A legal ‘cheat code’ to check your aim and alignment on the course

Welcome to Play Smart, a regular GOLF.com game-improvement column that will help you become a smarter, better golfer.

Fundamentals, fundamentals, fundamentals. In case you haven’t noticed, I’ve been on a kick this offseason stressing the fundamentals. Why? Because fundamentals are some of the easiest variables in golf to control.

If you watch any high-level golfer practice, you’ll notice that they are constantly checking their fundamentals. From their grip to their ball position to their posture, they’re obsessed with double- and triple-checking the basics.

Recreational players rarely give fundamentals this amount of respect. In the short time they do practice each week, they’re focused on swing changes and new feels that they hope will be the magic cure to their woes. Often times, though, the secret to improve lies in improving their fundamentals.

At GOLF’s Top 100 Teacher Summit last fall, understanding and improving fundamentals was a huge point of emphasis when I talked with various teachers. And one such instructor, GOLF Teacher to Watch Addison Craig, gave me some great advice on how to check the fundamentals of aim and alignment while out on the course. Check it out in the video below.

A trick for checking aim and alignment

When you’re practicing, it’s easy to check your aim and alignment before every shot. All you need is an alignment stick (or some other aid) laid along your foot line.

During the round, laying an alignment aid on the ground during your shot is against the rules. But that doesn’t mean you can’t check your aim and alignment legally.

“How we want to do that is called an ‘intermediate target,'” Craig says. “We want to find something about two feet in front of [the ball] that stands straight out.”

You want that spot on the ground to be directly in line with your target in the distance. And once you’ve found that spot, you want to focus on aiming and aligning with that spot.

“What that does is gives us that nice clean target line right where we want to go,” Craig says. “The smaller target, the smaller the miss.”

When you pick a target hundreds of yards away, it can be difficult to get yourself aimed and aligned directly at that spot. But by choosing a target just a couple feet in front of you in line with that distant target, it becomes much easier to make sure you are aimed and aligned properly.

Another easy way to check your aim and alignment is by using your club as an aid. But instead of laying the club down on the ground, you just want to pick it up and hold it by the clubhead and the grip and place it along your belt buckle.

“That’s just kind of like a cheat code that’s gonna help you make sure you’re squared up towards the target,” Craig says.

Next time you find yourself struggling with aim or alignment on the course, give these two tricks a try. Chances are, they’ll have you aiming much more precisely than you were before.