Correct Alignments

This was provided by TST member and golf instructor Brian McGrew (cbrian).  Thanks for sharing Brian!

Before I get into the point of this post I want you to stop and ask yourself a question: If someone asked you to check his alignment and he was aimed 5 yards right of his target, what would you tell him?  Would you tell him his aim is wrong?

I had a lesson about a week ago that reminded me how much I despise a certain piece of advice.  I understand the reasoning behind this advice, but I think it has been dumbed down to a point where it is, in a lot of cases, counter productive.  For whatever reason a lot of instructors think most of you are too stupid to handle real information (or don't understand it themselves).  They think they have to tell you that there is one right way to have your hands on the club, one right way to have your feet aligned, one right way to have the clubface aligned, etc etc.  Some of them have even gone as far to call them fundamentals... well sorry, but I just don't agree.

The lesson: A guy comes up to me and says he wants to have an "alignment lesson" because he hits the ball really far left at times.  I told him I doubted that was the problem, but if that was all that was wrong then I wouldn't charge him for a lesson.  He says ok and starts hitting... yea, definitely not his alignment.  On his good shots he was hitting a decent looking pull fade.  Then he would miss one left because the face would catch up with path.  He hits a few more and asks me what I think, so I told him his alignment was fine and what I thought the real issue was.  He likes what I have to say and we work on it a bit, and about 15-20 minutes later he starts consistently losing some of his pull fade and the ball is now falling right of the target.  I start getting excited like I have a tendency to do and announced, "You are hitting it too good now... if you keep this up we are going to have to shift aim left." (Insert dramatic car braking noises here) It was at this point that our lesson hit a brick wall. He just stops hitting and stands there... "wait, you said my alignment was correct".  I try to explain to him that his alignment was correct for the shot shape he was playing.  However, he just couldn't get what I was trying to explain to him.  At this point I kept having to come up with new ways to tell him that if you hit a 10 yard pull with 5 yards of fade , then you need to aim 5 yards right of your target, which is exactly what he was doing.  If at the beginning of the lesson I had shifted his alignment 5 yards left to where he would be aimed at his target, his shot would end up 5 yards left of it... at best.

It wasn't that this player didn't understand the math of it.  His problem was he was using the method of a guy that really hammered home the idea of one right way to aim.  The usual, club face NEEDS to be aimed at target, your feet NEED to be parallel to that, your shoulders NEED to be parallel to that, etc. The player was just at a loss because he was scrambling for a reason why what I was saying didn't make sense.  I just had to keep explaining to this player that there are a lot of extremely talented golfers that do not aim at their targets.  A lot of guys on tour are very good at aiming away from their target to account for their over or under curvature of the golf ball.  A lot of guys change their feet or shoulder alignment to neutralize or minimize tendencies.  And all change alignment to hit certain shots.

The point of all this being that the answer to the question I asked at the beginning of this thread is: " it depends". Yes, I understand that some or most instructors are just trying to emphasize the need to be somewhat neutral by using the "train tracks" theory of alignment.  However, there is never an explanation that goes along with that advice that says it its quite OK to not be perfectly square (and that it is a fruitless quest).   It is never explained that guys like Bubba Watson often aim at entirely different fairways, or that there are guys that set up slightly open or closed, guys that have the face wide open or extremely shut, etc.  In my opinion, what's lost is the understanding that aim, ball position, etc are components that can and should be manipulated to meet the needs of different players and different shots.  And this player was a perfect example of just that.  Not only did he not understand how to manipulate setup to hit different shots, had he seen himself on video, he would have shifted alignment left and started missing every single target left.

I think most of you are smart enough to hear that "it depends".  If you asked me for advice on "correct" alignment I'd say two things.  First, find a routine that helps you align the same way each time. If you practice that routine and try to hit shots to a target, I think your alignment will figure itself out for the most part.  And two, understand why your alignment works for you and understand how you can change it to hit different shots.

I hope this helps some of you, but even if it didn't, it sure made me feel better...