The Golf Swing Path

Knowing the golf ball flight laws and what it tells you about your golf swing path is one of the most important nuggets of understanding and evaluation you can gain about your golf swing.

Gaining an understanding of the dynamics of your golf swing path can take you a long way toward not only improving your golf game, correcting problems, and making positive adjustments when things get a little off track.

First, let’s set this up just bit with some terminology that is will be useful as we move forward with our discussion of the golf swing.

When someone refers to an outside-in golf swing path they are referring to the path of a golf swing as it relates to the target line or more simply, your body.

If you have an outside-in swing path it means that as you begin your swing from the top, the swing path starts away from you body and as it works its way closer it crossed your target line and impact zone from the outside (away) to the inside (closer). With an inside out swing path the reverse is true.

Taking now to the next level of understanding, we need to add the golf club face position into the mix and its relation to the path and the target line as it passes through the impact zone of the golf shot.

Let’s begin with the outside-in golf swing path (refer to the follwing illustrations to the right).

To help you understand what is going on in your golf swing it is helpful to know a couple of behaviors. After you initially make contact with the ball, the first 50yds or so, tell you the direction of your swing path.

Assuming that you have made reasonable contact, the spin you’ve imparted on the ball won’t be influencing the actual flight path quite yet (it’s a physics thing).

Once your ball flight gets underway a bit further out, the direction of the ball flight tells you what your clubface was doing in relationship to your swing path. Both of these concepts are very important for you to understand.

Continuing on… with an outside in swing path as you make contact with the golf ball if:

The clubface is square to the target line (which would make it slightly open in relation to your swing path) you will produce a shot that starts slightly left of your target line and works its way back toward the target because this combination of swing path and club face position will impart a clockwise spin on the golf ball. This is ‘fade’ and a quite useful shot pattern.

The clubface is square to your swing path (which would make it slightly closed in relation your target line), the ball will start left of the target line and because the club face was square (or matched) the swing path the spin on the ball will be more straight over the top and produce a flight that stays pretty much on line with your swing path. You have just pulled your golf shot slightly to the left.

The clubface is closed in relation to your swing path you have justadded a hooking action to scenario #2 just above and maybe just pull-hooked your golf shot out of bounds. When this happens you’ll sometimes here the golfer say that they double crossed themselves.

Meaning they set up for a fade and hit a hook.

Now simply taking these three types of ball flights and reuse them in relation to a swing  path that that comes down the target line and a swing path that is ‘inside out’ and you have three different types of swing paths each with three different clubface positions at the point of impact. Add this all together and you now have the nine principles of golf ball flight.

Take some time to look this over and understand the dynamics described.

Once you understand and can analyze the results of why your golf shot is behaving the way it does as a result of what we just discussed, you are well on your way to understanding what is going on within your golf swing and can then narrow the focus your practice drills and begin to greatly improve your golf swing path and thus your golf shots.