf ball.

So when a golf ball is made, it has two pieces and in the middle there’s a little seam. It’s a little tiny bit thicker than the rest of the ball, and this radar is so precise, it tracks that to figure out how much spin is on the golf ball.

It locks onto that golf ball and tracks it all the way through the air, so when it lands out there, hopefully 300 yards from here, it’s going to show exactly what that did the entire flight.

So if the wind pushes it one way or another, this little machine is tracking that entire thing. So it’s telling me all kinds of really good information that I can use for my teaching.

In this video, we’re going to go over some of these numbers because I think they’re pretty interesting, I think you guys would like to see this stuff.

Then we’re also going to talk about how you can get the same general idea without expensive equipment, you can just do it right with your eyes, and be looking at how your ball is flying, and knowing what to adjust at contact.

So let’s dive right into this. First let’s hit this bad slice, the one that falls out of the air, the one that’s not getting you the distance that you want to have.

One thing that I look at, or three pieces that this is going to help me with. Two of those are what’s called face and path. So which direction is my face pointing, is it pointing to the right, or to the left at contact.

This machine’s going to tell me exactly what the face is doing. Which direction is my club swinging? So am I coming over the top and swinging to the left? It’s going to tell me exactly how much it’s moving to the left.

Then I use this Doctor Scholl’s Odor-X foot spray powder. I get them off Amazon, they’re just a few bucks for a can. I spray this on the club face, and it puts a white powder on the club face, and this is going to show me where I contact the golf ball.

That’s the third piece that’s going to determine if there’s a slice. Now typically, whenever you’re coming over the top and you have that bad slice motion, you’re going to tend to hit a little bit more low and on the heel of the golf club.

The reason for that is, when you’re coming over the top, that heel, if you look at my club here, the heel is leading the way and I tend to hit off that heel side to maximize my ability just to hit the ball at all, when I have that over the top move.

That’s one of the things we’ll look for here in this video, when I make this over the top swing, do I get a little bit more contact on the heel.

When I do that, this face actually twists when you hit the ball and it creates a little bit more left to right spin. If you hit it on the heel, that’s going to make the ball spin even more, you’re going to lose even more distance.

So we’ve talked about it about enough here, let’s go ahead and hit one. Let’s do this bad move, and what I’m going to do is I’m going to do the wrong way.

I’m going to go over in the rest of this video the right ways to do this, but I’m going to start from the ground up.

My right foot is going to be angled in a little bit. So I’m going to take my right toe and angle it in. I’m going to take my hips and bump them back away from the target a little bit. Don’t worry, I’ll get into all the details of this here in a little bit.

I’m going to put my right shoulder high, my right elbow out, and my right hand on top. Now when I set up my body in this way, it’s almost impossible to do anything other than hit a big huge slice.

So let’s get set up in the incorrect way. I can feel dead on this ball is going to do nothing good, I’m probably going to slice the heck out of this thing. Let’s hit one on my FlightScope and see what numbers it spits out.

All right, so that one really had a big slice on it. Now let’s take a look at the contact point here. You’ll see when I sprayed it up with this powder that the contact was low and off the heel.

Now as I mentioned, anything on the left side of the face or toward the heel side, is going to get that ball to curve even more. So that ball really started to turn from left to right.

Now when you’re making that slice, what we’re also going to see is my path and my face are going to do a certain pattern when that happens.

So if I look here, my path was – this is a very extreme slice – my path was 24.7° to the left. That means that the direction this club head was moving as it was coming through that ball, was 24° to the left.

Now to give you a frame of reference, I want to be under 3° either direction, either to the left or to the right, which would be kind of like PGA Tour caliber shots.

So if I can swing and be less than 3°, or basically almost swinging dead straight, that’s when you’re going to really be able to transfer the most energy into the golf ball.

So 24° to the left, that was a big old slice there, and a lot of that had to do with how I had my body set up which I’ll get to here in a second.

Now the second piece of this, what happens is, if you have a pattern of getting your body set up in a way where you’re going to swing to the left, if I was to release this face and the face was to be square the direction that I’m swinging, or my face and my path were going both to the left, that ball is going to go out of bounds over here by these houses.

So it’s just going to shoot straight left and keep on going that way. After you’ve done a few of these, you learn that OK, I have to have my face a little bit open in order to get that ball to curve back to the fairway.

You’ll notice here, I actually, I think I may have hit the right edge of the fairway with this swing. It did perform, and it went where it was supposed to go, but I lost a ton of distance, I lost swing speed, and had a lot of curve on there.

I’ll see my face angle, was 25° to the right. What that means is, I swung 24° to the left, and my face was pointing down the middle of the fairway, or down the direction this radar is lined up, and that ball started a little left of my face and then just curved across the fairway into the right side.

Now most people might say well, you know Clay, that’s great. Why can’t I just play my slice? I already got it going for me, can’t I just get as consistent with my slice as I could with a straight shot?

The problem is, is this face angle. Now if I’m swinging that much to the left, if I release the face a little too much, that’s going to be way over there to the left.

My face really wants to go more to the left when that’s happening. If I hold it open a little bit too much, that ball starts to really curve a ton, and it goes way over here.

Tons of curve and goes over into the right trees, I have to have my face just perfectly right because there’s so much spin on the ball when I’m cutting across it that much to get it to land in the fairway. Your margin for error goes way, way down when we’re doing this.

You’ll also notice it’s a little tougher for me to swing fast when I’m doing that. 109 miles an hour, I’m usually up in the mid 115 to 120, somewhere around in there. I lost some distance there.

My carry distance was 207, that’s almost 90 yards shorter than my normal carry distance would be. So I swung what I felt like was pretty hard, but because of the way my body was set up, I just could not hit the ball the way I wanted to.

Now let’s go ahead, let’s hit another shot, and let me tweak my body positions to where we’re going to end up at the end of this video before I go through these drills, and let’s see the differences that this an have.

So imagine, same person, the same physical ability here, but with the incorrect motion, I’m losing about 100 yards of distance, most likely.

Let’s go ahead and let one rip here with my draw stance, I’m going to tweak my foot, adjust my hips, my shoulder’s going to be slightly adjusted, my elbow, and my hand, and now I’m in a position to where it’s going to be a lot easier for me to crank a big draw out there.

All right, that slice swing kind of got me out of whack. I believe that ball may have drew just a couple yards, which would be about perfect. If I can get that ball to be just turning over slightly from right to left, that’s going to be pretty good.

It looked like it may have been almost dead straight, I’ll hit another one when I give the example of the draw videos, but let’s just see what that could do to the distance.

Back to my normal club head speed, 116 miles per hour on that one, pretty good. So I picked up 6 or 7 miles an hour of club head speed by getting my body in a position where it could be more powerful and releasing that club out in front of me.

My path went from 24° left, now it was 1.4° left. Imagine a clock face. So you have all these minutes on a clock. One minute on a clock face is about 6°.

So we’re talking a fraction of one minute, that’s how accurate you have to be in golf sometimes, but I’m going to teach you how to get a little more accurate on this.

My face was just a little tiny bit open, 2.6° to the right. Remember I said anything less than 3° is the golden zone, that’s where we want to be.

So there, I was less than 3° of zero, and what we saw off my shot shape, is that ball started almost down the dead center of the fairway.

It may have had a little tiny bit of a fade on it, I had a little bit of bad body swing in there from the first one that I did, but it’s right in the middle of the fairway. If we get within 5° or 6°, then that’s when we’re going to see a moderate amount of curve.

So let’s say I’m swinging, let’s say we don’t have this radar out here, and I want to know about how much I’m swinging left. The first one started left of the fairway, and then curved all the way across the fairway.

That’s way too much. I’m more than 10° left or right when I get that much curve. Let’s say that I was more like 5° or 6° to the left. My ball’s now going to start at the edge of the fairway and curve to the middle.

So about a half the fairway’s length of curve, or maybe it starts in the middle of the fairway and curves to the right. Any time it curves, just about a half of a fairway width, that’s telling you you’re probably within 5° to 6° of zero, or centered.

Even if you don’t have this machine, if you just watch your ball flight, you can start to get some good feedback on which direction your club is moving, and how much off center it’s moving.

If I’m going just 5° or 6° of curve, or 5 or 6 yards of curve, or less like I saw with that last shot, then I’m inside that 3°, that’s what the PGA Tour guys are doing, which is really good.

So that’s all great information to know, we see how this FlightScope can be so helpful, and the thing that I love about this, is if you ever have an opportunity to get on one, I highly recommend it because I can make an adjustment.

I can make a change, what I feel like is a better swing, and then it’s going to give me immediate feedback, was it actually better, was what I thought was happening actually happening, or was I off track. So it’s really cool.

Now let’s go ahead, let’s talk about what we’re going to do to get that draw. So I hit one fairly straight there, but I’m not really happy with that, we want to get that ball to turn over a good 3 or 4 yards, if not a little bit more than that.

So the first trick, and when I see a lot of people go off track is, the right foot. Now when I angle my right foot in, so my right foot you can imagine it being straight forward there.

When I angle my right foot in, or let’s start with this, what you probably typically have been told when you have a slice, is get your stance more to the right and swing inside out.

But if I angle my right foot in, so it’s straight with the camera, or even a little bit toward the fairway, even if I turn my feet this way, what ends up happening is the rest of my body gets angled to the left.

You can still see my hips are going left, my shoulders are going left, and my arms, my forearms are going to the left. So even though my feet are angled that way, the rest of my body’s still pointing to the left, and that makes it really tough to hit that draw.

So what I want you guys to do, is not only to put your feet a little bit to the right, or line them up a little bit to the right, but I actually want you to open your right foot a little bit to help exaggerate with this.

What that does is that forces my hips to get a little bit more closed. As I rotate this way, my hips rotate that way. My shoulders also tend to rotate a little bit more that way. Then my forearms tend to go a little bit more that way.

So let’s try this out. I’m going to exaggerate here, get my feet to the right, open up that right foot, that’s a really good trick that I’ve found that can help you guys get that path and swing direction more out to the right. So let’s give that one a whirl.

There we go, nice little draw on that one. We could see there, started down the center of the fairway, it only had a few degrees of draw on it.

I’m going to guess that was less than 3° or 4°, my path was within 3° or 4° of straight, and my face angle was within 3° or 4° of straight, just based on what that ball flight did without seeing the FlightScope here.

So when I look at this, we saw 116 miles an hour club head speed again, nice little draw right down the left-center fairway. That one went to 305, so picked up a little bit of distance there.

My club path was 0.7° to the right. My club face was 0.7° closed, or to the left of my path. So that was a perfect draw swing, and the only reason it turned over a little bit more to the left, was because I was very slightly off the toe here. Remember that helps you to get a little bit of a draw.

Now the next piece, I’m going to put these next two pieces together here. So we’ve talked about we don’t just want to get our stance to the right, we also want to get our hips and our shoulders and our body to the right.

So we’ve got our stance to the right, we’ve opened up our right foot. That’s going to help. Imagine you have the beltloop in the center of the back of your pants here.

What I want to do, is I want to bump that toward the target, and I want to get my hips a little bit more closed as this happens. So as I bump my hips to the right, that’s going to close my shoulders.

If I put a club across this, we can see now my shoulders are a little bit more closed and pointed to the right. So that’s the next two tips that I want you guys to focus on.

Don’t stop with the feet, get the hips a little bump toward the target, and get the shoulders a little bit more to the right.

Now the mistake that I see a lot of players when they try to close their hips or their shoulders, what they end up doing is they kind of close their shoulders this way, or they’ll close their hips a little bit.

But they won’t close their shoulders, or they’ll tilt their shoulders right, I’ll kind of drop my right shoulder down, but I won’t turn it to the right. What I want you to do is a little bit different than that.

Take your entire hips here, and turn those like you’re taking the back beltloop of your pants and you’re going to face more toward the target. Then take your shoulders, actually have that more pointed to the right.

So now I’m going to feel like my right arm is much more under the club. So everything’s more to the right there. Let’s see if I can get a little bit more of a draw. I’m going to exaggerate, and see if I can get that ball to turn over even a slight bit more right to left.

Oh, another good one straight. So I had a little bit of an inside-out path, maybe drew a tiny bit, but didn’t do too much. I just had a little bit inside-out path, hey, I’ll take that all day long.

Not a ton of draw, almost like a bullet dead straight, but I bet my path was a little bit to the right there like we were going for.

So my path was basically dead straight 0.8° left, so almost less than a degree from zero. My face was just a little bit open, so just right-center is all that one went.

What that’s telling me there, and I think is what a lot of people are struggling with when they’re trying to exaggerate this, is that I’m lining up my body to the right more, but the piece I’m missing is getting that club and handle to turn on over.

That’s what this last piece, this one, the other piece is the feet, the hips, the shoulders, they help to give the general path to be straighter or more to the right. This last piece is what’s going to guarantee that you get that draw.

So here, what I’m going to do is I’m going to take my right elbow, and I’m going to put it more underneath. If you imagine my elbow pointing out.

If I have my elbow pointing out like this, back toward the camera, and not tucked under like that, that’s going to put my right side of my body higher and it’s going to make me want to swing across the ball in that direction.

What I want to do here, is I want to take my right elbow, and I want to tuck it under. So my right elbow’s now kind of pointing toward my right hip, Hogan talked about this a lot.

That’s going to really guarantee that my shoulders are to the right, and that’s going to make it almost impossible for me to do anything but to swing a little bit more out to the right.

Also want to feel like with that elbow in, that right elbow is lower than my left arm. If you want to really guarantee you get that draw, get that right arm under the left arm.

Now I’m really getting to where I’m going to make it very easy to swing out to the right. Then here’s the final piece, maybe you’ve been trying to release that club head, and get that face to turn on over and release the tow like you see the pros doing, a lot of that has to do with the right hand.

When I have my hands straight ahead like this, I want it to be turned under the club.

So when I feel like my knuckles of my right hand, instead of having if I struggle with a slice, instead of having those pointing directly back to the right, I want to feel like my knuckles are now pointed more down to the ground there.

When I put all these together, my feet are to the right, my right foot is splayed out. That makes things a lot easier. My back beltloop is bumped toward the target.

My shoulders are bumped a little to the right. My right arm is under, and my knuckles are down on my right hand, this really makes it almost impossible to do anything but to deliver that club a little inside out and to get that club face to roll on over.

So here, I’m going to exaggerate a little bit. Let’s get that hook. I’ve been hitting mostly straight shots, or fairly straight shots.

Let’s get one that really turns over, and on this one, I’m going to try to get that ball to turn over a good 5 or 10 yards. Let’s go ahead and give it a whirl.

There we go. So that time I exaggerated a little bit. I saw that ball turn from right to left about a half a fairway’s distance, so now I know my path was probably inside out, around 5° or maybe a little bit more.

Tough to know for sure without having the FlightScope, but let’s let it tell us here. We’ll see there my path was 4.6° to the right.

Remember again, I said that ball curved about a half of fairway’s width, that’s telling me I’m probably around that 5° off of center. My path was 4.6° to the right, so that’s exactly what we were guessing there.

My club face was a little bit closed in releasing, it was 3.8° to the left of the direction I was swinging, making that ball turn over from right to left.

So those are the things that I think make golf a lot easier when we’ve all tried to swing more to the right, we’ve all tried to turn over the face and get that ball to curve.

But until we get our body into position to make that easy, it’s going to be very difficult to do. So follow those steps and make sure that you get that path moving inside-out and really feel it.

The last tip I’ll leave you with here, if you still continue to struggle with this, feel like the club face itself is going to wrap around the outside of the golf ball.

If I have the golf ball, I want to feel like my club face is coming to the outside of that golf ball to really close down and get that ball to really turn over from right to left.

I promise you, you follow these, even if you don’t have a FlightScope, if you don’t have the luxury of being on this machine, you’re going to get some great shots, you’re going to get some really nice draws.

Now I don’t want you to stop right there. If you’re a member of the website, what I want you to do is to build this to last a lifetime.

Now in this video, we talked about a lot of ways to set up to get you in the proper position to hit a nice draw.

What we didn’t go over is how that relates to your spine angle, and this is what I call the Stable Fluid Spine in the Top Speed Golf System, as many of you already know.

As we get that tilted away, that’s putting my body into a position where it makes it very easy to do this. So these tips that I gave you here today, they got your spine tilted away from the target slightly, so that I can deliver the club more from an inside path.

Then I can release the club out in front of my body, instead of casting from the top and coming over the top as I’m swinging.

If we want to ingrain that, I want that to just be muscle memory, to have effortlessly just make a swing and that automatically to happen, we need to work through the Stable Fluid Spine system.

So start out at level 1, go there right now, check out that first video. Get your spine angle into the correct address position and then start doing some reps with that.

As you work through the second video, the third video, and then the second level and third level, it becomes completely natural.

This video was great to get you started if you are struggling with that over the top, that slice. This is a quick way to get your entire body set up more inside, to get that path promoted out to the right.

But if I really want to ingrain it, I can’t stop with this video, I’ve got to keep on going and building that Stable Fluid Spine to last me a lifetime.

Best of luck, I can’t wait to help you with your swing. I’ll see you in the Stable Fluid Spine.