Of all the lower body faults in golf, the hip slide is the one most golfers don't know they have. It feels athletic. It feels like a powerful drive toward the target. The ball flight doesn't always expose it clearly — sometimes the slide produces a block, sometimes a flip hook, sometimes just weak, inconsistent contact with no obvious pattern. The root is always the same: the lead leg isn't stabilizing, the hips are sliding rather than rotating, and the impact position changes on every swing.
Eric Barlow's fix is the most direct version of the slide correction in the entire pathpal series. One sentence. One setup. One outcome.
See the full drill here: "Stop the Slide" Lead Leg Rotation Drill — pathpal drill page
The drill
Eric Barlow — PGA Master Professional and Director of Instruction at Winchester Country Club, Golf Digest Best Teachers in Every State (2022–2027), NEPGA Section Teacher of the Year (2018), Massachusetts Chapter Teacher of the Year (2016), NEPGA Massachusetts Chapter Player of the Year (2016, 2018), US Open Local Qualifying advancer (2019), and winner of the New England PGA Stroke Play Series Finals (2025) — sets the pathpal to 90 degrees and places it outside the lead leg.
The setup
- Set pathpal to 90 degrees — fully vertical
- Place it just outside the lead leg at address
- Make swings without hitting the rod coming through
- Lead leg anchors, hips rotate, rod is cleared
- If the rod is hit, the slide went past the rotation point
There is no simpler slide correction in golf instruction. The physical barrier does the teaching.
Watch Eric Barlow demonstrate the drill
Watch the full drill on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KuA5mKLXvzg
Why it works
The 90-degree pathpal barrier works because it replaces a complex internal awareness challenge — "am I sliding or rotating?" — with a simple external task: miss the rod. Golfers who slide have almost universally never felt what genuine lead-leg rotation feels like, because their nervous system has encoded the slide as the correct impact movement. The barrier enforces the rotation by making the slide physically consequential — the rod is there, and contacting it is unmistakable.
The barrier replaces "am I sliding or rotating?" — an impossible internal question — with one simple task: miss the rod.
Once the barrier forces the lead leg to stabilize, the rotation that follows is automatic. The lower body has nowhere to go but around the anchored lead leg, and the rotational speed that was previously lost to lateral movement becomes available through impact. Most golfers who do this drill for the first time are surprised by both how different it feels and how much more solid the contact is — not because the swing changed, but because the delivery position finally became consistent.
Eric's minimalist prescription reflects his expertise. A PGA Master Professional with multiple Teacher of the Year awards doesn't need to over-explain a drill that the physical barrier makes self-evident. Set it up. Don't hit it. Feel the rotation. That's the instruction.
Who this is for
- ✓Golfers who lose power through impact without a clear reason — the slide is dissipating it
- ✓Players whose contact is inconsistent in ways that don't correspond to obvious swing changes — because a sliding low point shifts on every swing
- ✓Anyone whose instructor has said "stop sliding" without providing a physical reference that makes the correction immediately feelable
- ✓Golfers who want the fastest possible setup for a slide correction during a range session with limited time
Try it
- Place the pathpal at 90 degrees just outside the lead leg.
- Hit 20 shots, tracking how many times the rod is contacted. Focus entirely on lead leg anchoring — not swing mechanics.
- Once you reach 15 clean clearances, remove the pathpal and hit 5 shots. The rotation the barrier built will persist.
- For the fastest combined improvement, pair this drill with Eric's Ball-First Impact Control drill in the same session — slide drill first, low point drill second.
Part of Eric Barlow's three-drill system
This drill sits in the middle of Eric's complete lower-body and impact control sequence for pathpal. Each drill addresses a different point in the same fault chain.
"Sway Stopper" Trail Leg Barrier Drill
Fixes the backswing root — lateral drift of the trail leg. For many golfers, a downswing slide is a recovery from a backswing sway. Fix this first.
"Stop the Slide" Lead Leg Rotation Drill
Fixes the downswing cause — lateral hip slide through impact. The lead leg barrier replaces the slide with rotation.
"Ball-First" Impact Control Drill
Confirms the outcome — low point forward of the ball for pure contact. Pair this with the slide drill in the same session for the fastest combined improvement.
Related drill
If you want to see the slide correction taught with an emphasis on the shift-then-rotate sequence, Brent Witcher's drill is a natural complement — he breaks down exactly what the correct conversion from shift to rotation feels like.
The pathpal Hip Rotation Drill
Uses the pathpal barrier at knee height with an explicit "slight shift, then rotate back" cue — teaching the correct conversion point rather than just enforcing the boundary. A useful companion for golfers who want to understand the sequence, not just feel the outcome.
Browse the full drill library: pathpalgolf.com/pages/all-drills
About Eric Barlow
Frequently asked questions
How do I set up the pathpal for the Stop the Slide drill?
Set the pathpal to 90 degrees — fully vertical — and place it just outside the lead leg at address. The rod sits at the lateral boundary of correct lower body movement through impact. Make swings focused entirely on turning around the lead leg and avoiding the rod on the way through. Any swing where the hips slide laterally past the correct rotation point will contact the rod; any swing where the lead leg braces and the hips rotate correctly will clear it.
Why is the hip slide such a hard fault to feel?
The hip slide feels athletic — it mimics a powerful drive toward the target and doesn't always produce an obvious ball flight pattern. It can show up as a block, a flip hook, or just inconsistent contact with no clear cause. Because the slide feels like effort, the nervous system encodes it as a powerful movement. The pathpal barrier is one of the few drills that makes the fault physically undeniable rather than just analytically visible.
How does the slide cause fat shots and loss of lag?
When the hips slide excessively toward the target, the body gets too far past the ball before impact. From that position, the handle is already ahead of the club, leaving the face open. The hands flip to square it — producing inconsistent contact and a loss of lag. The fat shot and the flip are the same fault: the hips moved too far, too fast, in the wrong direction. The Stop the Slide drill fixes the root by enforcing rotation at the correct conversion point.
How do the Stop the Slide and Sway Stopper drills work together?
For many golfers, a downswing slide is a recovery from a backswing sway — the body drifted away from the ball going back, then overcorrects toward it on the way down. The Sway Stopper drill addresses the backswing root by placing the rod outside the trail leg. The Stop the Slide drill addresses the downswing consequence by placing the rod outside the lead leg. Practicing both in sequence — sway stopper first, slide drill second — addresses the complete lateral movement fault chain at both ends simultaneously.
What is the difference between a lateral shift and a hip slide?
A lateral shift is a brief, controlled movement of lower body pressure toward the target at the start of the downswing — it initiates the kinetic chain and loads the lead leg correctly. A hip slide is what happens when that lateral movement continues past the correct conversion point and the hips keep moving toward the target instead of rotating around the lead leg. The shift is a few inches of pressure transfer. The slide is an uncontrolled continuation that repositions the entire lower body and triggers the flip response at impact.
Stop guessing about your lower body. Feel the rotation.
pathpal is an integrated training system used by top-ranked PGA instructors across the country. One setup. Ten seconds. Immediate feedback on the fault most golfers don't know they have.
Shop pathpal
