Golf Instruction Zone: Instant Feedback on Your Swing Path

In the latest installment of our video instruction series, Stuart Clark of the Steve Dresser Golf Academy at True Blue Golf Club in Pawleys Island, S.C. demonstrates how a length of PVC pipe can serve as a simple tool to tell you a lot about your golf swing.

Today, my tip of the day is how to work on our golf game when we’re not actually at the golf course.

As you see right here, I’m holding a PVC pipe. It’s just an old PVC pipe, 3/4 inch to an inch. It doesn’t really matter. It’s about five feet long. It goes up to about my chin. What we’re doing with this right here, is when we’re at the house, we’re laying basically two parallel lines down on the ground and what we’re doing is we’re working on our set up. But, the PVC pipe works as instant feedback on our swing path. So, when I set up to my target, you’ll see this, the red line, is the red stick is the ball line and the orange is for my foot line. So, they’re parallel lines.

So, when I’m set up, I’m taking the club back and you’ll notice that the PVC pipe and the orange line are parallel. So, that is position one. I’m kind of keying on my takeaway. If it gets too deep, I know I’m way, late off. If the club gets over here, I’m too steep. So, it’s just instant feedback on my takeaway.

Step two is in transition, when I make my torso rotation. I make the rotation up, you’ll notice that the club’s in a good position here, it’s basically pointed at the ball line. This would be steep. This would be too shallow. So, I’m still working on takeaway and position two, just trying to mimic that, to get in a good spot.

So now, my third spot is on the way down. A lot of times, we see a lot of amateurs wanting to pull the club down and it gets steep. When the club gets steep, we have to try to shallow it out and that’s where we get early hip extension and we get a lot of trouble. So, what we’re trying to do in position, from two to three, is we’re trying to use the body and get the club shallowing out, so this club and the arm are parallel.

You’ll notice that my hips are open to target, and my shoulders at target. So, we’re moving the body down to this position. From here, it’s basically a push off to extension and you’ll notice that is a body pivot, and that’s what we have to learn as golfers. We have to use our big muscles to swing the golf club.

This is just a tool where we take the golf ball away. We can do it at home. We can do it in our back yard. We don’t even need a ball, and we actually have a coach, the PVC pipe guy sitting here, checking our positions to making sure we’re getting the right spots. It’s just a fun way to keep it pulled off, off the golf course, where you can actually work on your golf game. Once again, it’s just a good tip to do most every day.