Cure your slice for good (seriously!) with this foolproof trick
You can cure your slice with one simple feel.
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Welcome to Play Smart, a regular GOLF.com game-improvement column that will help you become a smarter, better golfer.
The slice is the most common miss among recreational golfers. Go to any range on the weekend and you’ll see what I mean. Hackers just can’t seem to stop hitting that big banana ball.
The shot shape typically afflicts higher-handicap players, but it can even give more accomplished players fits. It’s a miss that loves to rear its head at the worst moments.
We’ve covered the reasons for a slice quite a bit on this site, but here’s a quick refresher. There are two components that cause a slice: 1. An open clubface at impact. And 2. A swing path that is severely out to in. Combine those two flaws and you’ve got the perfect recipe for a slice.
Today, we are going to focus on correcting the swing path — and in a way that you won’t even need to think about when you stand over the ball. For more on that, we turn to GOLF Teacher to Watch James Hong.
A foolproof slice fix
When golfers slice the ball, they tend to come way over the top and have a swing path that is severely out to in. And to fix the slice, you’ve got to get your path closer to neutral. Sounds simple enough, right? Well, as anyone who’s tried to make swing changes to achieve this can tell you, it’s rarely that easy.
However, if you try this exercise that James Hong uses with his students, you can get that path moving in the right direction without even thinking about it.
“I call it the swimmer’s motion,” Hong says. “When I ask them to hold an alignment stick [across their chest] and do a crawl motion, they’ll move this way. If you notice, that’s the same pattern or motion as an over-the-top move.”
Instead of moving your shoulders forward and over the top like you would when crawling, Hong asks his students to instead rotate their shoulders backward like they would when swimming the backstroke.
“That’s actually encouraging a little more of a drop to the inside,” Hong says. “Some golfers like to focus on rerouting the club or shallowing the club. So this helps encourage that.”
It might sound like a fix that’s too good to be true, but Hong has used it numerous times with students he’s taught — and with great success. One such time, he approached a golfer on the range with an out-to-in path around 11 degrees and asked him to try the swimmer’s motion. Then, he simply asked him to hit the ball again with no other instruction.
“The very next ball he was only two degrees out to in,” Hong says. “Again, there was no instruction. Just doing this and then jumping right back in there to hit another ball.”
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