Golf Tip from Myrtle Beach Golf Passport: Using a Hula-Hoop to Prevent Outside-In Swings
In this video, Steve Dresser of the Steve Dresser Golf Academy at True Blue Golf Club in Pawleys Island, S.C. shows us how he uses a common childhood toy to help reinforce a better swing path.
So some genius years ago said that the golf swing is a circle on a tilt – or half way between a merry-go-round (which, of course, is the horizontal rotation) and a Ferris wheel, which is vertical. So the golf swing fits somewhere in between there.
Years ago I thought I’d attach a hula-hoop to a base and put it on a tilt. And actually, my main reason for doing that was just to get people to swing and hit balls out from out under the hula-hoop so they wouldn't get way out over the top like we see so many people do. And then I figured out another way to attach where I could actually twist it one way or the other, lower it or raise it.
So I use the hula-hoop a lot as a visual aid more than a teaching aid. And, of course, you hear the word swing plane all the time and this represents the plane or the tilt of the circle, so I'd like to try to stay fairly true to that as I swing. You can see the shaft and the hoop are on basically the same plane here.
What we see so much of, with the outside-in swingers, is that most of them take the club way around behind them going back, and then come way over so they end up cutting across the ball. And, of course, sometimes we get people doing just the opposite and they swing a little too much from what we would call the inside. It makes the club come in on a very shallow angle, and they'll tend to hit behind the ball and hit up on the ball and hit both fat and thin shots for the same reason. That’s going to start things out to the right a little bit more, so they'll need to make sure there's a lot of club face rotation to compensate for that.
Ideally, we're going to keep it more this way, and try to stay relatively true to that throughout the swing.