Free Golf Tips: Plane Path

Traditional Swing

Your swing plane is an imaginary surface created by the shape and angle of your golf swing. As you swing, the clubhead follows an elliptical path around your body. The angle that ellipse travels on compared to the ground is your swing plane. "Hogan's Five Lessons" remains to this day, the basis of many players' understanding of the golf swing. In it, he describes the swing plane in two parts.

First Part of the Swing

The first part of the golf swing, or the backswing, utilizes a plane that runs from the ball up through the golfer's shoulders. This plane is traditionally more upright than the plane utilized on the downswing and follow through.

Second Part of the Swing

The second part of the swing, the downswing and follow-through, utilizes a flatter plane than the backswing. As the golfer initiates the downswing by turning his hips toward the target and dropping his hands along the arc back to the ball, the plane flattens into a more horizontal, powerful aspect. This re-routing of the clubhead is sometimes referred to as finding the "slot."

Single-Plane Swing

The swing path is the actual path the clubhead takes as it extends along your arc away from the ball then back through the hitting zone and up into your follow-through. So, in a two-plane swing, the path of the clubhead changes slightly as you re-route the club onto the flatter plane into the slot. The goal in a single-plane swing is for the path the clubhead travels on the backswing to be basically a mirror image of the path on the downswing.

The biggest challenge in learning the more athletic single-plane swing is forgetting many of the lessons and changing the habits you learned when you first began playing golf with the traditional two-plane swing.

Swing Path

The swing path is the actual path the clubhead takes as it extends along your arc away from the ball then back through the hitting zone and up into your follow through. So, in a two-plane swing, the path of the clubhead changes slightly as you re-route the club onto the flatter plane into the slot. The goal in a single-plane swing is for the path the clubhead travels on the backswing to be basically a mirror image of the path on the downswing.