How to stop slicing the golf ball, starting with the real cause

What actually causes a slice in golf

A golf ball curves because of the difference between where the clubface points and the direction the club is traveling. That is the whole of ball flight in one sentence.

A slice for a right-handed golfer means the face is open relative to the path. In practice the path is swinging leftwards across the ball, out to in, and the face is pointing somewhere to the right of that line. The ball starts left of the face and curves hard away to the right.

Notice that both conditions are needed. This is why the internet's favorite fixes disappoint. Strengthen your grip without changing the path and you square the face onto a leftward path, which is a pull, not a straight shot. You have not stopped slicing, you have traded one miss for another.

Why your path swings out to in

Here is the part that matters, and it happens before the club ever gets near the ball.

In a well sequenced downswing the lower body starts first, the torso follows, the arms and club come last. That order drops the club into a slot slightly behind you, and from there it swings out towards the ball rather than across it.

In an over the top move, the upper body and arms start first. The club is thrown outwards away from your body, and from that position the only way to reach the ball is to pull across it from out to in. That is your slice, and it was decided in the first fraction of the downswing.

Two things push almost every amateur into it:

• Rushing the transition. Hitting at the ball rather than swinging through it. This is the same fault that wrecks your tempo ratio, and it is why your practice swing looks better than your real one.
• Not enough rotation going back. If your shoulders have not turned, there is nowhere behind you for the club to drop into, so it goes over the top instead. Very often what looks like a big backswing is a sway rather than a turn.

Both of those are movement faults, not equipment faults, and both are trainable without a ball in front of you.

How to stop slicing, in the order that works

1. Check your grip once, then leave it alone. If you cannot see two knuckles on your lead hand at address, your grip is genuinely weak and worth changing. If you can, stop blaming it and move on.
2. Make a real shoulder turn. Not longer arms, more rotation. You are creating the space that lets the club come down from the inside.
3. Slow the transition down. The change of direction should feel unhurried. Roughly three counts back to one coming down, which is the proportion nearly every good swing shares.
4. Let the lower body go first. The feeling most people need is that the downswing starts from the ground while the club is still finishing its backswing.
5. Swing out to the right of the target. An exaggeration, deliberately. A confirmed slicer who feels like they are hitting a push will usually hit it straight.

The drill you can do without a ball

Slow rehearsal swings, stopping at the top, then starting down with the hips while the hands stay passive. Ten of those, slowly, with attention on the order of events. Speed is the last thing you add, not the first.

The reason this works away from a course is that you are not training a strike, you are training a sequence. Sequences are motor patterns and motor patterns are built by repetition, which is the argument in practicing golf at home without clubs.

Rakou is useful here for a narrow and honest reason. Hold your iPhone like a grip and make a real swing, and it reads where the phone's face pointed at impact and the rhythm of your swing, backswing to downswing. On a hole, that face decides the shot: an open face slices and a square one flies straight. So you can practice delivering a square face with an unhurried transition, most days, in ten minutes.

Be clear about what that is. It is a real reading of the phone's face, not your clubface, and Rakou does not read swing path. It cannot tell whether you came over the top, it will not diagnose or fix a real slice, and the ball is simulated. What moves it is measured. More on the readings in swing your phone.

If you want to see your body rather than your hands, Rakou can also read a swing you film from behind. It checks ten checkpoints against your own body and gives you one priority with a drill. The club is not tracked. How that works, and what video can and cannot see, is in golf swing analysis on your phone.

What not to buy

Anti-slice drivers exist and they work by building the correction into the head, which masks the fault rather than removing it. That is a reasonable trade if you have decided you are never going to practice, and a bad one if you would like to actually improve. Same with the training aid that straps your arms together: useful for a feeling, useless as a permanent solution.

The short version

You slice because your club travels across the ball from out to in, with the face open to that path. The path comes first, and the path comes from starting the downswing with your upper body, usually because you rushed it or because you never turned far enough to have anywhere else to go. Fix the turn, fix the sequence, and the face fixes get much easier. None of that requires a ball, which is lucky, because that is the part you can practice on a Tuesday.