The Mini Golf Swing Drill (Video) - by Pete Styles
The Mini Golf Swing Drill (Video) - by Pete Styles

If you now presume you’ve got your club in a better position coming back here, we want to make sure of that, we want to check that theory out and actually the golf ball is the biggest diagnostic tool we’ve got to use here because the golf ball is the barometer of whether the clubface was open or closed. So when we set up to the golf ball we want to make sure that clubface is nice and square to the target and we pick a target in front of it. Obviously we’ve talked about how we want to bring the club back to a square position and now as we go ahead and hit the ball we can just have what we would class here as a little mini swing, a little sort of hip height through to hip height and just see the position of the clubface as we hit through in this phase.

What you should appreciate here is if the clubface toe up in the halfway back position, so toe up over on this side, it should also be toe up in the follow-through position, so we’ll have toe up here to toe up here. Now, if I hit a ball deliberately this time out to the right hand side I’m going to be opening the face at that point, holding the face open at that point, so it’s rolled open and hit out to the right-hand side and you can see my clubface has followed through pointing more to the sky than the toe up position and that would cause a lot of shots to go too far to the right. And then likewise now if I can hit a shot where I’m actually going to close the clubface down too much here, rotate the clubface left in the follow-through, of course, we should expect to see the ball go down the right-hand side here. I don’t know whether you can see that on that side of my body, but that clubface has rotated too far to the left. So we’ve got an opening clubface and a closing clubface can cause differences in the direction of your shots and just experimenting with the straightening out of the clubface position here through to here should produce straighter shots. So go ahead and practice that drill, maybe 10-20 golf balls on the driving range, hip level to hip level and just see whether you can work on squaring your clubface halfway back and in the follow-through position to help you hit straighter shots. 2016-05-13

If you now presume you’ve got your club in a better position coming back here, we want to make sure of that, we want to check that theory out and actually the golf ball is the biggest diagnostic tool we’ve got to use here because the golf ball is the barometer of whether the clubface was open or closed. So when we set up to the golf ball we want to make sure that clubface is nice and square to the target and we pick a target in front of it. Obviously we’ve talked about how we want to bring the club back to a square position and now as we go ahead and hit the ball we can just have what we would class here as a little mini swing, a little sort of hip height through to hip height and just see the position of the clubface as we hit through in this phase.

What you should appreciate here is if the clubface toe up in the halfway back position, so toe up over on this side, it should also be toe up in the follow-through position, so we’ll have toe up here to toe up here. Now, if I hit a ball deliberately this time out to the right hand side I’m going to be opening the face at that point, holding the face open at that point, so it’s rolled open and hit out to the right-hand side and you can see my clubface has followed through pointing more to the sky than the toe up position and that would cause a lot of shots to go too far to the right.

And then likewise now if I can hit a shot where I’m actually going to close the clubface down too much here, rotate the clubface left in the follow-through, of course, we should expect to see the ball go down the right-hand side here. I don’t know whether you can see that on that side of my body, but that clubface has rotated too far to the left. So we’ve got an opening clubface and a closing clubface can cause differences in the direction of your shots and just experimenting with the straightening out of the clubface position here through to here should produce straighter shots.

So go ahead and practice that drill, maybe 10-20 golf balls on the driving range, hip level to hip level and just see whether you can work on squaring your clubface halfway back and in the follow-through position to help you hit straighter shots.