Club Benefits
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Stop wasting money on a new driver every year — get this simple training aid instead
Golf is an exceedingly difficult sport. Your club face only contacts the ball for a fraction of a second, but there are hundreds of tiny factors that will alter how — and where —the ball travels.
How far will it go? Will it go right? Left? Every tiny angle change, how close you stand to the ball and every other seemingly minuscule aspect of your swing will change where your shot ends up.
Arguably, the most important aspect that determines where the ball goes is your swing path and the angle of the club face relative to that path. I’ve always struggled with an outside-in swing path and a slightly open clubface, which results in excessive slicing with my driver.
I understand all the data. I know I need to swing from the inside out with a closed or neutral clubface to create a draw. But what I can’t seem to figure out is how to do that. And that’s where PathPal changed the game for me. The complete training system and its accompanying drills have finally had me hitting straighter drives.
It’s a good feeling. No, a great feeling that anyone can have if you’re just willing to practice with the right tool.
How PathPal helped me fix my slice
If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the last few years testing golf training aids, clubs, launch monitors and other devices, it’s this: there’s no quick fix.
Every aspect of the game you want to improve involves practice. But not just mindlessly going out of the driving range and swinging the club. You need to practice with purpose and direction. For me, PathPal gave me the feedback I needed to understand how to adjust my swing path and eliminate the slice.
As soon as I received the training system, I looked at the large library of drills on PathPal’s website and immediately locked in on one called Inside-Out Draw Path. Here’s the description of the drill — you’ll quickly see why it’s helpful to me: “This drill uses both halves of the PathPal to create a guided swing path, forcing the golfer to shallow the club from the inside and promote an exit path to the right, ideal for hitting a draw. It also helps improve centeredness of contact.”
I hit a draw on my very first swing with the two PathPal parts and the included alignment sticks. It was only about 160 yards because I had to completely adjust my swing to be shallow under the stick and around the front one, but it was a draw. After a few more shots, I started seeing the distance come back and the shot shape stay right-to-left. It felt like magic!
Once I removed the PathPal, the over-the-top swing started to come back: old habits die hard, as they say. But I could finally feel what it felt like to hit a draw.
After a few more days of drilling with PathPal, I could remove the aid and start to follow that swing path because I was memorizing the feel. And what a glorious feel it was. Suddenly, I could walk up to the tee box and know I was going to hit a good drive. It might not always draw with a powerful right-to-left shape, but if it faded, it would only fade a little, not be a big dramatic slice that ended up in the long grass, woods or worse.
I just played my first two outdoor rounds of the season, as it’s finally warm in the northeastern part of the U.S. In those two rounds, I hit exactly one tee shot that wasn’t in play. And it went out of bounds to the left, not the right. That’s right, I, Dave LeClair, a slicer, hit a massive hook into the left woods. I’ve never been so happy to hit a bad shot.
And I’ve never had more fun golfing.
And that’s just one drill
What’s crazy is that’s just the effect one drill with PathPal had on my game. The four-part system comes with two alignment stick holders, the alignment sticks themselves and the TrueStick impact trainer. They all come together with drills that let you work on ball striking, putting, hitting the center of the club face more often, swaying in the backswing, your balance, and so much more.
The teachers who partnered with PathPal have come up with so many creative ways to use these seemingly simple tools. If there is an aspect of your golf game that needs work, I’m confident you can find a drill with PathPal to address it.
I’m going to dedicate my practice time to working on my ball-first contact with the Impact Control Drill. If it works as well as the driver-fixing practice, I’ll stop chunking and topping my irons and be on my way to breaking 80 before I know it.
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