This game is called Marching Golf. We are going to go left, right, left, right like a marching band. And what we are going to do is we are going to pick a target line that's dead straight. So looking down the edge of my range mat here, I’ve got a target in the distance, a white flag; and I am going to aim straight towards that. But then I am going to deliberately try and hit the ball left of it, right of it, left of it, right of it. And this is a great game for club face rotation control. So understanding how I can rotate that club face and generate some control out of it.
Now for a lot of golfers lack of control of rotation of club face is the reason why they would hit shots that don't go on line. If you have got a path of swing that's pretty straight, and you've got an alignment on a target aim that's pretty straight, but you are still finding that you are missing left and right, it could be lack of control of club face. Now for a lot of golfers, they would have a side that they generally miss. So they might hit hooks all the time, they might hit pushes and slices all the time.
By understanding that and understanding how to control the club face, hopefully you can understand how to hit the ball straighter because it’s all degrees off. So if the face is very open and you are struggling and the ball is always going to the right, by trying to do this game and I am encouraging you to hit it left, you go through degrees of rotation, you will actually find that at some point on that curve you are going to hit the ball quite straight. So I am going to line up everything straight, I am not altering the angle of my feet, or the angle of my club face, I am going to try and hit this first one to the right side, so aiming that straight, I am going to hit it to the right. And I fade the ball off and it slices away to the right hand side, misses the green by about 20 yards to the right.
And you won't necessarily see this in full speed, but in slow motion, I might be able to point out that I hold the golf to below bit more open here, I don’t release my hand through impact anywhere near as quickly. I hold the face open, it doesn't release until the follow through. My follow through had a little bit of a twizel because there was no rotation in the follow through part of the swing. That makes the ball curve out to the right hand side in my swing. Then I setup again, again everything is aiming straight, nothing is off line, everything is down in the middle, going to rotate this one through to hit this one left. There you can see my follow through here is very different from where it was last time to getting that ball to turn about 25 yards down the left side quite a strong draw. Slightly lower ball flight as well because the club face was closing over earlier hooking down that left hand side quite a big hand action, so very different from the previous swing.
Now by understanding and learning how to rotate the club face through the impact face, the hope is that you would be able to actually hit the ball straighter. So on this next version of the same game, I am going to aim straight with my body, aim straight with my club face and hit it slightly right and slightly left, so I've had the big slice and the big hook, this time I am just going to try and hit that little fade to the right, little draw to the left, but keep the ball maybe on the green. So I am going to try and hit it at the target, let it fade to the right side of the green at the target, let it draw to the left hand side of the green but not quite so aggressively that I would miss the green. So lining up straight, that's a nice little fade. The swing didn’t feel as exaggerated as it did on the first occasion. And all the time when I am doing this game, I am educating my hands on to how they feel through the impact area little bit of a draw there down the left side, so I am educating my hands on how they feel through the impact area. What's nice about that game is if I have got a problem with deliberate or accidentally slicing the ball all the time, by deliberately feeling the draw or feeling the hook I can understand the right correction to hit that ball straighter. So play the Marching Game on the driving range, left, right, left, right, and you’ll find you’ll soon start hitting it much straighter.
