There's nothing more frustrating than stepping up to a shot, making what feels like a decent swing, and then watching helplessly as your golf ball sails weakly off to the right, landing nowhere near your target. That powerless slice or high, floppy push shot can almost always be traced back to a single, simple cause: hitting the ball with an open clubface. The good news is that this is one of the most fixable problems in golf. This guide will walk you through the reasons your clubface is open at impact and provide clear, actionable steps to get it square, so you can start hitting powerful, straight shots again.
Before we can fix the problem, we need to understand it. Imagine the face of your golf club is the front door to a house. If the door is pointing directly at your target at the moment of impact, it’s “square.” If it’s pointing to the right of your target (for a right-handed golfer), it’s “open.” If it’s pointing to the left, it’s “closed.”
Hitting the ball with an open face imparts sidespin, causing a slice. It also adds effective loft, which leads to those high, weak shots that rob you of distance. While lots of different factors can contribute to an open face, they almost always fall into one of four categories:
Let's tackle these one by one, starting with the biggest offender of them all.
Your grip is the only connection you have to the golf club. Think of it as the steering wheel for your car, if it isn't positioned correctly from the start, you'll be fighting it the entire ride. An incorrect grip is the number one cause of an open clubface. Specifically, what we call a “weak” grip will sabotage your swing before you even start moving.
A "weak" grip isn't about pressure, it's about the placement of your hands on the handle. Here’s how to spot one:
This "weak" orientation makes it very difficult for your hands and forearms to rotate naturally and release the club through impact. The default tendency will be for the clubface to arrive at the ball wide open.
To fix this, we need to move toward a more "neutral" or slightly "stronger" grip. This will feel strange at first. Very strange. But trust the process, it sets you up for success.
A final note: Whether you use a ten-finger, interlock, or overlap grip doesn’t really matter. What matters is the rotation of your hands on the club. Commit to this new hold. Hit short shots with it until it stops feeling so foreign. It's the most important change you can make to stop that slice.
With an open face slice, many golfers instinctively try to compensate by aiming far to the left of their target. While it seems logical, this action often makes the slice worse! It encourages an "over-the-top" swing path, where your arms swing out and across the ball, further wiping across the face and increasing slice spin.
A proper setup makes a square strike easier.
Start behind the ball and pick an intermediate target a few feet in front of the ball on your intended line. Set the clubface behind the ball aiming at that intermediate spot first. Then, build your stance around the club, setting your feet, hips, and shoulders parallel to that target line. Aiming your body correctly frees you up to swing toward the target, not away from it.
For mid-iron shots, your ball position should be dead center in your stance. As clubs get longer (5-iron, 7-iron), the ball can move slightly forward of center, and with a driver it should be off your lead heel. However, a common fault for slicers is playing the ball too far forward with their irons. If the ball is too far forward, you don't give the club enough time to rotate and square up by the time it reaches the ball. Check your iron position, a simple adjustment back towards the middle could make a massive difference.
Your grip and setup can be perfect, but you can still open the face during the swing itself. This usually happens in two key places: right at the start of the swing (the takeaway) and at the transition from backswing to downswing.
A common mistake is to "fan" the clubface open during the takeaway by rolling your wrists and forearms. This means the clubface is open right from the start, and you have to perform miracles to get it square at impact.
The Fix: The One-Piece Takeaway. Feel like your shoulders, arms, and hands move away from the ball together as one unit. For the first few feet, the clubhead should stay outside your hands and the face should feel like it's pointing down at the ball for as long as possible. A great checkpoint is when your club shaft gets parallel to the ground in the backswing. At this point, the toe of the club should be pointing straight up at the sky. If it’s pointing behind you, you’ve rolled it open.
The number one move that ruins amateur golf swings is the “over-the-top” move. This is when your downswing starts with your shoulders and arms throwing the club out and across the target line. This steep path makes it nearly impossible to square the club naturally. Instead, the face is left wide open, and you slice or pull-slice the ball.
The Fix: Your Body is the Engine. A powerful and consistent downswing is a chain reaction that starts from the ground up. At the top of your backswing, the first feeling should be a slight shift of your weight and pressure into your lead foot, followed by the unwinding of your hips. Your torso follows, then your arms, and finally the hands. When the big muscles of your body lead the way, the club naturally drops onto a shallower path from the inside, giving the face all the time it needs to rotate and square up through impact - no manipulation required.
If you're using just your arms, you're not going to generate power, and you’re certainly not going to control the clubface.
Understanding these concepts is one thing, feeling them is another. Here are a couple of very effective drills to help you train a square clubface.
Without a ball, take your new, stronger grip. Now, swing back in super slow motion. Pause at that first checkpoint (shaft parallel to the ground) and check that the toe is up. Continue to the top. Now, start the downswing by feeling your hips turn, letting your arms drop. As you swing through the impact zone, again in slow motion, watch the clubface. See it rotate from slightly open on the way down, to square at the bottom, to closing after it passes the would-be ball. This slow, deliberate practice helps your brain build a new motor program.
Take your normal setup but separate your hands on the club by about 6-8 inches. Now, make half-swings back and through. You will get instant, exaggerated feedback on what your clubface is doing. To get the clubface square at 'impact' with split hands, you will have to actively feel your trail forearm (right forearm) rotate over your lead forearm. It makes the correct clubface release motion much more obvious.
Solving the slice and stopping your open clubface comes down to checking your fundamentals and understanding how rotation works. A patient audit of your grip, followed by improvements in your setup and swing sequence, will lead you to a squarer clubface and much straighter, more powerful golf shots.
Getting personalized feedback is often the fastest way to get better. We built Caddie AI to be that expert in your pocket, available 24/7. If you’re struggling with concepts like your grip or downswing sequence, you can ask for simple explanations or drills tailored for you. This helps take the guesswork out of your game and gets you back to hitting straighter, more satisfying shots with confidence.
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