How to Tell If a Golf Swing Tip Is Actually Right for You (2-Minute Self-Check)

A golfer I'll call Dan came to me last spring with a slice and a phone full of homework. Eleven saved videos. Four of them were about swinging more from the inside, because somewhere along the way he'd learned his problem was "coming over the top," and the internet is unanimous about what you do with that.

He'd been working on it for five months. His slice had gotten worse, not better, and he'd started to genuinely wonder whether he was just bad at golf.

He wasn't. He'd been handed a correct diagnosis for somebody else's swing.

This is the most common problem in golf right now

I want to be careful here, because "the internet ruined golf instruction" is itself a lazy take. There is genuinely great teaching being given away free right now. The problem isn't the quality of the content — it's that the content can't see you.

I'm not the only one saying it. In a January piece for GOLF.com on social-media instruction, Zephyr Melton quoted GOLF Top 100 teacher Jonathan Yarwood describing what now walks through his door:

"About 90 percent of amateur players now come in saying, 'I don't know what I'm doing anymore. I've consumed so much golf content, I'm completely confused.'" Yarwood called it a new phenomenon, and added: "It's an epidemic."

Top 100 teacher Tony Ruggiero, in the same article, named the mechanism exactly: "They chase effects instead of causes, and then they go down rabbit holes." Then he gave the best analogy I've heard for what that does to a golfer:

"It's like going into a Walgreens. Everything in there can help you — if it's really treating what's wrong with you. But if you take one thing from every aisle, you'll end up in the hospital. That's what golfers are doing. They're taking a little bit of everything, even though most of it has nothing to do with their actual problem."

That's Dan. Eleven videos, eleven aisles, one hospital.

Why "over the top" is the perfect example

Over the top is not a fault. It's an effect — a thing your swing does in response to something else. And the most common cause underneath it in the golfers I see isn't the shoulders at all. It's an open clubface.

Here's the chain. A weak grip (hands rotated too far toward the target) leaves the face open at impact. Your brain has one job in that quarter-second before contact: get the ball to go somewhere survivable. An open face sends the ball right, so your brain finds a way to counteract it — and the fastest available counteraction is to throw the club out and across, cutting the face back toward the target line. Over the top isn't the disease. It's the immune response.

Now hand that golfer the standard prescription: swing more from the inside. What happens?

His path moves right. His face is still open. And because the ball's curvature comes from the relationship between face and path, not from either one alone, moving the path right while the face stays open makes the gap between them bigger. The slice gets worse. That's not Dan failing to apply the tip. That's the tip doing exactly what it was always going to do to a swing built like his.

Give the same tip to a golfer whose face is already square and whose path is genuinely twelve degrees out-to-in, and it's the best advice he'll get all year. Same words, opposite outcomes. The tip was never right or wrong. It was right or wrong for a particular cause, and nobody on the other end of that video knew which one you had.

The two-minute self-check

You can answer that second question yourself. You don't need a launch monitor, a lesson, or a coach standing behind you. You need a phone, ten balls, and about two minutes of honest looking. Three data points, in this order.

1. Start line — this is your face

Put an alignment stick or a club on the ground pointing at your target. Hit five shots. Ignore where they finish. Watch only the first thirty yards: where does the ball START?

The face controls starting direction — roughly 80 percent of it with a driver, and more than that with a wedge. If your ball consistently starts right of your target line, your face is open at impact. Left, it's closed. This is the single most misread thing in amateur golf, because most golfers describe a shot by where it ended up and never once looked at where it began.

2. Curve — this is your path, relative to the face

Same five shots. Now watch what the ball does after it starts. Curving right of its own start line means your path is left of your face. Curving left means your path is right of your face.

Put those two together and you have a diagnosis instead of a label. A ball that starts right and curves further right is an open face with a path even further left of it — that golfer's grip is the first thing I'd look at. A ball that starts left and curves right is a different animal: the face is closed to target, the path is way left of it, and swinging more from the inside really would help him. Same slice on the scorecard. Opposite fixes.

3. Low point — where the club bottoms out

Take a can of foot spray, or just find soft turf and read your divots. Draw a line, put a ball just in front of it, and hit five. Does the divot start at the line, or behind it?

Low point behind the ball causes an enormous share of the shots amateurs blame on everything else — fat, thin, and a lot of "my irons just don't compress." If yours is two inches behind the ball, no amount of face and path work will make your irons feel solid.

What to do with the answer

Run everything through it. When a video tells you to feel your trail elbow in front of your hip, ask what that changes — mostly path and low point — then check your three data points. If your face is the thing that's wrong, that video isn't for you this month. Not because it's bad, but because you're not the patient it was written for.

A feel isn't a law. Ball flight is. Your ball is telling you the truth about your impact conditions on every single shot, whether or not anyone taught you to read it.

Dan's fix took about four minutes of the first session, and it wasn't a swing change. We strengthened his grip until his face started showing up square, and told him to stop trying to swing from the inside entirely. His path improved on its own inside two weeks, because his brain no longer had anything to compensate for. The over-the-top move he'd been fighting for five months was never the problem — it was his swing being smart about a problem he hadn't found yet.

Here's the honest limit, and I'd rather say it than oversell you. Three data points tell you which one is wrong. They don't tell you why — an open face can come from the grip, the trail wrist, or a stalled body that leaves the hands behind. Narrowing that down is the genuinely hard part, and it's where guessing costs you months.

But knowing which of the three you're chasing already puts you ahead of the golfer with eleven saved videos. It turns the feed from a firehose into a filter. And it means the next time somebody tells you what your swing is doing wrong, you'll have your own evidence to check it against.