Shallow Your Swing with the Ball Above Your Feet Drill

This drill teaches you how to shallow the driver by using a simple but powerful setup: hitting from a ball-above-your-feet lie. If your driver swing tends to get steep, choppy, or dominated by the upper body, this drill gives you immediate feedback. A steep approach with the driver often leads to pop-ups, slices, and weak contact. But when the ball sits above your feet, the slope encourages you to swing more around your body and more from the inside. In other words, it helps you feel the club working on a shallower, more functional path without overthinking mechanics.

How the Drill Works

The idea is simple: when the ground rises up outside the ball, a steep, outside-in swing becomes harder to get away with. If you chop down from above, the club is more likely to strike the slope before it ever reaches the ball. That feedback is what makes the drill so effective. Your brain quickly starts searching for a better route to the ball.

The better route is a motion that feels more rotational, more around, and more up the slope. That phrase matters. Rather than feeling the club drive sharply down toward the ball, you want to sense the clubhead tracing the angle of the hill through impact.

With a driver, that is exactly the kind of pattern you want to improve:

• A shallower approach into the ball
• A club path that works more into-out instead of outside-in
• A strike that is more level to slightly ascending
• Less glancing slice spin and fewer pop-ups

If you have access to a practice area with a graduated slope, that is ideal. Start on a more severe ball-above-your-feet lie, then gradually move to milder slopes, and finally to flat ground. Each step asks you to keep the same feel as the terrain changes.

If you do not have a range with this kind of lie, you can still use the concept. Many golfers can rehearse it on a backyard hill, with or without a ball. Even slow-motion swings on a slope can teach you a lot about how the club needs to travel.

Step-by-Step

1. Find a slope where the ball sits above your feet. Ideally, use a hill that lets you work from a severe slope down to a mild one. The most exaggerated version might place the ball several inches higher than a normal lie.

2. Use your driver and make a normal setup. Let the lie influence you naturally. You may notice your posture, shoulder tilt, and orientation start to adjust on their own. That is fine. The goal is not to force a perfectly textbook setup on uneven ground.

3. Make rehearsal swings without a ball first. Feel the club brushing the grass up the slope. Picture the clubhead traveling along the hill rather than crashing down into it.

4. Hit a ball from the steepest version of the lie. Your task is to send the ball starting slightly to the right of the target while keeping the face square enough that it does not slice. A small push is acceptable. A big wipey slice is not.

5. Pay attention to the turf interaction. If the club digs into the hill before impact, you likely came in too steep and too far from the outside. If the club brushes along the slope, you are moving in the right direction.

6. Move to a slightly less severe slope. Try to recreate the same feeling of swinging around your body and up the hill. The terrain is changing, but the motion should still feel shallow and flowing.

7. Move to flat ground. Now your job is to reproduce the same motion you just learned from the slope. On flat ground, that “up the hill” feeling becomes a sensation of the club working more from the inside and more around through impact.

8. Alternate between the slope and flat ground. This is one of the best parts of the drill. Go back and forth so the exaggerated lie teaches the pattern, then the flat lie tests whether you can keep it.

9. Add a visual guide if possible. An alignment stick placed on the ground to match the slope direction can help you picture the path you are trying to trace. On flat ground, that same stick can remind you of the shallower, more inside approach you want to keep.

What You Should Feel

This drill works best when you pay attention to the sensations it creates. You are not trying to manufacture a dozen technical positions. You are trying to learn what a better driver delivery feels like.

A swing that feels more around than down

If you are normally steep with the driver, the first thing you should notice is that the downswing feels less like a chop and more like a sweep around your body. The club should not feel as if it is being yanked vertically toward the ball.

The clubhead tracing the slope

This is the signature feel of the drill. From roughly trail-foot height into impact, the clubhead should feel as if it is traveling along the angle of the hill. That is what helps create a shallower path.

More body rotation through the strike

Many steep driver swings are too arm-driven and too upper-body dominant in a downward direction. On this drill, you should feel your pivot helping the club move through the ball rather than your hands throwing it down at the ground.

A path that wants to send the ball slightly right

For a right-handed golfer, a good sign is a ball that starts a little to the right. That usually means the path is moving more from the inside. As long as the face is not left open, that start line is often exactly what you want to see during the drill.

Brush, not crash

The turf interaction matters. You want the club to brush the grass up the hill, not dig sharply into the slope. A brushing motion tells you the club is approaching on a shallower angle.

A shallower driver strike on flat ground

Once you return to level lies, the exaggerated slope is gone, but the feeling should remain. On flat ground, the swing may feel more into-out, more rounded, and less steep than what you are used to. That is the transfer you want.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

• Trying to hit down with the driver. This is the exact pattern the drill is designed to clean up. If you force a downward chop, the slope will usually expose it immediately.
• Ignoring the feedback from the ground. If you keep striking the hill before the ball, do not just swing harder. Use that contact as information that your path is still too steep or too far outside-in.
• Leaving the clubface wide open. The drill is about path, but face control still matters. A slight push is fine. A big push-slice means the face is not matching the improved path.
• Overcorrecting into a hook. Some golfers get so focused on swinging from the inside that they excessively close the face or drop the club too far under plane. The goal is a shallower path, not a flip-hook.
• Only practicing on the slope. The slope teaches the feel, but you still need to transfer it back to flat ground. Alternate between the two so the motion becomes part of your normal driver swing.
• Making the swing too handsy. If you try to steer the club with your hands, you can lose the natural rotational feel the drill is meant to create.
• Expecting perfect ball flight right away. Early on, you may hit some pushes or small overdraws as you learn the new path. That is often part of the process, especially if you are used to slicing.
• Using only full-speed swings. Slow rehearsals are valuable. If you cannot trace the slope at half speed, you probably will not do it at full speed either.

How This Fits Your Swing

This drill is not just about handling an uneven lie. It is a training tool for your stock driver motion. The ball-above-your-feet setup exaggerates the environment so your body can discover a better delivery pattern. That makes it especially useful if you tend to:

• Pull the club down too steeply in transition
• Come over the top with the driver
• Hit weak slices or high pop-ups
• Dominate the downswing with your shoulders and arms

On a normal flat tee shot, you do not want to literally feel like you are standing on a hill. But you may want to preserve the intent the hill gave you: a club that approaches from a shallower angle, works more from the inside, and travels through the ball with width and rotation.

This is also why the drill can be so effective for newer golfers. A lot of players cannot shallow the club simply by hearing technical instructions. Telling someone to “drop the club” or “come from the inside” often does not create the right motion. But put them on a slope where a steep motion no longer works, and the body starts solving the problem in a much more intuitive way.

There is also a useful connection here to real-course play. Uneven lies always require some level of adaptation, and a ball-above-your-feet lie naturally encourages a more rounded, flatter motion. Practicing from that lie not only helps your driver mechanics, but also improves your ability to react to terrain and organize the club accordingly.

In the bigger picture, this drill is one of the simplest ways to train the difference between a steep, chopping path and a shallow, sweeping one. The slope gives you feedback. The ball flight confirms whether the path is improving. Then your job is to take that same feel back to a normal tee shot.

If you are a golfer who gets too vertical with the driver, this is a smart drill because it teaches the motion in a way that is hard to fake. Either you trace the slope and shallow the club, or the ground tells you that you did not. That kind of honest feedback is exactly what makes a drill worth keeping in your practice routine.