AIMING, HOOKS, AND SLICES

Introduction

In this article, we will refer to "hooks" and "slices" and will consider "draws" and "fades" to be simply mild versions of hooks and slices. As we will discuss, flaws of aiming can cause unwanted hooks or slices. When you understand and control these "flaws", they allow you to generate draws and fades at will and the flaws become tools. The basis for this is side spin on the ball which we will discuss later. You needn't worry about side spin to learn to control hooks and slices.

The aiming process we suggest will give you easy control of hooks and slices. In addition, it improves accuracy for 3 reasons as follows.

1. There is a tangible gain because the aiming process doesn't require any alteration of your swing, which may be hard to repeat, may be somewhat uncomfortable, or may be hard to learn.
2. Specific things are listed for you to look at when aiming.
3. Perhaps most important is that your errors in taking the grip and your errors in alignment tend to cancel each other as discussed in the Technical Notes.

Figure 1 will help you understand the process. Please notice that here we are concerned with all except very short shots. The aiming process for putters and short chip shots is quite different and will be discussed in another article.

Adjustments 1 and 2, A New Aiming Procedure

You can get improved accuracy by using 2 essential aiming adjustments. Adjustment 1 is to adjust your grip to give straight shots. Afterward, you make adjustment 2 to send these shots where you want them to go. We will call these "regripping" and "aligning", respectively. Here are these essentials:

1. Find the correct orientation of the club face with respect to the position of your hands on the grip, judged by looking at the club face and at the Vee's of your hands. Keep trying until you find the relative orientation which gives straight shots, not curving left or right. We call this "regripping". Don't worry if these shots are right or left of what you want --- just worry about straight shots.
2. Take and adjust your stance to find the correct orientation of the club face, relative to where you want the straight shot to land (target direction), without regripping.

It is very important to make the 1st adjustment with no regard for the direction of your target. Only the club face and your hand position are important. It is also very important to make the 2nd adjustment without changing your grip. For the 2nd adjustment, you must rotate not only your feet, but your entire body (your stance). The 2nd adjustment is as if you stood on a turntable with its pivot at the ball and it was rotated as necessary to square the face relative to the direction you want. Note: For your swing, the club face may not end up square to the target direction. It is important that you learn the face orientation "relative to the target direction" which results with the desired shot. Use this relative orientation to the target direction for aligning future shots.

Aiming errors are reduced in the regripping aiming process as stated in item 3 in the Introduction because the club face orientation is used twice. Once in adjustment 1, regripping, and again in adjustment 2, alignment. The basis for these statements are explained further in the Technical Notes at the end of this article.

Learning the 1st adjustment is best done by trial and error, making the face more closed relative to your hands to reduce slices and more open to reduce hooks, with no regard for the target direction. Learning the 2nd adjustment is also by trial and error with the turntable idea, but without regripping (that is, maintain the grip you selected in the 1st adjustment.) You align your stance after you have finished learning the first adjustment and adjust your stance until the shots go in the direction you want.

Depending on your habits, you may find that the best face orientation is slightly different among each of your various clubs. It appears that the adjustment for par 3 tee shots with clubs other than the driver, may also require a somewhat different face orientation than the same club used on the fairway.

The rest of this article is concerned with understanding how and why this aiming process works. It is not essential to learning the new aiming process, but will interest those who want to understand the basis. In particular, the following section describes 2 simple experiments which we urge you to make to familiarize yourself with these new aiming ideas.

Aiming Experiments

Instead of the suggested regripping process, if you rotate (around the shaft axis) both your clubhead and wrists at address without taking a new grip, it has little effect on the orientation of the head at impact. You can make an easy experiment to convince yourself of this without even going to a golf course.

EXPERIMENT 1. Take your normal address position. Now rotate your hands and club together without taking a new grip until the club face is about 30 degrees open or closed. Slowly take your normal back swing. You find that your hands strongly tend to rotate back to their normal orientation or nearly so unless you modify your swing.

The following downswing also strongly tends to rotate your hands and wrists back to normal orientation if the back swing didn't do it completely. This puts the club face just before impact back to its normal orientation or nearly so, even though you started with the club face 30 degrees open or closed. Results are about the same if you make a normal swing instead of a slow swing but the swing will feel very awkward.

There is an easier way to change the face orientation just before impact and you need not change your swing. You turn the clubhead around the shaft axis to a new face orientation while keeping your normal address position of hands and eyes. Then take a new grip. The essential thing is that you have changed the angle between hands and the club face. Only the clubhead changes orientation; your hands and stance do not change position. We have not seen articles which recognize this fact and which explain it by experiments such as we suggest.

This leads to another convincing experiment you can try, either in slow motion as above or on actual hits on a course.

EXPERIMENT 2. Take your normal address position. Release your grip, orient the club face considerably closed, then take your grip again with the clubhead in the new orientation, but with your hands in their normal orientation. Now you have a new angle between your hands and the club face. When you take a slow swing and return to the address position, the swing feels easy and normal and the face stays closed.

The process gives a new club face orientation. We call this regripping because you take a new grip with the face at the desired orientation relative to your hands.

Notice also that this method of changing club face orientation has no effect on your normal swing because your hands are always in their normal position. If you would like more technical detail, refer to Figure 4, which shows the main things to observe when regripping.

The Cause of Hooks and Slices

One of the essentials of good aiming is to avoid hooks or slices. Here we will explain slices in terms consistent with what many golfers know. Hooks are simply the reverse situation. Also, left-handed golfers must reverse things appropriately.

Figure 2 illustrates the fundamentals for center hits with no wind. The sole cause of hooks or slices for center hits is side spin, and side spin happens when the club face is not square to the swing path at impact. Side spin causes a lateral force on the ball during its flight for well-known aerodynamic reasons, and this force curves the shot. Note that in the figure, the target direction is not shown. Contrary to common belief, the target direction should not be used as a reference to orient the face to the swing path. When the face is square to the swing path, there is essentially no side spin. The shot will be straight. This is true for an outside-in swing, a perfect swing, or an inside-out swing.

Case A in Figure 2 shows a typical outside-in swing, with the face not square to the swing path. It results in side spin and a curved shot (exaggerated in the figure.) Case B shows the club face reoriented to be square with the path, and the shot is straight, but the alignment needs to be changed as discussed elsewhere in this article.

Hits which are off center toward toe or heel are a different matter. They also cause side spin and give curved shots. Proper curvature of the face surface minimizes errors for such hits. Face curvature was discussed at length in another article.

Discussion

In our design work with drivers, we were concerned with minimizing the common tendency to slice. This led to the methods and experiments described in this article regarding ways to aim. These suggestions give straight shots on average whether your swing is good or bad, outside-in, or inside-out. We do not mean to suggest that these new ideas are a substitute for learning a good swing and a good grip.

Figure 1 illustrates 3 different face orientations, as viewed by a golfer. B represents what is conventionally thought of as an ideal orientation. At A, the face orientation illustrates the correct direction for you to reorient the face (as compared with B) when you want to reduce a slice or to cause a hook. The opposite reorientation at C reduces hooks or causes slices.

As explained in the previous section, shots hook or slice (draw or fade) when the club face is somewhat closed or open relative to the clubhead path just before impact regardless of the reason why it is closed or open.

An outside-in swing path is common among golfers. It usually is accompanied by the club face being open at impact. This is because the path is generally left of where the golfer wants the ball to go, so the tendency is to compensate by having the club face more open. This causes a slice. Even a swing which is severely outside-in will give a straight shot if the face is square to the path just before impact but the ball will fly to the left. Proper club face orientation deserves great attention and is the most important aspect of aiming.

We have discussed adjusting the face orientation and then regripping. This has the interesting consequence that it does not matter what "face angle" may be built into your clubs. If you imagine a super-closed face, for example, when this face is aligned appropriately with respect to your hands, the face angle does not matter. Similarly, face progression and shaft progression are not factors when you use the suggested regripping procedure.

Remember that by suggesting regripping, we don't mean to change the way you grip the club. We do mean to adjust the clubhead orientation properly relative to your hands before you take your grip. It is your same, normal, comfortable grip. Don't change your backswing or downswing in any way.

Regripping has the same effect as the usual instruction to change the position of the Vee of your hand, provided you do not change orientation of the clubhead when you change the position of the Vee. This latter point is often not mentioned in conventional instruction about strong and weak grips, but it is essential to controlling of hooks and slices. We suggest that reorienting the clubhead rather than reorienting the position of your hands (changing the Vee) is more comfortable and more effective.

As an extreme example, you could not comfortably make a 90- degree change by changing the Vee, but it is easy by reorienting the face. There is no physical reason why regripping should alter the feel of the swing because there is no change in position of the body, hands, wrists, or arms.

In contrast, changing the Vee gives many golfers a different feel for the swing. This is detrimental because a good golfer wants to feel a "grooved" swing which never changes. See the Technical Notes for more detail.

In summary, the sequence for aiming is: first, to get straight shots, choose the appropriate club face orientation with respect to your hands, with no regard for the target direction, then take your grip; second, without changing your grip, choose the appropriate club face orientation relative to the direction you want by adjusting your stance (the turntable idea) as required.

How a Slice Can Get Progressively Worse

Some ideas about aiming may lead you to take your stance and square the club face to the target or do this in reverse order. If you do this and have a persistent slice, you are likely to align your stance more to the left. This causes the line of travel of the clubhead to be more toward the left. Now if you square the face to the target before gripping, it is even more open with respect to the line of travel of the clubhead just before impact and the slice is worse. More adjustment of this type causes even more slice. The reverse can affect hooks similarly.

This illustrates that the target should not be used for orienting the club face when regripping. This is central to our new suggestions for aiming.

Comparison of the Importance of Errors in Adjustments 1 and 2

This articles's 2nd section explained adjustment 1 as finding the correct angular orientation of the club face relative to your hands. Adjustment 2 was to properly adjust the club face orientation without regripping by changing alignment. Inevitably you will have errors in making these 2 adjustments. These are the 2 errors we will consider in this section.

Our model shows results of these 2 errors in clubhead orientation. We consider adjustment 1 first. For center hits with drivers, a golfer who hits 250 yards has a lateral error of about 22 yards if the face is oriented 2 degrees too far open or closed at impact, as compared to club face orientation which is square to the direction of travel of the clubhead. A golfer who hits 220 yards makes lateral errors of 16 yards and a golfer who hits 180 yards makes lateral errors of 11 yards. That is, the lateral error increases progressively faster with distance of the hit. It is a small concern with short hitters and a large concern for long hitters.

By comparison with adjustment 2, the corresponding lateral errors due to 2 degrees alignment error for these 3 cases are 8.7, 7.7, and 6.3 yards.

Thus for the 3 cases, adjustment 1 is 2 to 3 times as important as adjustment 2.

For the longer irons, such as the 6-iron or 5-iron or longer, similar calculations show that adjustment 1 is about 2 times as important as adjustment 2. For the 9-iron and the wedges, they are about equally important.

Visibility of Errors

The previous section showed that rather large errors can be caused by small errors of orientation of the club face. You must be especially careful about making adjustment 1 correctly for the driver and the longer clubs. This is mainly because adjustment 1 alters side spin. For the short irons, side spin has a much smaller effect on lateral errors and the adjustments are about equally important.

These 2-degree changes in club face orientation are illustrated in Figure 3. The 2-degree change is hard to see. This shows that you should observe the face orientation very carefully when regripping.

We have made experiments which show that golfers maintain club face orientation more accurately with a very large club face rather than a small one, another advantage for clubs having large faces. Since correct club face orientation is very important, anything which can reduce orientation errors is worth serious attention.

Figure 1 shows a good way to judge club face orientation. Without regard for the target direction, look at your hands, your feet, and the shaft axis so you are sure that all appear in what you consider to be their usual and normal address positions before you worry about the club face orientation. Adjust the face orientation after checking that these other angles are normal by adjusting the face orientation shown in Figure 1. The face orientation at A tends toward hooks and at C, toward slices. Regrip after you have chosen the face orientation. The shaft axis is a very useful reference for making these judgements. Notice that the face and the Vee are nearly parallel to the shaft, and thus reasonably easy to judge.

Use of the shaft axis to help find the right orientation of the club face apparently is seldom used by golfers. Your hands, shaft, and club face are right there in your field of view, and are easy to judge. Figure 1 should help you understand these angles and guide you to observing that the angle between the face and the shaft axis is what you want and that the other angles are normal for your swing. After practice, this can be done with little special attention. The shaft axis is not essential to good choice of the club face angle, but we believe that many will find it helpful.

Always remember that orientation of the club face relative to the hands is normally the most important factor for best accuracy, whether or not you use the shaft axis as part of the aiming process.

This club face orientation method can be done before or after you step to the ball to choose your alignment. In any case, be sure to choose club face orientation relative to your hands rather than to the target.

Many golfers simply depend on their instincts to have the correct orientation of their hands and body and may do very well without consciously looking.

We believe that most golfers look at the club face when they choose clubhead orientation, probably unconsciously. Other features of most clubhead designs do not indicate club face orientation very well.

TECHNICAL NOTES

Figure 4 repeats the message of Figure 1 in more technical form and labels the important angles.

A. Cochran and J. Stobs, The Search for the Perfect Swing (The Booklegger, Grass Valley CA, 1968, page 90) partly confirms our basic comments about regripping by indicating that the angular position of the wrists is driven by the dynamics of the swing, rather than the angular position of the wrists at address controlling the dynamics of the swing. We suggest that the angular position is probably governed more by static factors, as demonstrated by the slow swing experiments suggested above.

Centrifugal force is probably also a significant factor. Considering centrifugal force up to 100 pounds, it is reasonable to expect that this force tends strongly to put the wrists into their normal orientation.

The earlier section about comparison of errors, showed that errors of face orientation caused lateral errors from about 1 to 2.5 times larger than errors of alignment, depending on which club is used. Since the suggested aiming process uses the face twice, any error in face orientation during regripping tends to be reduced on the second use of the face for the alignment. We believe this tendency will cause perceptibly better accuracy for golfers. This stems from use of the face twice for the 2 different orientation processes, causing them to no longer be independent of each other, so far as effects on lateral errors are concerned.

If you study this process carefully, you can see that if your clubhead orientation is normally different at impact from what it was at address, the process properly allows for this difference. That means this difference is something you need not worry about.

Not discussed above, a small amount of side spin is caused by the rotation speed of the head around the shaft axis at impact. This is included in our model, but it is a minor effect in connection with this discussion.

How regripping reduces combined aiming errors

At the beginning of this article, we said that using the face as a reference for both adjustment 1 and for adjustment 2 reduced aiming errors. That is because using the face twice makes adjustments 1 and 2 interdependent. An error made in adjustment 1 is present when adjustment 2 is made. When adjustment 2 is made from this erroneous face orientation, the result is more likely to reduce the error of the first adjustment than to increase it, without any tendency to increase the error made in adjustment 2.

In summary, for aiming all clubs except the putter and chip shots, the sequence is: first, to get straight shots, choose the appropriate club face orientation with respect to your hands, with no regard for the target direction, then take your grip; second, without changing your grip, choose the appropriate club face orientation relative to the direction you want by adjusting your stance (the turntable idea) as required.

Figures for AIMING, HOOKS, AND SLICES

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Figure 1. Adjustment of clubhead to control slices and hooks. Notice that orientation of the hands does not change, whereas the face orientation does change. In this process, the grip is released, the head is readjusted, and then the same grip is taken again. Slices are suppressed by the head orientation shown at A; hooks are suppressed at C. Target direction is not a factor in this adjustment. Figure 4 gives more detail. This replaces the conventional "strong" and "weak" grip procedure.

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Figure 2. The cause of slices for center hits. Case A shows a typical outside-in swing path with the face open relative to the swing path direction. This causes a slice. Case B shows an outside-in swing path but with the face square to the swing path, causing a straight shot. Shots have almost no curvature when the face is square to the swing path.

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Figure 3. The left clubhead is oriented 2 degrees closed, the center one is square, and the right one is 2 degrees open. These small changes are hard to see but they cause lateral errors of 20 yards or more with a driver. Great care is needed when aiming.

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Figure 4. A suggested way to choose clubhead orientation. The tangent line can be absent and the club face used instead. First, make sure LAS, LVS, and RVS are ok and normal, then adjust FS to the position you prefer and then take your grip. We call this regripping. All these angles are nearly zero. FS is the angle which a golfer should adjust to control hooks and slices.

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