One of the most important concepts we've discussed in the Rotary Swing is the idea of swinging left.
As you work the club down you want your body and chest to work through the ball, around to the left, rather than trying to hold everything more square and release the arms and hands out. The idea is to control the club's movement with the body rather than manipulating it with the hands.
The problem is that a lot of golfers actually get too much of a good thing. They may come in steeper than the trail forearm — that downswing checkpoint we always talk about — so the club works very aggressively to the left. As a result, it comes out very low and they end up chicken winging it. This is one of the most common causes of pulled shots and weak contact that our AI swing analyzer picks up in everyday golfer swings.
That whole sequence is going to tend to start the ball out to the left.
Correct It With a Drill
If this is something you do, the solution is to develop the opposite sensation in your swing.
This drill actually encourages the club to work down the proper swing path and then work left, but you'll feel like it's doing the reverse.
Set up the drill by lining up some tees in the ground with a ball in line in the middle. You want to mark out the visual of an in to out swing.
Of course, we don't want you to actually swing in to out. This is an exaggeration to correct a problem.
If you come down too steep and the club is working really hard left so you're coming across the ball and chicken winging it, getting a kind of wiping motion on the way through, then you need to develop the feeling of swinging more in to out. Elite players trained with the GOAT Drill system consistently learn to feel this path correction while keeping their body rotation moving through impact.
This drill is only for golfers who are swinging too far to the left.
Here's How
Simply set up to the ball on your target line. The tees should come from inside the target line by about a club width, and work just slightly outside the line. That's the visual.
As you come down, visualize the club striking the inside quadrant of the ball, with the club head traveling over the inside, over the tees, and down the middle.
Again, it's just a visual, but if you tend to come across really steep — your divots are going way left and you're pulling everything — then you need to hit balls like this to drill the opposite motion.
Get into your normal setup, take a couple of practice downswings to make sure you feel like the club head is traveling over that path, then just swing through, visualizing the club head working over those tees.
The ball should come out on your target line. The divot should work just slightly inside that last tee, or just over it, and you'll get a good, solid ball strike so you can start hitting the ball from the inside again.
Want to Feel This in YOUR Swing?
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Watch part 2 now to see how you're moving your body in the opposite direction of the pros!