Curing a Slice/Learning to Swing From the Inside

[Knockglock]

So this is my major problem. And i'd like to get some good suggestions/tips/fundamentals.

I'm using my left shoulder (i'm a lefty, it's my back shoulder) on the downswing, and I think that its causing me to come over the top and have a slice. On my short irons I usually hit a soft little fade that doesn't have too much right to left (slicing movement) on it. On my mid irons (5 iron), I have more of a fade, but not too bad where i'm slicing it out of bounds or anything. But on my long irons, hybrids, and woods I often have a bad slice, which is worst of course on my driver. I also hook my driver randomly driving to not slice the ball.

I'm also going to try and bring a video camera to the range tomorrow, can anyone give me a quick lesson on what to look for on the tape when i'm swinging incorrectly from over the top and also when i'm swinging correctly from the inside.

I'm already taking lessons, but he is telling me to just keep my left shoulder back and i'm having trouble making myself do it.

Can anyone share what helped them learn to come from the inside and quit coming over the top?

Thank you!

[enduro]

You're probably flipping. I think I read somewhere 90% of golfers do that. I know I was at 1 time. When I finally figured it out, it seemed a whole lost simpler than I thought it would be.

I think the golf swing is over analyzed and made more complex than it is. The body will do a lot of things right when put into the right position. The club head does a lot of the work, to be honest.

I think I'm bad at explaining things because my usual answer is:

A) You're probably flipping because so many people do that and it seem intuitive to a lot of people.

B) Once the club is back with the standard grips, address, waggle and back swing, just let it go. Swing the damn thing and slap the ball. Don't get the hands or arms involved. Just swing the damn thing by rotating your body and shoulders, etc. Hit that ball in the back and see what happens.

C) Just hit it not worrying about where it's going. If you crack it like that it will go pretty well usually. And if it doesn't go well who cares? It wasn't going to go well getting tense and flipping it anyways.

Swing and slap are the keys. SWING SWING SWING. As my dad would tell me, "Just swing the damn club". Hows that for coaching, lol.

[michaeljames92]

For a little while try to keep your leading shoulder up throughout the whole swing. You need to feel like you are turning your hips forward from the top of the back swing and not puling your arms down. And, if you are then starting the ball left and then it is slicing, make sure you turn your hips to square the club face

[Zeph]

Impossible to tell for sure what is causing the move over the top without a video, but how does your hips work? If you don't turn and move the hips forward, the arms will have a very hard time falling into the slot and giving you a better swing path. The arms should fall into the slot automatically if you transfer weight, push and turn the hips.

The cause of your slice is an open clubface. How do you take away the club? Do you take it away on the club plane, outside or inside? Are you cupping the left wrist or turning the arms over? You can come over the top without slicing, with a proper wrist movement you will probably pull more than fade.

[n8ron]

Watch how his lower body starts the swing. This lets the arms and hands come from the inside. No weight shift equals bad slice. It's really that simple.

[Knockglock]

Thanks everyone for the help, especially that Ben Hogan video, that seems pretty good.

So just to update on the situation. Went to the range today for about 3 hours, hit around 375 balls or so, and I was able to get some draws. The majority of my hits were still fades, but I was able to get some to draw. All my draws though for the most part started out straight and drew to the right of my target line, I thought draws were supposed to start out to the left of the target line and draw towards it (lefty golfer).

But I feel that my overall ballstriking improved a bit, and also it seems to add some distance, I was hitting my 8-iron 140-150 yards easily during one stretch before I got a little bit tired, and my 7-iron was hitting around 155-160 ish. Just eyeballing on both. So I think i've taken a step in the right direction.

My divots are still bothering me a little bit, a lot of them were angled to the right, which I think indicates that i'm still coming out-to-in, a few were angled left, and a bunch were relatively straight. Only thing was I wasn't able to keep my divots consistent so.

Anyways, any more help is sincerely appreciated. I will try and get some video up sometime, but the camera I was going to use is missing the charger cable so I got to go buy a new one.

[MeltDownZ]

Let's keep this simple: you've got your upper body and your lower body. In the downswing, you must allow your upper body to 'float' above the moving lower body.

The 2 main tasks you must accomplish right from setup are:
1) have have your head behind the ball and never allow it to drift forward past the ball position
2) have your rear leg braced inward sort of jammed into your rear pelvis and keep it there so you have a leverage point when you need to get your rear hip moving forward in the downswing. In the back swing be careful to not lose this leverage of the rear leg by improperly raising your spine angle. It will help to keep your spine angle if you allow your front shoulder to go beneath your chin vs tilting your head.

What is easier said than is done in the downswing is to allow your weight and rear hip to rotate forward while your upper body stays in place. The natural tendency is to allow your lower body to carry your upper body (head) forward past the ball and to carry your arms outside. To accomplish this go slow and MAINTAIN YOUR BALANCE through the transition and entire swing. If you pause at the top, you can begin to let your weight and rear hip drift forward as your hands drop down. Focus on bringing your rear hip around at about the same pace as your hands are falling. Most people fail to shift their weight and rotate the hips properly. In my thinking, the key to this for a beginner is to allow the downswing hip action to start with more of a drift and a twist so that it happens with enough control for you to manage your balance.

There is an inverse relationship between your hip rotation and angle that your club head strikes across the ball. So, the more your hips rotate with your head behind the ball, the more your club head comes from the inside. The point here is that you need to get a good hip rotation, head behind the ball, and balance vs. trying to create a contrived swing path. The reason this is so is because to get proper extension and consistent ball contact your arms must swing freely. If you try and control your swing path with your arms then they will be tense and you will scoop and chicken wing. A thought that seems to work for a lot of people is to brush your front pocket (left front for lefty, right front for righty) with your hands in the downswing.

Lastly, avoid a hitting action when approaching the ball. Swing into the finish position. This will help redirect your intentions from the top and help your arms relax and not raise or chop from the outside as you'll need to conserve momentum to get you into the finish.

So:
Keep head behind ball
Maintain rear leg leverage
Swing slow enough to maintain your balance and form especially in the transition
Rear hip rotation must accompany the falling of the hands in the downswing and into the hitting area
Swing all the way into into finish by maintaining body rotation from transition through the finish position.

A final note: You may need to spend several weeks or months mastering each one of the key points I've mentioned. So, don't be discouraged if it takes a year or more to get a grasp of all this. That's the process of learning this game. If someone gives you advice that starts with, "Your problem is..." don't listen to them. You really need to get multiple things right for all this to come together and that just takes lots of practice time and to go back and re-read your principle swing objectives.

[Knockglock]

Let's keep this simple: you've got your upper body and your lower body. In the downswing, you must allow your upper body to 'float' above the moving lower body.

Awesome and amazing post! Thanks for putting it in a way that I can understand! and don't worry, i'm good at translating from righty to lefty-ese :)

Thank you so much and I begin work on it at the range tomorrow and in front of my mirror tonight :) Now to just get these blisters healed lol.

[deafheaven]

As a former (mostly) slicer, what worked for me was to accentuate finishing outside. Obviously it's pretty much impossible to start outside and then also finish outside so by concentrating on just finishing outside I developed an inside to outside swing path.

[just hit it]

I still fight this, but here is my 2 cents. Some of the above post had a lot of good information, but a lot to think about. What has helped me is this thought and feel. Have you ever skipped a rock across a pond. You are almost certainly standing sideways to your intended path. You have to get the rock low or it won't skip, to throw this way you have to clear your right hip (for righties). Same thing for a golf swing. It's not a perfect analogy but it works for me.

[alf174]

As a former (mostly) slicer, what worked for me was to accentuate finishing outside. Obviously it's pretty much impossible to start outside and then also finish outside so by concentrating on just finishing outside I developed an inside to outside swing path.

I agree. A quick fix I use if I'm having trouble on the course is to pull my rear foot back off the line about half a shoe length after I've set up; I have trouble clearing my hip.

[Zeph]

"Wanting" to swing on the outside rarely works. You swing over the top for a reason, most likely the hips don't move forward and shift the weight, or you do and the head follows. If the body does one thing and the arms work the other way, which you would do by having an inside to outside path without getting the hips to work. It will not be very effective. Many have tried to learn me how to swing from the inside by making gates, objects to avoid etc., but the only thing that really works, even without me trying to do it, was getting better at the fundamentals. Shifting my weight and letting the hips turn and pull the upper body through. An important detail is to not let the head follow the hips. The head must stay where it was at adress, or you'll ruin the proper positions.

I was at the range hitting balls one day, divot always starting behind the ball and aiming to the left (righty). I worked on clearing the hips, transferring the weight and keeping the head still. The divot instantly changed from behind and to the left to after the ball and square to the target line.

[elcash]

A great deal of information seems to be here already, but here's my suggestion from one night at the range. I hit about 10 hooks for every slice (except the driver) which I can barely hook if I try. I can remember up to 4 things while I swing, and tonight I was thinking about only 3 things when my driver was at its best ever.

1. Weight on my back foot. No matter what I might do with the rest of my body during the swing, starting with my weight back means I always hit the sweet spot. I think it just gives the club a split second more to come around.

2. Stand as far back as it takes to hit the ball on the upswing [this is for the driver, of course]. I tried moving the ball a little bit more forward in my stance (maybe 1.5 inches forward of my front heel). I forced myself to put the ball just a little farther forward than my brain was telling me was even sensible, and now my brain has a new 'sensible' zone.

3. At the top of my backswing, I started the forward swinging motion with my wrists instead of my body. This felt counterintuitive for me (I am a hooker and always thought my swing was too wristy) but I think starting with the wrists is what was subtly dropping my swing plane to start more inside...

Seriously, how could my three tips NOT cure a slice?

Weight back longer, putting the ball farther forward (club has more time to square before impact) and starting unhinging the wrists sooner...

It worked for me tonight and I was thrilled so I thought I would share...

[Zeph]

If it works for you, great, but I won't advice it.

The weight should transfer to the back foot automatically because of the extension of the arms when turning, but you want it back on the left foot before the downswing.

Moving the ball sounds like trying to fix a fault by making another fault.

Starting the downswing with the wrists? Not at all, you'll cast the club. You don't want to do anything conciously with the wrists, they should release automatically.

[elcash]

If it works for you, great, but I won't advice it.

I was actually going to post a clarifier about the last one because it does sound pretty ridiculous. When I looked up what "casting the golf club" meant, I chuckled at the thought of a swing where the club was already parallel to the ground when the swinger's arms were... Yeah it'd be hard to get power!

Let me defend my suggestions as ideas for mental notes. My mechanical swing is a lot of muscle memory, plus a few minor changes effected by the simple things I might be concentrating on at the moment. But yes, advice only recommeded for someone who can filter out what they don't need and maybe someone who emphasizes how they think about their swing more than how they swing. And an excellent post, Zeph! I'm glad I mentioned how I had been thinking about my swing; I have much to learn...

[Knockglock]

So i've had a pretty frustrating couple of days. I've tried to get some draw on my shots, and i've been able to do it some times, but overall i've been extremely inconsistent, and my contact has been fairly poor. I got some video but I don't know how to upload it from my computer.

Okay, i've figured out how to put it up on YouTube. Apologies for the crappy framing! I self-shot it by balancing my Verizon Blackberry Tour :). Please analyze my swing and tell me what you can tell!

These swings were with my Callaway X-22 8 iron, and it was during the course of swing tinkering trying to learn to come in to out. I did a slow frame by frame look at it and I saw some pretty cool stuff that i've never been able to see before :) video analysis is awesome, I can see stuff i've only wondered about before. On the last swing on the second video I was even able to see a little shaft flex.

[squaddie]

I'm a former slicer, so here's what I see from your videos:

First video: definitely see an out-to-in swing path, as I could stop the frame right at the moment of impact and see your club approach the ball from the outside.

Your swing appears very armsy, as your hips don't appear to be turning enough. As a result you are using your upper body to power the swing, since you can't get any power from a pivoting hip on the downswing.

It's OK to turn your hips up to 45 degrees in the backswing, then pivot the right-hip back (as a lefty) to help set the shoulders in motion to bring the arms and club to the ball.

I'm guessing due to your lack of hip turn that your swing plane is too steep. It's hard to tell as you cut off the top part of your swing in the video.

My guess is you need to let your lower body drive the downswing more. But to do that you need to work on your backswing, get your hip turning correctly and ensure your arms are not set for too steep of a swingplane.

Be patient and research some drills on how to get the lower body more engaged, and also check up on taking a proper backswing.

I wouldn't spend time banging any more balls at the range until you have the techniques down for correcting the out-to-in swing. I tried the same thing, hitting hundreds of balls, but was not able to correct the problem by feel alone.

Keep at it and good luck.

[CalBoomer]

Inside-out swings will not necessarily cure a slice if your swing plane is too vertical, might even worsen it. Try flattening your swing plane as much as you can while working on a inside take-away.