The Ultimate Guide to Fixing Your Golf Slice

How to Fix Swinging Over the Top

If someone were to ask me to give them one thing and only one thing to feel and practice in their swing who is swinging over the top, it would be this:

The golf swing’s power sequence is incredibly similar to throwing a ball.

That’s it. If you know how to throw a ball properly and I’ll show you how to do it correctly down below, you will never swing over the top again - I guarantee it.

In fact, I’m so positive that you will never be able to swing over the top again doing what I’m about to show you, that I’ll pay YOU $100 if you can!

Might as well make it a million bucks because this is a rigged fight.

I already know you won’t be able to swing over the top again not just because I have already done this with literally thousands of students, but because it will literally be impossible because you will be moving in the opposite direction of an over the top move.

And all you need to be able to do to never swing over the top again is be able to read a clock.

I have a video that I think you’ll like that will show you exactly what I mean and I promise, you’ve NEVER heard this before, so it’s worth a listen.

As you saw in the video, what you need to feel is a clockwise motion for a right handed golfer when viewing a clock back behind you on the wall.

That’s it, problem solved!

Well partially at least, but there’s more that you need to know.

In the next section, we’ll talk about how this motion works to shallow out the club every time and create speed.

How to Stop Swinging Over the Top and Get the Club Perfectly on Plane - NATURALLY

So, you’ve got this idea of this clockwise motion with the trail hand, but what do you do with it exactly?

In simplest terms - we “throw” - but in a very specific way.

For us “old timers”, we may remember Dan Quisenberry and the old submarine baseball pitch.

Well, it’s similar to that but that’s too complicated.

We can make learning this motion really simple and have you on hitting baby draws in just minutes if you follow these 3 simple steps:

• Make your small little clockwise motion feel with your hands
• Bring the elbow down to the trail hip in the same clockwise motion as the hand
• As the right elbow “runs out of room”, shift your hips toward the target to make room for the elbow while rotating them open

It might be easier to see this than read it, so here’s a short clip on how to do this motion and get the club perfectly on plane every single time.

Pretty cool, right?

I go over this much more in depth in this video if you care to take a deeper dive into the entire sequence to add wicked speed to your golf swing.

Your hand, your wrist, your elbow and even your trail shoulder all make this tiny little clockwise movement and your swing y shallowed out and shifted horizontally to the right so you can approach the ball from the inside for the first time - perhaps for the first time ever!

Your club path is simply where the bottom of your swing is "aimed" as the club approaches and strikes the ball.

By shifting my swing plane, I shift my path and that minor change will have a huge impact on ball flight.

If you’ve got a friend who is slicing like crazy, try this little trick with them.

It’s fun to watch your buddies' faces if they’ve struggled with swinging over the top their whole lives and you can fix it in 1 minute.

You’ll be their hero and change their game instantly and they will buy you all the all the drinks at the 19th hole you could ever want!

It’s true. You wouldn’t believe the incredible things people have offered me and done for me because I fixed their slice so fast.

I once had a famous attorney offer me $50,000 if I could get his wife to want to play golf with him.

I gave her one lesson, she went out and shot her best score the very same day - and promptly quit the game.

She either wanted to go out on top or hated her husband that much.

Either way, I didn’t collect on the 50 large.

Anyway, try it out on a buddy and kick me back my 10% of your bounty - ya know, for the “big guy” ;-)

Ok, so we have the swing plane problem understood at its root cause - if you’re swinging over the top, you’re moving counter-clockwise - that’s it.

Can you clearly see the counterclockwise hand path now? It is the death move in the golf swing.

I also secretly taught you how to get your body in the right position at impact with the simple Throw the Ball Drill (I published that video back in 2007 - you could’ve saved yourself a lot of balls in the woods if you found me sooner!) and you didn’t even notice it.

Getting into the correct body impact alignments and aligning the joints properly is the difference between a 20 handicap and a 0 handicap.

We move our bodies better by moving them in the right sequence.

But the right sequence is actually much EASIER than what you’re doing right now and stupidly simple.

Again, why couldn’t someone teach ME this 20 years ago?

Remember “The DEAD Drill” (you can watch the DEAD Drill video here) I mentioned earlier?

This is what it does - it teaches you how to move your body EXACTLY like the pros, like me, in 3 simple moves you can learn in 30 seconds.

With the AXIOM, I boiled the entire golf swing down to one movement in one direction, it’s pretty slick stuff.

What’s cool about what you’re learning here, is rather than learning it in chunks, or trying to learn it as one fluid motion even, you learn it by simply throwing a ball. 

• You will now be posted and balanced on that lead leg in the follow through and can pose for the cameras.
• You’ll naturally get off your back foot and stop hanging back.
• You’ll naturally get your hips open at impact just like the pros.
• You’ll stop losing your posture.
• You’ll naturally have the proper amount of secondary axis tilt at impact that directly affects your swing plane.
• If you don’t have enough tilt, your swing plane will steepen, just by changing the angle of your spine.

But, you just learned how to do all of that without having to “think” about all of “that”.

And that’s because you’re now looking at the golf swing and how to fix your slice holistically, how everything relates to one another and how you can view the swing as entirely cause and effect based.

Now that you have a “big picture” view of the golf swing, everything else will simply make sense and start to fall into place.

But there’s still one critical piece we have to address here that can still cause a slice, even with a perfect swing plane.

The release of the golf club.

The Release is the “Big Payoff” in the Golf Swing

The release. Is. EVERYTHING.

It is the entire point of the golf swing - the build up is all for this great release.

Wait, that didn’t come out right..

You know what I mean.

The release is not only where ⅔’s of your club head speed comes from, it’s also CRITICAL for squaring the face, controlling the angle of attack and so much more.

If you don’t have a good release, you’ll have no power and always feel like you’re fighting with the golf club rather than swinging it freely.

If you want to visualize what a full release looks like, watch this first 10 seconds of this video:

The release of the golf club is the most important - and nearly the easiest - part of the golf swing to learn and master.

And all you have to do is - nothing.

Well, just about nothing.

That’s right, the release in the golf swing is essentially a passive movement that occurs totally naturally when you move in the sequence of the Throw the Ball Drill you watched earlier.

It’s incredibly easy!

But, that doesn’t mean you won’t still screw it up, so let me walk you through it ;-)

Golf’s a humbling game, isn’t it?

The Release IS Rotation

Everything is rotating in the golf swing. The clubface, the hands, the body, the wrists, the pressure in your feet.

Hey, it’s why I call my golf instruction method RotarySwing! Not very original, I know.

But, once you get this into your noggin, you’re going to “get it.”

That “ah-ha” moment of your golf swing journey where it “clicks” and you experience what it feels like to truly release the club and watch the ball effortlessly rocket off the face.

That’s my jam.

Check out my RoadShow lessons on YouTube and you’ll see what I mean.

Here’s a good clip of me roasting a 7 iron 200 yards with someone else’s club, no warm up shots, and it was cold and drizzly outside!

Oh yeah, and with crappy range balls.

That’s SMOKED - effortlessly.

I’m sorry, I’m obsessed with striking the ball purely - and listen to that sound!

Ok, enough about that.

But Dr. Goldmark, who was the student in that video, he’s having so much fun right now.

Check out this email he recently sent in.

Imagine shooting one BETTER than your age - at 76 years young!

And he’s experiencing the “4 C’s” of RotarySwing - consistency, control, compression and confidence.

That’s what my C4 Ballstriking Mastery program teaches you, but more on that later.

For now, imagine you were getting emails like this all the time - I live for them!

That’s why I put this guide together. I want you guys to write in and tell me how much this helps you overcome the pain that ugly slice causes. 

Just post it somewhere in the social media-verse and tag us, somehow, umm, however that works.

Whatever, just let me know how much it helped you (drop us an email at cs at rotaryswing.com if you don’t do the social internet thingy - I don’t care for it either).

Ok, now let’s get back to work.

Rotation. You MUST let your wrist bones rotate over.

Note I said LET. If you’re actively trying to rotate them over, that’s what we in the biz call a “pro flip” and you don’t want that.

It’s too hard to time and control consistently and will lead to some inconsistent and even wild shots.

I saw a guy once who was so nervous to play with me he literally hit a ball backwards on the 2nd hole.

No, it didn’t bounce off something and ricochet back.

It NEVER saw forward progress.

He topped his fairway wood so bad it compressed the ball into the turf and the spongy ground sent that puppy 15 feet into the air and nearly straight backwards for a net loss of 20 yards on the shot.

He quit the round on the next hole.

So, we don’t try to use our hands to manhandle or manipulate the club in any way, got it?

Unless we’re talking about shaping the ball, then that’s different and you can learn how to do that in this video.

But for the boring old laser straight shot on a frozen rope, the release is, in many ways, just a reaction to much of what you did during the backswing.

When you feel this for the first time…. Oh man…

The first time you properly and fully release the golf club it feels like a hot knife through butter, that’s what the game of golf is all about to me.

I don’t like putting. Don’t care much for short game.

But compressing golf balls in a full swing, that I live for.

Give me a bucket of brand new Pro V1’s and a fresh, tight patch of turf on the back of the range and I’m in heaven.

And that amazingly wonderful, even euphoric feeling is all created by the release.

So, it’s worth taking a deep dive so you know exactly what you’re doing and what it should feel like.

So, the wrists are rotating. And that happens very naturally because we are swinging on an inclined plane.

Now, if you’ve never felt a release in the swing, you’ll want to develop a feel for how this happens naturally.

To most easily feel this for yourself, swing a golf club parallel to the ground. 

You will feel the clubface, shaft and your forearms naturally wanting to rotate back and through.

If you try to hold the clubface upright the entire time, you won't be able to make a full backswing or use your wrists for speed.

The clubface naturally wants to rotate open and closed, so don't fight it, feel it.

As you tilt the swing plane forward to address the ball by hinging at the hip, this feeling tones down significantly, so you should feel just a nice even flow as the club face opens slightly in the backswing and closes slightly in the downswing.

Completely naturally. Relax, and feel what the golf club is trying to naturally do - and let it.

Now, as you combine this feeling of letting the forearms gently rotate back in through in response to the inclined plane, begin to mix in the feeling of the AXIOM - that little, subtle, gentle clockwise FEELING of your hand path with the release of the club and guess what you got?

A golf swing on-plane that hits gentle baby draws.

Go forth, and slice no more.

So What if I’m Still Slicing?

First off, did you video your swing?

If you didn’t video your swing, you have NO IDEA what’s actually happening.

I’ve got a hell of an eye for the golf swing in real time as you saw in the RoadShow but even I rely on high speed cameras in my teaching.

So, don’t guess. Don’t tell me what you feel. I only care what’s actually happening and the “camera don’t lie.”

Maybe you did video your swing, but don’t know what the hell you’re looking at.

Don’t worry, it’s MY job, literally, to know the inner dark secrets of the golf swing. 

YOU need to just be an athlete, but you still need to know some basics about what to look for when looking at your swing on video.

When thinking about your swing plane, it helps if you think of the swing as being made up of steepening moves and shallowing moves.

If you have an imbalance of steepening moves vs. shallowing moves, your swing plane will be steeper as a result.

If you’re swinging over the top, you need more shallowing moves.

If you’re swinging too far from the inside, you need more steepening moves.

Simple enough, but you have LOTS of steepening and shallowing moves to choose from.

And you can put them together in just about an infinite number of combinations and still manage to hit the ball ok, at least on occasion.

This is how otherwise atrocious looking golf swings that still hit the ball reasonably well, still work - they have a balance of steepening and shallowing moves to get swing path and clubface angle that works at impact to produce reasonable shots.

So, they can look like a monkey attacking a banana while falling out of a tree and still whoop your butt on the course.

I don’t know how you feel about it, but I personally can’t stand it when I play with someone who hits it well with a horrible swing!

Drives me nuts. 

There is an art and beauty to the golf swing when it’s done right and I’m here to abolish ugly swings - and slow play, they’re directly related!

I know, I’m a golf swing mechanics snob. I admit it.

Anyway, there are all sorts of movements you can put together to shallow out your swing.

For example, you could have a big lateral hip slide in the downswing.

This creates enough secondary axis tilt to shift the swing plane to the right in most cases.

Think old school Nicklaus, Watson and Weiskopf - and hideously ugly pants.