Trace the Plane Line
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Do you tend to get "stuck" in the downswing? Do you hit blocks and quick hooks? Do you want to get the ball to start on your intended target line and stay there?. Improper and overly aggressive use of the body is typically the cause. In this video, I give you a simple drill and very important fundamental for the arms that you can work on both at the club and at home to start hitting perfectly straight shots.
- Better golfers often come from inside the plane line (higher handicap players tend to come over the top)
- Better players also tend to get stuck because they're using the upper body too much
- The solution is to keep the body quiet and rotate the arms
- Use a mirror and practice keeping your body square and slowly tracing the plane line
- Also use arm rotation to keep your elbow from getting too far ahead of the club
One of the problems that I work on with my better ball strikers is they tend to get stuck coming into impact.
That just means that I've got this little, basically a plane line here set up with this yellow guy.
You can see kind of the shaft plane where I want to come in to at impact.
What happens is a typical better golfer starts to come a little bit from the inside too much, And so the ball is always going to want to start to the right of the target line.
Unless they shut the face down in relationship to the path, and so we start getting balls that don't start on our line and have too much curvature to them.
My goal with every single tour player that I work with and better ball, striker and everybody, period, is to get their path zeroed out.
What I mean by that is that I want that club coming down with a zero degree path at impact.
This would be in to out a lot, 20 degrees in to out.
Typical high handicappers come over the top.
They're coming in, you know, 20 degrees out to in.
I want that path to be zero.
So I use a flight scope.
We have a launch monitor that we use to get specific, but you don't need a launch monitor to get really, really close with getting your path zeroed out.
The reason we do this, though, is to see that we want the ball to always start on line, with the minimal amount of curvature.
I want every single shot to start out exactly on my line and fly dead straight.
That's what RST is built around.
So I hear that quite a bit when I hit balls.
I had somebody just say the other day, like, I love how square you come into the ball.
And while he couldn't explain exactly what he was seeing, he could realize that my divots were really, really square, my club face was really square to impact, and my path was really square, and so the ball flies very straight and true.
And I'm not manipulating loft and club face angle and all those things to try and get the ball to come back to my target line.
I'm just wanting to hit it dead straight every time.
So with doing that, one of the important things that you can do is what I call tracing the plane line.
And so what that is, now you can have a, I just have a training aid here, but you can have just a shaft in the ground that mimics close to where you are at address.
It'll be a little bit more upright, but close to where you are at address.
And so what you want to do is start understanding the relationship of rotation of your arms and your body, and how that affects plane line.
So I'm going to do a couple of things here.
One, I'm going to show what the better players tend to do a little bit too much of.
And what that looks like is as they start coming down, they use their body really aggressively, really early.
The arms get trapped, and now I'm coming away from the inside.
And so they learn that they've got to try and flip their hands over really quick to bring the club back to square and bring the ball back on the target line.
And so that ball is going to always be a quick hook or a block or a push draw.
We don't want that.
We want it to be straight.
So what we've got, and then the other problem is that they tilt a little bit.
So you look at face on, if I just go to the top and then I pull my left shoulder really hard, my arms can't catch up again.
And that tilts the plane.
So my plane now goes from being on plane, I pull my left shoulder up, it drops underneath the plane.
Now higher handicappers, they all tend to want to do this.
So this is going to be a little bit different.
That's all typically due to body rotation.
So this is more specifically geared towards teaching a better player how to stop getting stuck.
But if you're a higher handicap player, you've got to go back and work on the other fundamental pieces of where you start working on this.
You're probably, you know, using your upper body too much.
You're not shifting your weight and so on and so forth.
So again, this is targeted towards a little bit better player.
So what you're going to find is that even if you do everything right, it's really easy to start getting stuck coming down where I'm going to start bashing into this guy.
You can see that my club shaft is no longer on plane.
It should be able to work right down this plane line all the way into impact.
The key to doing that is rotation of your arms.
So what that looks like is when I come down, I've got to do, I'm going to exaggerate it here.
So it's very visible what I'm doing.
My arms are going to be rotating this way.
So I'm going to exaggerate a couple of times.
As I come down, this is stuck.
All right.
So I just move my body.
My arms aren't rotating.
They're just kind of working with my body instead of my arms working on their own.
So now I'm going to exaggerate and I'm just going to rotate my arm this way, this type of movement.
Now as I come in, that you can see now brings the club.
This is too much, but out on top of the plane rather than from underneath.
So now if we tone that down a little bit, as I come down, you're going to see it go right through my forearm, trace right on top of the plane line.
But all I'm doing at this point is continuing to rotate my arm and my wrist to get the club to come out on plane.
In order for me to do that, my body has to basically take a nap.
I can't be spinning my body out.
Rotation inherently shallows out the swing.
So when you start rotating, that shallows you out and drops you to the inside.
That's a great way to hit a big hook.
You're going to feel like your body stays quiet and you rotate your arm and your wrist to bring the club out on plane.
So the best way to see it is to just set a shaft in the ground.
Or if you have something like this, where you can set up to do it, to trace down it.
And you can see now all I'm going to do is try and slowly trace down, oops, trace down that plane line all the way into impact.
I got a little crooked there.
All the way down back to the ball.
And so you're just going to do some drills, coming down and just working on keeping your body square and letting your arms work independent of your body.
So you can start getting the club to can now come out, goodness, right on top of the ball and square to the path rather than from the inside.
So again, this comes down to learning to rotate or I call spin the shaft.
When you're taking the club and twisting it, that rotates the club back out in front of you.
Another important key to this is you don't want to get your elbow way in front of your body too much.
That will also get the club stuck.
So as you're rotating it internally, you can see what this is going to do to my elbow.
That's going to take my elbow from being way in front.
You can get too far in front here and get stuck coming underneath.
If I rotate my arm this way, now my elbow is actually a little bit further back behind my hip.
Now again, for golfers who've never had lag in their life and they're like this coming down, We work on trying to get their arms a little bit more in front because we've got to get that arm firing to catch back up with the body.
They're using the body too much.
But if you're in a really good position, you can get too far into a good position and get stuck the other way.
So again, This rotation of your arm going this way brings the shaft back out in front and keeps your elbow from getting too far ahead of the club.
Because that's also a stuck position, as I mentioned.
So that looks like this.
And now I have tons and tons of lag, but I need to get rid of it because my arms move too far.
It's got to be releasing at this point.
And that's all this motion.
And that motion needs to happen gradually throughout the downswing.
So the best way to feel it again is just start tracing the plane line, rotating it down all the way into impact.
I'm going to knock this thing out before I'm done here.
All the way down into impact, until you start seeing in a mirror how you can see how the club comes down.
very, very square to the ball and allows you to release it on plane.
So spin that shaft coming down.
Just start rotating your arm, rotating your hand, And watch how it brings the club out on top of the plane, and how your body has to kind of take a nap.
It can't be just spinning through here.
The club's got to start accelerating and releasing and the body's got to slow down.
So the club can do that.
So spin the shaft coming down, work on the rotation, and pay attention how it alters the plane coming down.
And if you tend to get a little bit stuck and hit little push draws, you'll see how you're able to get the ball to start out online every time and fly dead square.
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