How to Close the Face to Path While Staying Open to the Target

⛳ To hit a push-draw shot in golf, the club face must be open to the target but closed to the swing path.

🖐️ Rotating your hands away from the target and raising the club handle helps create a closed face-to-path relationship.

🎯 Practicing starting the ball to the right and then curving it left builds the foundation for mastering push-draw shots.

🔄 Segmenting practice into starting direction and curve control, then combining them, is key to consistent shot shaping.

00:00:00 - So, we got a question in the comments. By the way, if you have any questions about golf or anything about your golf swing, please post them down here. We would love to answer those for you. Uh, but the question was really talking about how do you hit a shot where the faceto path relationship is closed, but the face is open relative to the target. So, what that would create is a shot that pushes and draws. So, we're going to talk about the system in order to do that.

00:00:26 - All right. So, let's dive into this. So, uh, if if you had a little bit of trouble following kind of what's happening here, let me explain this and slow down just so everybody's on the same page with what we're trying to accomplish. So, in order to hit a shot that starts to the right of your target and then draws back to your target, the club face needs to be open relative to the target line. So, that would cause the ball to start to the right for a right-handed player. And then the face

00:00:49 - needs to actually be closed relative to the direction that you are swinging the club or closed to the path. That's what creates the curvature back to the left of the draw. So, the easy way to practice this would be to split those two things up. So, as a coach, the first thing I would teach you to do is how do you start the ball to the right? So, in order to do that, the face needs to be open relative to the target. So, practice hitting shots. I've got a Sky Track range up here. This would be a

00:01:12 - great way to practice this on a launch monitor, even if you're practicing outside. Basically, just figure out a target line, practice making some swings where you start the ball out to the right. So, a couple ways you could do this would be use a noodle on the ground just to help remind you of the direction that you're swinging. Don't worry about the curve. Just worry about starting the ball to the right of your target. So, if I was going to show you what that would

00:01:32 - look like, I just take my setup. I'm not going to swing fast, go back, hit one that starts out to the right. So, you can see that golf ball is going to push and it's just going to stay out to the right. So, that's totally fine. Whether it curves back to the left, whether it stays to the right, doesn't matter. Your first objective, start the ball to the right of the line. So you can see that ball started to the right. I've got a face angle that was 7° open. That's why

00:01:56 - the ball started out to the right of my target. So that's step number one. Step number two then is to practice closing the face relative to the path. So in order to do that, there's a couple things that I might change with how you're holding the club or some of the things you're doing in your swing. Let's talk about those really quick. So the first one, in order to build in a more closed face to path, you would want to rotate your hands more away from the target on your grips. You can see how

00:02:18 - now my thumbs are going more down the trail side of the grip. You can see more of the top of my lead hand and the the my trail hand is more underneath the grip. That will help you get the face closed. Another thing that you can do when you're hitting uh set up with the handle a little bit higher. So instead of having the handle nice and low, you want that handle a little higher. That's going to help keep your lead wrist flatter, which is also going to help you

00:02:40 - create a little bit more of that closed face to path. And then the last piece is when you're hitting, when you follow through, you would want that face pointed more down towards the ground instead of up towards the sky. So you can see when I do that, the rotation of my forearm, how my arms moving differently relative to those two positions. That's going to help you hit a shot that has a face that's closed relative to the path. So practice that. Get your hands on the club in a little

00:03:03 - bit of a different place. Have your handle a little higher. You could still have your noodle on the ground swinging out to the right and just practice that movement. So that would look something like that. You can see this ball is probably going to start a little left, curve a little bit to the left. That's fine. Again, you're just trying to segment this stuff individually. So practice starting it to the right, then practice curving the ball to the left, and then you want to

00:03:24 - combine the two. So in order to do that, then you basically build in what we just talked about of starting the ball to the right first, closing the face in the followrough. So what I probably need to do in this one, I don't need to have my hands rotated as far away from the target. I'm I'm definitely somebody who overcurves the golf ball to the left. So, I put my hands a little bit more neutral position on top of the club. I'm not going to have the handle as high up

00:03:47 - in the air. Again, this is something I've practiced a ton. I'm really good at it. I don't need the help there. And then in the follow through, I'm not going to have the face as close. So, hopefully when you build all this stuff in, it would look something like this. So, you can see that ball's going to start to the right, curve back to the left. you just continue to practice that skill over and over and over reducing the amount of curve that you have trying

00:04:11 - to get this ball to land as close to the target as possible. So really that's the method, that's the system. That's how you would go about it. Start by starting the golf ball out to the right, then start by working on getting the face closed relative to the path. Then try to combine the two together. If you practice it in that order, you'll be well on your way to hitting a lot of shots that push and then draw back to the target.