What you do with the club in the first two feet of your backswing makes all the difference between your best shot and your worst.

That is the interval where your clubface can get out of alignment without your noticing it. Open or closed, this is where it happens, and you can’t do a thing about it because you won’t feel it.

Practice this a lot: Take the club away using your normal swing and stop after the clubhead is about two feet away from the ball. Using your arms only, bring the clubhead back to the ball.

If it’s not square, you have something to work on, and it’s simple. Practice taking the club back those two feet so the clubface stays square. Learn what it feels like to do that.

When you play, do this takeaway drill before very shot. Remind yourself of the feeling, because the difference between right and wrong is hard to detect.

With that, and a soft grip pressure, you’re good to go.

When your hips and your arms are moving forward as you swing through the ball, there might be a tendency to shift your whole body forward. Avoid that tendency, if you have it.

When you shift forward, you shift the bottom point of your swing forward, too. Now your swing and the ball on the ground are in a different conversation.

All you have to do is keep your head from going forward, and that will take care of things. Bobby Jones called it “swinging out from underneath yourself.”

When you swing the club back and consequently up, you might have a tendency to rise up with it. That is, raise your body up a bit.

That gives your swing a new bottoming out point, and you have to go reaching for the ball as you go through impact. This is so easy to do without being aware of it.

Give this a try. Swing back and tell yourself to keep your head where it is. Don’t let it rise up.

If you do that, and it feels odd, then you have habit of rising up in the swing that needs to be broken.

How do you break the habit? Practice swinging without your head rising up.

The practice swing is a rehearsal swing. It should be the swing you want to copy when you hit the ball. I’ll show you how to make sure your practice swing is exactly that.

When you swing the golf club it is often true that your mind is not fully engaged. Your body starts moving and leaves your mind behind. And the swing doesn’t feel right.

Instead of swinging the club just once, swing the club twice without a break between the two swings. You make one swing all the way to the finish and with a continuous motion swing club back from there make a second swing to the finish. One motion, two swings. 1,2.

The purpose of the second swing is to let your mind catch up. You will find the mental feeling you have during that second swing to be very different from the one you had in the first swing. You will as a result feel a swing that is not only much different than the first one, but will be the one you want to hit the ball with.

When you have done this step up to the ball, take a quick look down the fairway or at the green. Return your eyes to the ball and without hesitation swing the club away while the feeling of that good swing is still fresh.

Doesn’t this take extra time, though? Everyone says in order to speed up play you should only take one practice swing. Well, you are. It’s just that your one practice swing has two parts. This two-part swing hardly takes any longer than a normal one-part swing. So you’re not really taking any extra time by doing this.

A pro once told me that this extra time, if there is any, will be more than made up by you hitting better shots which means hitting fewer shots, and that, friends, saves time.

The key point here is that a two-part practice swing lets you find your best swing. It is certainly possible for that to happen with a juzst one practice swing, but few people are capable of doing that. Give yourself a chance to get it right by taking one two-part practice swing.

As your swing approaches impact, there is a detail you must attend to that I don’t see mention of in books or online videos. And that is the tilt of your torso.

When you address the ball, you are bent forward from the hips to a certain degree. You retain that tilt when you swing the club back.

But when you swing forward, retaining that tilt feels like the right side is collapsing, so you straighten up.

But now, realizing subconsciously that you are out of position, you try to rescue the shot with your hands, but are seldom successful.

All you have to do is retain the forward tilt as you turn and swing through impact. I know it feels funny if you haven’t been doing it. But trust me, it’s the right thing to do.

This video shows you what I mean.

It’s how you make your swing bring the club into the ball shallow and in line to your target. You know, those good things you want leading into impact.

Be careful, though, not to create this feeling deliberately by dropping the right shoulder (left shoulder, for lefties) or increasing the spine angle. This will force the clubhead to approach the ball from too much inside, with an open clubface. That’s how you hit a monster push-slice into the adjoining fairway.

Find a way to get used to retaining the tilt at address all the way through impact. You might be surprised how easy the game just became.