How To Perfect Your Golf Alignment?

All I want to see are good shots, so the first priority is always to get you hitting good shots straight to where you are aimed, wherever that may be.

Let’s start by clearing up a common misconception. Aim and alignment are not the same, they are two different issues. Having good alignment is not the same as having everything — your feet, knees, hips, shoulders, arms, and eyes — aimed at a target. The aim is taking every aspect of your alignment and aiming it at a specific target. Read more: Top golf rangefinders

Alignment simply means having everything coordinated and pointing in the same direction. If anything is misaligned, you will have a much greater chance of making a mistake in your takeaway. With good alignment, aiming is easy. Especially if you hit straight shots. You have to have good alignment to hit good shots. But you don’t need good aim.

Proper aim is what gets your straight shots to go to a specific target. Aiming, in fact, is easy. If you don’t believe me ask a friend who has never played golf before to hold a club and aim at a target in the distance. I bet he does it perfectly. Beginners always do. They all aim at the target until they have hit a couple of shots. Only then do they start to adjust. Let’s say they slice the first three balls. Guess where they will aim for the fourth one? That’s correct; to the left.

All to compensate for the left-to-right curve on the ball. In contrast, with good alignment you have a great opportunity to make a good swing and hit a good shot. Maybe it won’t be to the target you thought you were aiming at, but it will still be a good, solidly struck shot. If you can do that on a consistent basis, you will soon find your aim. Why all the confusion? Because there are too many teaching philosophies. Some teachers say you can’t hit straight if you can’t aim straight.

My idea is that if you can’t hit straight, why would you ever want to aim straight? Plus, if you curve your shots, the amount of curve is going to be different for every club in the bag. They all have different lofts, so they all impart differing amounts of sidespin on the ball. So if you have a curvature problem, aiming is next to impossible. During a lesson I never ask a pupil to pick out a target. Only after he has hit a few shots will I ask him where he thinks he is aiming. I just watch him hit and look at his alignment. At least initially, aim isn’t a big concern.

All I want to see are good shots, so the first priority is always to get you hitting good shots straight to where you are aimed, wherever that may be. Remember, ball-flight is everything, so any mistake with ball-flight is where you start correcting. If you hook or slice, you are going to have aiming problems.

But get your alignment right and you have a better chance to make a good takeaway and a good swing and hit a good shot. And aim better. Ideally, you want to take the club back right along the angle of the clubshaft as it was at address. That is the start of a neutral, on-plane swing, something which is easier to achieve if you have good posture and good alignment.

Lining Up

Proper alignment is easy to describe. You want to have your feet, knees, thighs, hips, arms, shoulders, and eyes all lined up parallel left of your target.

That would be proper alignment. The bend in your right elbow makes up for the fact that your right hand is lower on the club than your left and closer to the ball, which keeps your shoulders and arms parallel with everything else. Most important is the fact that they are coordinated correctly. Whenever students ask me where they are aiming I invariably have to wonder which part of the body they are referring to. Their feet might be closed.

Their shoulders might be open. Their eyes might be angled left or right. They are pointed in so many different directions that it’s difficult for me to know where they are aiming.

The most important aspects of alignment are the shoulders, arms, and eyes. Your feet are important, but nowhere near as important as the other parts of your body. They receive more attention than they warrant considering their relation to the golf club.

What you may not know is that your eyes have a big influence on your swing. If you set up with them aligned to the right, you will probably swing that way. If you tilt your head more one way or the other, you’ll probably swing too steeply or too flat. You want to keep your eyes level to the ground and parallel to the target line.

That’s important for your balance and for the direction and angle of your golf swing. All because that is the way we function. Our whole world is based on being level to the horizon.

When you start tilting your eyes you run into equilibrium problems, which makes it hard for you even to put the club correctly on the ground behind the ball, never mind hit it squarely. Almost everyone who reverse pivots swings the club back so that their eyes are at an angle looking down at the ground. If they kept their eyes level, they wouldn’t reverse pivot. That’s how I fix that problem. Use the brim of your hat or the top of your sunglasses to check how level your eyes are throughout the swing.

At address, keep your eyes level. One last thought. If you have watched Jack Nicklaus play golf over the years you have probably noticed how he always lines up on an intermediate target about a yard in front of his ball. The theory is that it is easier to align the clubface with something that close as opposed to a flag 200 yards away . I like that method. Try it.

Create Good Alignment

Put a club down on the ground so that you can line up your feet. Then hold another club across your legs, just above your knees. Use the club on the ground as a reference. When the two are parallel, your legs are aligned.

Moving up, lay the club across your hips, aligning them. Then your shoulders and eyes. If you have been aligned badly, you’ll be amazed at the different feel you have. Now, set up to the ball. Your right hand is closer to the ball than your left. Your right elbow is bent. Don’t overdo it, though. I see many people tucking their right elbows in more than they need to.

That only aligns your arms to the right, which will encourage you to take the club away too much on the inside, then loop it over on the downswing. Your arms should be parallel to the target line. If your right arm was perfectly straight, your arms would be lined up to the left. Try it and you’ll see what I mean.