Tip Tuesday: Shallowing Out the Golf Swing

In this tip, Stuart Clark of the Steve Dresser Golf Academy at True Blue Golf Club and Caledonia Golf & Fish Club in Pawleys Island, S.C., is here to help you learn how to shallow out your golf swing, and why it’s so important.

Stuart Clark:
How are you doing today, guys? My name’s Stuart Clark. I’m one of the instructors here at Steve Dresser Golf Academy at True Blue and Caledonia in beautiful Pawleys Island, South Carolina. Today’s Tip Tuesday is about face awareness. I got a lot of guys that come to me all the time with the big slice or pull, and I hear the word “shallow” or “hit it from the inside.” A lot of times they can’t do it. They want to do it, but they can’t do it because of their takeaway. If I got here, if you’ll notice, I’ve got a ball kind of set up here on my feet line. You’ll notice I have an alignment stick right here that kind of mimics my shaft point right here.

So what that does is a lot of times when guys take the club back (or women do as well), when we take the club back, they’ll want to roll the face or get a lot of form rotation to open the face so when they get to the top, the face is really open. And though if they did show the club out, when they hit it, the ball’s going to go a thousand yards right and you don’t want to do that. So what your brain tells you (is when) the face is open, you start coming down steep, there’s your pulls and your slices.

So what we want to do today is I just want to facilitate the takeaway, try to clean it up so when you get to the top, the face will be in a good position where you can kind of shallow the face of the club out. So if we set up here, if you just kind of cross hand it, yep, and I did say, cross hand it, just left-hand low. And what we’re trying to do is when we take the club back, you’ll notice that the face is not fading open. It’s easier to kind of feel that with the cross hand to fill this position because you’re going to see that my forearm stays relatively quiet. Instead, a lot of times we see the forearm roll and open up.

So if you want to see it and practice this, you can do it a couple of times to feel the club face, good and neutral right there. And once you basically get the club to shaft parallel and the back swing in this position is just basically throughout the rotation. You’ll see that my face is pretty neutral or square and it’s not rolled open. When it’s open, we’re going to slice it and we’re going to pull it. All right? So go on back, take it back to about right here. You’ll notice that the face is good and orientated. Nice and clean. We’re good here. We kind of pivot up and then down.

And that’s your push draw. That’s your Tip Tuesday!