If you are yet to taste this victory, you need to learn how to fix the golf slice. For a right-hand golfer, a slice is a golf shot that veers dramatically from left to right instead of going in a straight line. In this tutorial, we will tell you how to fix the habit of shooting slices.
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How To Fix A Golf Slice?
Novice and weekend golfers are plagued by hooks and slices when they are trying to drive a golf ball straight.
The fact that the slice may initially start out from the left and then curve drastically to the right can play with your mind and muddy your estimates.
Correcting the slice would require attention to a number of details. You need to get the correct equipment and get the right grip on the club. The swing action needs to be tailored to offset your mistakes and straighten out the drive.
Your hands, your body, your club, and your grip all contribute to the success of your swing.
What you will need to fix a golf slice?
The right driver
Evaluate your equipment first. Most of the people who hit slices persistently carry low loft drivers. They try to compensate for their high incorrect ball-flight. This is a mistake. If you intend to hit 10-11°, then buy a driver of that loft, instead of using a 9° driver with an open clubface.
Weighted golf clubs
Yes, you heard right. A weighted club helps you warm-up for the real shots. It helps you work the muscles on your hands and forearms so that you can lend more power to your actual golf club.
Practice:
Since you are not in Neverland, you can’t just wake up and find that you are driving straight shots. Practice does make you perfect. With continued conditioning on placing the swing plane correctly, you will find yourself avoiding hooks and slices consistently.
These steps spell out how to avoid a golf slice step-by-step. These are pretty much derived from scientific principles of impact and direction. You can use this as a reference to correct the slice.
Before we delve into it, here’s a study of the causes of a slice. There are three types of slices in golf:
- Straight slice: Here the swing path of the golf club is right but ball slices due to open clubface at the impact.
- Pull slice: Here the golf swing is out-to-in. So the golf ball starts off slightly left of the target line and then curves to the right.
- Push slice: Here the golf swing is in-to-out. So the golf ball starts off the right of the target line and steers further right.
How to fix a slice with irons?
This is an understated factor in great golf shots.
The way you hold your body at address sets the precedent for the path the clubface will come down on and how the clubface will be positioned. So it’s important to set up your stance right.
- As you stand, your toe line should be parallel to the target line.
- Your shoulder plane should also be parallel to the target line.
If these two conditions are satisfied and you hold the club right, it should be square to the golf ball. This will help you avoid straight splices.
As you can see, standing with an open clubface will send your shot into a splice. So correct your alignment regularly. Even pros revise their alignment every now and then.
How to grip a driver not to slice:
Your grip on the golf club is another defining factor in correcting a golf slice. The right grip would teeter between too strong and too weak a grip.
An ideal way to monitor the grip is by looking into the mirror while practicing grip. With the right grip, you should see 2.5 knuckles of the left hand. Golfers who hit big slices should compensate and see 3 knuckles of the left hand.
The right-hand goes under it and the V formed by its thumb and index finger roughly points upwards.
You can practice this neutral grip while grabbing other cylindrical objects at home.
You should strive to keep your left hand in the same vertical plane through the swing. Wrist cock also determines the flight of the ball.
How to fix a slice off the tee? golf slice cure practice drills
Most of the slicers make critical mistakes with two aspects of the golf swing: the clubface position and the swing plane. We have already told you how to keep the clubface square during the address.
To understand the swing plane, imagine the golf ball to be right in front of you at navel height.
How will you strike it straight?
You will trace a swing plane that’s perpendicular to your body and parallel to the ground.
Here the golf club will remain straight and parallel to the ground.
Now imagine the same golf ball on a tee. You hold the club at an angle to the vertical. So the swing plane will also be at an angle to the vertical. This is the ideal swing plane. If you are hitting a slice, your downswing is most likely above the correct swing plane.
As a result your club automatically approaches the impact with an open clubface and results in a slice. If you are prone to hitting a lot of pull slices, you are swinging out-to-in. If you are susceptible to push slices, you swing in-to-out very often.
Pull slices are more common on the golf course than push slices. If that’s the case with you, the simple correction is practicing a compensating in-to-out swing.
In-to-out swing:
The pull slicers usually take the right path in the backswing but their downswing is over the top. So golfers try to cope with it during the impact by pulling the club close to the body.
This results in the out-to-in swing.
To compensate your slicing habit, cultivate an in-to-out swing.
Out-to-in swing is caused by the shoulder moving too fast in the downswing. So in the in-to-out downswing, we move the arms first. From the top to the half of the downswing, pull your right elbow towards your hips.
All the while, their left shoulder should be under the chin while your face is aimed at the golf ball. You will find your body automatically pulling the golf club towards an inside path compared to the actual swing plane.
An in-to-out golf swing can seem counter-productive to a habitual slicer. It feels like at impact, the in-to-out swing will make the golf ball go further right.
So they tend not to use it.
But they must try it to cure their slice.
Correcting clubface:
Once you have mastered the in-to-out swing, the golf ball will still be slicing.
The reason? Open clubface.
Since you are practicing a far from ideal in-to-out downswing to cure the slice, the club tends to meet the ball with an open clubface.
To correct this, you need to rotate your arms in the next half of the downswing. As the swing reaches your hips, rotate your arms so that the trailing hand comes on top of the leading hand early, the clubface will be square at impact.
In short, the rotation of the hand is more aggressive than it would be with a normal swing.
You will have to stake multiple shots that may hook or slice until you figure out the right amount of rotation to correct the slice. So perfect the in-to-out swing first and then practice squaring the clubface.
Conclusion:
We have envied the straight shots of the pro golfers one too many times to know how good that feels. We wanted to detail the corrective movements that will help you learn how to fix the golf slice.
