Tip Tuesday: Using Alignment Sticks to Help Your Takeaway

Most golfers have a pair of alignment sticks in their bag. However, many simply don’t know the proper ways to use them. Scott Tanguay from the Coastal Golf Academy shows you one easy way to put those sticks to good use.

Scott Tanguay:
Hey, folks. Scott Tanguay here at the Coastal Golf Academy at Whispering Pines Golf Course, right across the street from Myrtle Beach International Airport. Today, we’re going to work on our takeaway, very important part of the swing. A lot of people try to tell me that they can just take it back however they want, as long as they get to the top and the right spot and come down, which can be true to a point, but you’re going to hit a ceiling there. If you take it away properly, that usually goes into the rest of the swing. It’s going to make it all flow a lot better, and you’re going to play a lot better. So, we’re here. All right, we’ve got two sticks. The green stick here is to represent the club path. The orange is for our hand path.

It’s very important that we don’t really cross them over. What I mean by that is we’re right here. We want to, as long as we can, maybe until about hip height, we want to try and keep the club head on the green stick and the hands on the orange stick. Club out, hands in. Club out, hands in. You can imagine if you put the hands out on the club path and the club on the hand path you’re going to be in trouble, and it’s going to be very inconsistent. I see a lot of people that do this. They try and take it back to the inside like that’s going to help them come more from the inside, but it’s usually counterintuitive. The more you whip it back in here like this, usually there’s a lot of overcorrection over the top.

Also, most people don’t even think of the hand path at all. You’re just thinking about your club. The hands are doing pretty much the same thing as the club, just a little bit more in here. So, we’ve got to keep them on both. So, we got to keep the club here, hands here. This wouldn’t be good, or this wouldn’t be good. We want to maintain that relationship as best we can. So, again, slow motion looks a little bit like this, trying to get the face in line with the spine, and maybe at worst, you have it parallel with your hands like this. But the drill would be feeling a little bit more like this, a little bit more like that, and you’ll hit it much cleaner. Trust me.