If you feel you worked really hard on creating a technically sound golf swing, you are happy with your alignment, you are happy now that your hips are aligning with your feet and you are hitting the ball nice and straight, what are the next stages? You might ask if you want to deliberately shape the ball. You want to be able to curve the ball in flight. Be able to shape it from right to left or shape it from left to right with varying degrees of amounts of curve. Now by changing the alignment in the set up that gives you a really good and relatively simple way of encouraging that ball to start to curve one way or another.

I am just going to grab an extra club out of my bag here and this is going to be a club that I would encourage you to lay down when you are on the driving range to give you an idea of where you might line your body up in order to shape the ball. So my target line is one of the red flags out in the distance here but I am going to lay this club down so it points to a good twenty yards to the right of my intended target. That is where I would like the ball to finish its round on to the flag but I am going to point my club out on this direction that is going to encourage my body to point out on that direction as well.

Now while we talk about lining the body up, we know we are talking about the knees, the hips, the feet and the shoulders all being on the same line. So everything stays square down this line, you have got to be careful here that you don’t now open your hips or open your shoulders to look back at the target, everything is pointing nicely down that right hand side, square to the club that you have laid on the floor. The only thing that doesn’t point on that line is going to be the club face, where you are going to just close the club face down slightly, have the club face aiming slightly left of the shaft on the ground.

Now the club face probably doesn’t need to aim as far left to the actual target, if the club aimed all the way back to the target the chances are I would be hitting the ball at the target and then it would be hooking further left. So the aiming to the right will create the draw spin, if the club faces to the left but it doesn’t need to be all the way left of target. So slightly close the face, point the feet down the right hand side, now quite importantly swing down the right hand side, swing in the direction of your feet, swing in the direction of your hips, don’t necessarily swing in the direction of target because we are aiming over this way, swing down the right side, that will draw the ball. Now if aiming right encourages the ball to draw it stands to reason that the opposite will affect things the other way.

So aiming down the left had side so this time I have got everything pointing the left side of target, again toes, knees, hips, shoulders everything pointing left of target more towards those trees in the background. Aiming the club face slightly right of those trees and then go ahead make your normal swings from this position. Hips are nicely lined up, swing across the line here, we are going to hit down the left side and then at the top of its flight it starts to cut back in a little bit because the face was open to the path the ball started to have some left to right spin.

The path was down the left side, the face was slightly right of that and the ball just curved back to the target nice and gently. Now that is how changing your alignment can affect the ball flight and how the ball flight can change. It does take a little bit of practice and it might feel a little bit weird when you first try it out but understand how changing your alignment changes your ball flight but make sure you keep your hips square to the rest of your body.