Railway Tracks Help With Golf Alignment (Video) - by Pete Styles
Railway Tracks Help With Golf Alignment (Video) - by Pete Styles

So if we now know the importance of good and proper alignment, I think it's important that we discuss one of the most commonly used theories and methods in golf teaching is the visual imagery of railroad tracks. Now, we’re all familiar with railroad tracks, two steel bars so far apart but dead straight down the middle, and most importantly never merging and never meeting. So they don’t go out apart diverging, they don’t come in together or meet each other but stay the same distance apart and we can use that simple visualization as a golf practicing aid as well. So I’m going to take two alignment canes. Now, these don’t have to be alignment canes. If you got garden canes or even just spare golf clubs, you can lay them down in the same pattern. So the first one is going to be down the edge of the mat here, now that would be my ball to target line so that would be pointing exactly to the area you want to aim up, be that the hole or whatever I’ve got picked out in the middle of the fairway.

Now, the next cane is going to go down in front of my toes. And again, ideally pointing parallel to that cane like the two train lines, like the two train rails. Now, it’s important to notice that when we do this, the feet and therefore the body do not necessarily point exactly at target because exactly at target is where that cane’s pointing. So if this one was to point exactly the same as that, we’d probably have this end in a little bit and those two would eventually meet and merge up at the intended target points. Now, over the course of a 300-yard golf hole, the difference between here and parallel is just going to be that gap, whatever that is, two feet. So the two feet difference here is still going to be two feet apart all the way over there. That might not seem like a big problem. But let’s just imagine that we were taking a short putt and we had this as our ball to target line pointing at the hole, and then we had this one also pointing at the hole. So this is where my body is, this is where the golf ball is, we can see quite clearly that that isn’t going to work very well. That’s quite a big sort of an angle, a triangle effectively where my feet pointing in exactly the same direction as my club is going in. So I would like to keep this one parallel like the two train lines, now I can go ahead and make a putt that’s going to go in because my body is lined up parallel to my ball to target line but is not exactly the same as my ball to target line. And hopefully, that helps you understand the reasons why we use train lines as our idea in our visualization for good proper body alignment. 2016-05-12

So if we now know the importance of good and proper alignment, I think it's important that we discuss one of the most commonly used theories and methods in golf teaching is the visual imagery of railroad tracks. Now, we’re all familiar with railroad tracks, two steel bars so far apart but dead straight down the middle, and most importantly never merging and never meeting. So they don’t go out apart diverging, they don’t come in together or meet each other but stay the same distance apart and we can use that simple visualization as a golf practicing aid as well. So I’m going to take two alignment canes. Now, these don’t have to be alignment canes. If you got garden canes or even just spare golf clubs, you can lay them down in the same pattern. So the first one is going to be down the edge of the mat here, now that would be my ball to target line so that would be pointing exactly to the area you want to aim up, be that the hole or whatever I’ve got picked out in the middle of the fairway.

Now, the next cane is going to go down in front of my toes. And again, ideally pointing parallel to that cane like the two train lines, like the two train rails. Now, it’s important to notice that when we do this, the feet and therefore the body do not necessarily point exactly at target because exactly at target is where that cane’s pointing. So if this one was to point exactly the same as that, we’d probably have this end in a little bit and those two would eventually meet and merge up at the intended target points. Now, over the course of a 300-yard golf hole, the difference between here and parallel is just going to be that gap, whatever that is, two feet. So the two feet difference here is still going to be two feet apart all the way over there. That might not seem like a big problem. But let’s just imagine that we were taking a short putt and we had this as our ball to target line pointing at the hole, and then we had this one also pointing at the hole. So this is where my body is, this is where the golf ball is, we can see quite clearly that that isn’t going to work very well. That’s quite a big sort of an angle, a triangle effectively where my feet pointing in exactly the same direction as my club is going in. So I would like to keep this one parallel like the two train lines, now I can go ahead and make a putt that’s going to go in because my body is lined up parallel to my ball to target line but is not exactly the same as my ball to target line. And hopefully, that helps you understand the reasons why we use train lines as our idea in our visualization for good proper body alignment.