The pull hook is one of the nastiest ball flights in the game of golf.

While plenty of players spend years trying to get rid of the slice, a pull hook is arguably a harder ball flight to live with. Sure, it isn’t as common as the slice, but that doesn’t matter to those who are afflicted. If you happen to be dealing with the pull hooks at the moment, you simply want to get rid of this problem as quickly as possible. Forget about shooting low scores – it’s hard to even enjoy playing this game when you are pull hooking many of your shots.

In this article, we are going to talk about the causes and cures of pull hooks. Most players who struggle with the pull hooks run into trouble because of one of a few specific problems. Once you understand that list and know what to look for in your own game, you’ll have a much better chance of getting back on track. Once we have covered what it is that can cause a pull hook to occur, we’ll move on to providing some tips on how you can move past this struggle. You shouldn’t expect anything to come easy in this process, but you can expect to eventually make your pull hooks a thing of the past.

In case you are not familiar, we should take a moment to provide a simple pull hook definition. This is a shot which starts to the left of the intended target line (for a right-handed golfer) and then proceeds to hook even farther to the left. The origin of the name is pretty obvious – the shot is a combination of a pull and a hook. Either one of those mistakes on their own can leave your ball in a bad spot. Combining them into a single ball flight is almost sure to lead to trouble.

So, what is it that makes a pull hook such a damaging ball flight? Let’s break this question down for a moment before we get started. Imagine you are playing a tee shot with your driver on a relatively straight par four. Your plan for the shot is to aim slightly to the left of the middle of the fairway so you can use a fade to bring the ball back to the center of the short grass. This is a ball flight pattern that works for you on a regular basis, and you consider it your go-to shot.

However, on this particular hole, you wind up hitting a pull hook instead of a fade. That means the ball starts to the left of your intended target line – which was already to the left of center – and then the ball hooks from that point. Quite obviously, this is a shot which is going to miss way left of the fairway. You may wind up in a water hazard, a fairway bunker, or even out of bounds. And, since a hook usually has less backspin than a slice, this is a shot which is likely to bounce and roll significantly after it lands. Whatever the case, it’s highly unlikely that you’ll be happy with the final result of the shot.

All of the content below is based on a right-handed golfer. If you happen to play left-handed, please take a moment to reverse the directions as necessary.

How a Pull Hook Occurs

Far too many golfers fail to understand how ball flights are created. If you are going to take your game seriously, you need to take some time to understand why the ball flies the way it does. Understanding ball flights doesn’t mean you are going to hit quality shots each and every time, but it will help you make adjustments to your swing, both on the range and on the course. Since this article is all about the pull hook, we are going to take some time in this section to discuss what has to happen in order for a pull hook to be created.

First, let’s back up a bit and cover some of the basics on the topic of ball flights in general. There are two distinct elements you need to understand on this subject – the initial path of the shot when it leaves your club, and the shape of the shot as it flies through the air. You can have many different combinations of these two things, depending on how your swing comes together. For instance, you could hit a great shot by starting the ball out to the right but then drawing it back toward the target. On the other hand, you could hit a poor shot by starting the ball on the same line (out to the right) but then having it fade even farther to the right. Only when you plan out your starting line and your shot shape just right will you be able to come away with a shot that you can be happy with.

Generally speaking, it is the path of your swing that is responsible for the starting line of the shot, while the angle of the face is going to determine the curve. So, if you swing directly down the target line, your shot should start out heading perfectly at the target. If the face happened to be square at impact, you will hit a straight shot which flies precisely for the target you picked out (this is extremely hard to do, by the way). Or, if the face is open or shut at impact, you’ll get some degree of fade or draw instead. If you are struggling to start the ball on the right line, you have a swing path problem. If you are having trouble getting the ball to curve as you would like, you have a face angle problem. Understanding this simple distinction will go a long way towards helping you solve your swing issues.

At this point, we have established that your swing path will cause the ball to head in a certain direction, and the angle of the face will decide how the ball is going to curve after it gets up into the air. So, what about pull hooks? It should be pretty easy to put together the pieces now that you have a basic understanding of this topic as a whole. The ‘pull’ half of the puzzle is going to be caused by a swing path that moves across the ball from outside-in. This is a common path mistake for amateur golfers to make. Then, for the second half of the puzzle – the hook - the club face is going to need to be closed significantly in relationship to the target line. By combining an outside-in path with a closed face, you’ll come away with a dreaded pull hook.

If you have been hitting pull hooks on a consistent basis, it should be a relief to finally have some understanding of what is going on in your game. Sure, you still have a long way to go in order to actually fix this issue, but understanding the problem is the first step. You know that your swing is coming across the ball, and you know the club face is in a closed position. Take the time to learn how to correct both of those issues and you’ll significantly improve your level of play.

Causes of the Pull Hook

It’s one thing to understand why a shot may result in a pull hook – it’s another thing to understand the underlying technical faults which may lead to such an outcome. Knowing that a pull hook is the result of a closed club face and an outside-in swing path is a good start, but that knowledge alone isn’t going to do you much good. To go to another level, you’ll need to figure out which mistakes in your swing are leading to the trouble.

In this section, we are going to highlight several potential causes of the pull hook. You probably aren’t making all of the mistakes below. In fact, you may be making only one or two of these mistakes. However, even running into trouble on just one or two of these points could be enough to produce a pull hook on a consistent basis.

• An inside takeaway. One of the biggest causes of a pull hook is something that you might not think of at first, unless you are rather experienced in this game. As we have established, one of the mistakes you must make in order to hit a pull hook is swinging across the ball from outside-in. Believe it or not, it is often players who swing back too far to the inside during the takeaway that end up coming across the ball at the bottom of the swing. This issue could have an entire article all to itself, but let’s quickly walk through what happens here. When you swing back too far to the inside, there is very little room between your body and the club. By the time you get up to the top of the backswing, your arms are in close to your body and the whole swing feels ‘crowded’. To make some space, you’ll more than likely push the club away from your body during the transition to the downswing, which is known as an ‘over-the-top’ move. At this point, you’ll be above the proper swing plane and there won’t be much you can do to save the shot. The club is going to move across the ball from outside-in, and the shot will start to the left of your target line. The only question now is what shape the shot will take as it flies, and that is going to be determined by the position of the face at impact. If you are currently struggling with an inside takeaway, fixing this relatively simple mistake can go a long way toward straightening out your shots.
• Failure to rotate away from the target. An idea backswing is one which rotates nicely away from the target, with the shoulders doing the majority of the work. This rotation is going to serve a couple of purposes. First, it is going to prepare you to rotate back to the left in the downswing, which is how you will create most of your power. Also, this rotation is going to open up the club face, which is essential if you are going to return to a relatively square position at the bottom of the swing. Some players who hit pull hooks never manage to rotate correctly going back away from the ball. Instead, these players just lift the club up with their arms, keeping their shoulders in place and failing to rotate the club head properly. This kind of swing is doomed to fail right from the start. The club face will be dramatically closed, and a hook is almost inevitable. If the player uses an outside-in swing path to go along with that closed face, you can be sure a pull hook will be the outcome.
• Poor lower body rotation in the downswing. Again, we see that rotation can be a problem. This time, however, we are talking about the downswing, and we are talking specifically about the lower body. On the way down into impact, you should be turning your lower body aggressively toward the target. If you fail to make this rotation properly, you are not going to get into the right position to strike the shot. Your hips should be turning hard to the left, and your legs should be going along for the ride. Without this turn, you are going to quickly bring the possibility of a pull hook into play. Basically, the downswing rotation of your lower body is what allows the club to get into a good position to strike the ball while swinging down the target line. Without that rotation, you’ll be forced to swing from the outside-in, since there will be no room to attack from the inside. At the same time, you might feel that you need to use your hands more aggressively through the ball, since your legs didn’t provide you with any power. Of course, this will make matters worse, as you’ll shut down the club face and a pull hook will become a real possibility.

If any of the three points listed above sound familiar, you will know exactly what you should be working on during an upcoming practice session. The sooner you can get down to work on taking the pull hook out of your game, the sooner you can move past this problem and look forward to better things on the links.

Getting on the Right Track

Quite obviously, the way to work past your pull hook pattern is to correct the errors that you are making in your golf swing. That’s easy enough to say, but it certainly is not easy to do. You have to accurately diagnose the problems you are having in your swing, and then you have to spend the necessary time on the range to work out those issues. It’s absolutely possible to leave your pull hook behind, but you shouldn’t expect this to be simple.

One of the biggest keys here is accurately identifying the problems in your swing that are leading to the pull hook. We touched on three possibilities above, but we can’t know for sure what is causing your problem without seeing you swing the club. And, as the person making the swing, you can’t really see for yourself what is going on. Toward that end, we have two suggestions to accurately assess your swing and make a plan for how you’ll move forward.

• Use video. As the first option, try recording your swing on video so you can watch it back and get a good perspective on how the club and your body are working together to hit each shot. As a friend to record your swing from the ‘down-the-line’ angle, meaning the camera should be on an extension of the target line, at least a few feet back from where you are swinging. This is a great angle because it captures you, the target, and the club all in the same shot, making it easy to evaluate your performance. Specifically, watch the path of your takeaway and the way the club moves through the transition from backswing to downswing.
• Take a lesson. The more powerful of these two options is to take a lesson from a local teaching pro. By working with a pro, you’ll be able to receive valuable advice from an experienced teacher who knows all about pull hooks (and every other kind of poor shot). You’ll have to pay for a lesson, of course, but that should be seen as an investment in the future of your game. Be sure to tell the pro that you are dealing with pull hooks so he or she can watch for patterns in your swing which may lead to that issue. If you wind up finding a golf pro you like working with, you may wind up taking a lesson from time to time when you feel like your game needs a little nudge in the right direction.

Above all else, remember that you are going to need to be patient with yourself during this process. It’s hard to make improvements to your golf game, especially when you need to break a habit as stubborn as hitting pull hooks.

Clearing Mental Hurdles

In golf, it seems that the work is never done. Just when you think you have cleared a major hurdle and you should be well on your way to great scores, another issue will pop up and confront you. In this case, that issue is the mental hurdles that you’ll need to clear after you have corrected the mechanics of your golf swing. Even if you have sorted out the fundamental problems which were causing you to hit pull hooks, the mental ‘scars’ from those pull hooks are still going to need to be dealt with.

The main issue here is the fact that you may still fear the pull hook when getting ready to hit certain shots. For instance, let’s say that you used to hit pull hooks on a regular basis with your driver. Even if you have completely corrected your swing mistakes on the range, you are still going to remember those pull hooks when you go back out to the course. As you get ready to hit a drive, you may glance over to the left of the fairway to see what kind of trouble could be waiting if you happen to hit one of those old pull hooks. Simply thinking this way will make it more likely that your old habits will pop back up, so you need to do your best to keep these negative thoughts as far away from your game as possible.

To steer clear of thinking your way into trouble, try to focus intently on the plan for each specific shot. Think clearly about what you are trying to do with the ball on every shot – what shot shape are you going to use? How high is the ball going to fly? Where is it going to land, and how far is it going to roll? The more detail you can include in this process, the less likely it is that your mind will have time to wander off into a bad place.

It’s hard to have much fun on the golf course when you are dealing with pull hooks. Don’t let this problem linger any longer than it already has – get down to work on finding a solution right away. We hope the tips in this article have pointed you in the right direction. With enough patience and the right plan in mind, you should be able to shake free of your pull hooks sooner rather than later. Good luck!

Now, here's little section of pull hooking the golf ball. Now, a pull hook is quite a bad shot to hit on the golf course and it's quite a bad shot because it goes left and it also goes a long way. It will often get you into a lot of trouble, so, pull hook by nature starts off left of center and then curves further left of center for a right-handed golfer.

Now, people who are sometimes guilty of hitting a pull hook are people that slide the golf ball and also people draw the golf ball and both of their bad shots can be pull hooks. So, left, starting left going further left. Now, there are three reasons why a pull hook might be in your game and the cure to go with each one.

So, as you set up to the golf ball, a pull hook maybe caused by the club face being too close in relation to the swing path during a down swing and if the club faces too close in your down swing, often that's going to be caused by a pull grip. So, if your right hand is too far underneath the shaft for the right-handed golfer or your left hand is too far on top of the grip for the right-handed golfer, this is one of the reasons why you'd be pull hooking the golf ball.

So, just double check with your left hand that you can only see two knuckles and then check with your right hand that the V on top of the third and fourth finger points nicely up to your chin. If you got a nice neutral left hand with the V pointing up towards the chin that's generally going to be considered a nice neutral grip and that should help alleviate the big pull hook going down the left hand side.

Now, another area of cause for concern would be the wrong ball position. If you have the golf ball too far forward in your stance, that could cause you problems. So, as I set up to the golf ball here, if I have that ball over towards my left hand side here and it's too far forwards, as the club comes through impact, it goes through its neutral phase, now the club face starts to close over pointing left at the point of impact causing the ball to go left and I'm sorry, pull further left.

So, just double check your ball position and maybe experiment a little bit. If having the ball too far forwards, makes you hook and pull down the left hand side, consider moving it back a little bit in the stance. You might find that the further back you put the ball, the more the club is in its open face as it strikes the ball, the more of a push you get. And you might find a happy medium somewhere within your stance where the ball flies quite straight.

Now, a traditional position for a drive particularly would be just on the left instep, but you could have the ball a couple of inches either way from that position to help straighten it out. If you feel that ball position is the reason for your pull hook.

The other issue with the pull hook for a lot of people is the fact that they fire their hands from the top of their back swings, so they cast their hands. So, they take the golf club up to the top in a good position and then they throw their hands at it. Now, from this angle, you'll see that from there throwing my hands, takes the golf club outside the line and it shoots the face at the same time, so outside and closed is a classic example for a ball starting left and curving further left.

So, what we really want to work on here is just having a nice little pulls at the top, where we don't fire the hands on the down swing but we hold them a little bit, drop them a little bit and then fire them at the ball. So, we use the fast hand action down at the bottom to generate maximum clubbed speed at the ball, but we don't get carried away and throw the hands at it from the top.

So, if you've got a problem with pull hooking the golf ball, try and use those three things to correct and I'm sure that will pay in evidence as well.