How to Fix an Open Takeaway and Square the Club Face

‍

0:00 - All right, Lexi, we've got another Fix My Fault today. We're going to talk about the takeaway. So, if you struggle with getting the club face too open in your takeaway, I'll have you demonstrate that in just a minute to show everybody what it looks like. This is going to be the segment for you. We're going to talk about some simple, easy ways to fix that. Awesome.

0:20 - So, Lexi, go ahead and do this for me. Take your address position. I want you to demonstrate for everybody at home kind of what we're talking about. When the face of the club gets too open in your takeaway, show everybody what that looks like. Yep. So, you can see how the face points up toward the sky. Generally, what happens is you get too much rotation of your arms at this point. You can see how the back of your left hand’s pointed up toward the ceiling, the palm of your right hand’s pointing up toward the sky. What that’s going to cause is some issues with a couple of things. You might see a big loss of distance because you’re adding a ton of loft, opening the face—which can lead to slices and inconsistencies with contact, all that type of stuff. So what we really want to focus on, if this is your problem, is minimizing the amount of rotation that you have.

1:01 - This is a really simple, easy way to do this. Go ahead and take your address position. Do the same thing where you made that swing and got the face too open. Bingo. One easy way to fix this would be keeping your right hand, or trail hand, more on top of your lead hand. You can see when you do that and minimize the amount of rotation you have—I'm not suggesting this is the perfect position—but if you got the club back to parallel, you can see how that face points more toward the golf ball. An easy visual I use with a lot of students is: keep the grooves of the club looking at the golf ball for as long as you can. Because what a lot of golfers do when they struggle with this problem is, as they make their backswing, they start to roll their arms really early and point that face up toward the sky. The longer you can keep the grooves looking at the ball, the easier this is going to be.

1:49 - When you do that, it keeps your right hand more on top of your left hand and minimizes the amount of forearm rotation. Another way you can do this—I’ve got this handy-dandy 50 Best Places to Play Golf Before You Die book. Doesn’t really matter what book you use. You can use this in your lead hand. For a right-handed golfer, put it in your left hand. As you make a backswing, rehearse keeping the back of your hand pointed more down toward the ground and keeping the book touching your forearm. If you have too much extension in your lead wrist, that can open the club face as well and cause the same problems. So this is another simple, easy, visual way to do it. Grab a book, make some backswings where you rehearse that feeling—keeping the book planted on your forearm. That’ll give you another easy way to do it. Cool.

2:31 - Okay, so what I want you to do now is practice what we just talked about—basically keeping your face looking at the golf ball a little bit longer. Yep. Keep your trail hand on top of your lead hand—your right hand on top of your left hand—a little bit longer in the backswing. Then go ahead and chip a couple out there, because I want to talk about what you’ll probably see when you do this. Bingo. That contact was really good. Ball’s probably going to come out fairly low, curve to the left just like that. That’s exactly what you want to see if your problem is getting the face too open. What you probably struggle with is the opposite—the ball starting too far right, launching too high, and curving too much that way. So this is a really good way to practice that feel. Then, all you do after that is make the swing a little bit bigger, go a little bit faster, but keep that same initial part of your takeaway—keeping the face pointed down longer. That should go a long way toward fixing this problem.

3:23 - Awesome. Perfect. That one wasn’t as great. It’s totally fine. Two in a row—low ball, curves left. That’s going to fix the problem with your takeaway if you get the face open too quickly. Awesome. [Music]