If you were to take the view of your golf swing take it from the viewpoint of the golf ball. The golf ball doesn’t really know who you are and what positions you put the golf club in throughout the swing. All the golf ball really knows or cares about is what this club is doing to it at the point of impact and in terms of direction of shot there is nothing more important than the position and angle of the clubface at the point of impact.

So we work really heard on making sure that clubface is lined up as we sat up to the ball, it’s pointing exactly in the target line and obviously it would be nice if we could guarantee it was going to come down and point to exactly in the target line as well, that would help to hit straighter shots. We’ve also got to be aware that once we’ve set this club up we’ve got our grip on the club in a really nice position, clearly we want to bring it down in a really nice position.

A lot of golfers make the mistake in the very early two or three feet of their backswing that will affect what that club head will do and this is where we work on this toe up principle of trying to have the toe pointing nicely to the sky at this point. What we might find is golfers have a temptation to get into two different positions. One would be a closed position where the club points down at the floor. This would encourage the clubface to be pointing more to the left at the point of impact and hooking the ball down that left-hand side for the right-handed golfer. Another golfer might be tempted to overuse the forearms and rotate the clubface into a skyward position at this point, which is a very open position, the club coming back down to the golf ball, pointing out to the right-hand side.

So in this next little miniseries of videos we’re going to work on the principles of swinging the club to toe up position to try and encourage the clubface to be squarer at the point of impact.