How to Keep Your Hands Left for a Better Follow Through

This drill trains the hand path after impact, which is a major key if your typical miss is a hook or an overdraw. Many good players get the club too far from the inside not because of what the clubhead is doing alone, but because their hands travel too straight toward the target through the release. When that happens, the club tends to approach from too far in-to-out, and the ball starts curving more than you want. The goal of this drill is to teach you how to let your hands work left in the follow-through while the arms continue extending away from you. That blend helps neutralize the path, improve face-to-path relationships, and produce a straighter, more reliable ball flight.

How the Drill Works

The basic idea is simple: from impact into the early follow-through, your hands should not keep moving straight down the target line. If they do, the club often gets delivered too much from the inside, especially if you also add extra side bend and hang back through the strike. That combination is a common recipe for hooks.

To train a better pattern, set up two visual references on the ground:

• One stick along the target line
• One stick angled slightly left of the target line, roughly 20 to 30 degrees

The target-line stick shows the direction many hook-prone players mistakenly send their hands after impact. The angled stick gives you a better picture of where the hands should travel as the club releases.

The important distinction is that this drill is about the hands, not the clubhead. You are not trying to drag the clubhead sharply left immediately after impact. In fact, trying to force the clubhead left can create a different set of problems. Instead, you want the hands to move left while the arms are still extending and the body keeps rotating. That sequence allows the club to shallow and release naturally without getting excessively stuck behind you.

For this movement to happen correctly, your body has to support it. If you stop rotating or stand up through impact, your hands will tend to run out toward the target line even if you are trying to move them left. To make the drill work, you need:

• Continued upper-body rotation through the strike
• Ongoing side bend rather than early extension
• Arm extension away from your body, not a cramped or stalled release

When those pieces are working together, the hand path shifts left enough to keep the club from traveling excessively in-to-out. That is why this drill is especially useful for players who can hit strong draws but struggle to control them.

Step-by-Step

1. Create your station. Place one alignment stick on the ground aimed at the target. Place a second stick just left of it at about a 30-degree angle. The angled stick represents the direction you want your hands to travel in the follow-through.

2. Start without a ball. Get into a setup position, then move into a slow-motion impact position. Your weight should be forward, your chest beginning to open, and your hands slightly ahead of the clubhead as they would be in a solid strike.

3. Rehearse the hand path. From that impact position, slowly move into the follow-through and feel your hands travel along the left-angled stick. Let the arms extend as they move left. Do not try to yank the clubhead across your body. The focus is on the hands tracing that leftward route.

4. Add body rotation. As your hands move left, keep your chest rotating open. Feel that your torso continues turning instead of stalling. If your body stops, your hands will tend to move too straight down the line.

5. Maintain your side bend. Keep your posture and tilt through the strike. Avoid standing up early. If you rise out of the shot, the hand path usually shifts back toward the target line and the club can get too far from the inside.

6. Brush the ground. Once the rehearsal makes sense, make short swings brushing the turf in front of the ball position while tracing the same hand path. This helps you connect the feel to an actual strike motion without worrying about ball flight yet.

7. Move to a nine-to-three swing. Hit short shots with a waist-high backswing and waist-high follow-through. Let the ball simply get in the way of the motion. Your priority is to keep the same leftward hand path through the release zone.

8. Build to three-quarter swings. If the contact and start lines are improving, lengthen the swing gradually. Keep checking that the hands still work left as the arms extend and your body keeps turning.

9. Test it at full speed. Take the feel into full swings only after you can maintain it in shorter motions. If the hook returns, back up to the shorter rehearsal and rebuild from there.

What You Should Feel

This drill often feels different from what a hook-prone player expects. If you are used to sending your hands down the line, the correct motion may initially feel as if the hands are exiting much farther left than normal. That is often a sign you are moving in the right direction.

Key sensations

• Your hands move left while your arms extend. It is not a pull-in move. The arms are still reaching away from you as the hand path shifts left.
• Your chest keeps turning. The hands moving left should feel connected to body rotation, not independent of it.
• You stay in your posture. There is continued side bend through the strike instead of an early stand-up move.
• The club feels less trapped behind you. The release becomes more neutral and less excessively from the inside.
• The ball flight straightens out. Instead of a start line well right with heavy curve back left, you should begin to see more neutral starts and less overcurve.

Checkpoints to monitor

• At and just after impact, your hands are not chasing the target line.
• Your upper body is still rotating through the shot.
• Your hips and chest are opening rather than stalling.
• You do not feel the need to rescue the face late with excessive hand action.
• Your divot and contact pattern begin looking more neutral rather than excessively in-to-out.

If you use a training aid such as a hula hoop to visualize swing direction, you can also picture the hand arc shifting slightly left through the follow-through rather than extending straight toward the target. That visual can be very helpful if you tend to think too much about the clubhead instead of the hands.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

• Using this drill when your real miss is a slice. If you already cut across the ball or deliver the club too far left, this is usually not the place to start.
• Trying to swing the clubhead left instead of the hands. The drill is about the hand path. Forcing the clubhead across can create glancing contact and poor strikes.
• Stopping body rotation. If your chest stalls, your hands will tend to shove outward toward the target line.
• Standing up through impact. Early extension makes it much harder for the hands to work left correctly.
• Pulling the hands inward too abruptly. The hands should move left as they extend away, not collapse into your body.
• Going too fast too soon. If you jump straight to full swings, you may lose the pattern before it is learned.
• Ignoring ball flight. The goal is not just to complete the motion but to produce a more neutral path and straighter shot shape.
• Over-manipulating the wrists late. If you rely on a last-second wrist fix to save the shot, the path issue usually remains.

How This Fits Your Swing

This drill fits into the bigger picture of release mechanics and club path control. A lot of golfers think hooks come only from a closed clubface, but many strong players hook the ball because the path is too far to the right through impact. In those cases, the face may not even be dramatically closed relative to the target. It is simply too closed relative to that path.

That is why the follow-through matters so much. Your follow-through is not just a finish position you pose in after the ball is gone. It reflects the motion that carried the club through impact. If your hands work too straight down the line, that usually tells you something important about how the club was delivered. By training the hands to move left in a coordinated way, you are often improving the path that produced the hook in the first place.

This drill also connects closely to good pivot action. You cannot separate the hand path from what your body is doing. To get the hands traveling left properly, you need:

• Rotation through the strike
• Proper side bend
• Space for the arms to extend
• A release that is driven by motion, not by panic hand action

In practice, this means you should not treat the drill as a stand-alone bandage. It works best as part of a full understanding of how your pivot, arm motion, and release all blend together. If your miss is the overdraw, though, this can be one of the fastest ways to start changing the geometry of the strike.

A smart progression is to keep revisiting this pattern in the nine-to-three range. That release zone is where you can actually feel and control the movement. Once the motion becomes reliable there, you can gradually stretch it into longer swings. If it breaks down at higher speed, that is your sign to shorten the motion again and rebuild the feel.

Done correctly, this drill helps you replace a hand path that runs too far toward the target with one that exits more left, supported by rotation and posture. The result is a club path that becomes more neutral, a release that is less trapped, and a ball flight that is much easier to trust.