The TrueStrike Precision Gate Drill

Use both TrueStrike pads to create a gate around the impact zone — one positioned to catch an over-the-top path and one to catch an excessively inside-out path. Jacob recommends leaving a couple of inches of clearance between the shaft end and the pad at address, giving yourself a realistic window to work within. Start with slow-motion half swings — back to waist high, through to waist high — checking for a neutral face and neutral hand position at both ends before progressing to fuller, faster swings.

The two checkpoints are both waist-high positions — the 9 o'clock backswing position and the 3 o'clock finish position. At the backswing checkpoint, Jacob looks for a neutral clubface (roughly parallel to the forearm) and neutral wrist position. At the finish checkpoint, the same neutral face and hand position should be maintained while the path has traveled cleanly through the gate. These two pauses make the drill a slow-motion self-diagnostic tool rather than a guess-and-check ball-striking exercise.

Jacob's philosophy — consistent with his motor learning approach across all his drills — is that if you can't perform the movement slowly, you can't perform it at full speed. The half swing eliminates timing, tempo, and power variables so you can isolate path and face at the most critical moment: through impact. Once the neutral path and face are grooved at half speed with clean gate passes, Jacob allows progressing to tighter settings and fuller swings. The difficulty is scalable — the closer the pads, the more demanding the gate.

Tommy Fleetwood has been widely documented using a half-swing gate drill to train the same concepts Jacob works on here: neutral path, neutral plane, neutral face, and pure strike at impact. Jacob explicitly references Fleetwood in the video, noting that the core concepts of solid strike and neutral delivery are the same regardless of which products or setups are used. The TrueStrike gate is Jacob's precision implementation of those same principles — with the added benefit of simultaneous bilateral feedback for both path faults.

A tighter gate shrinks the margin of error for both path and face — any deviation in either direction catches a pad immediately. As the tolerance narrows, the nervous system has to recruit more precise motor control to consistently clear both barriers. This progressive overload of accuracy is the same principle behind elite practice across all sports: train at a difficulty level slightly above your current capability to accelerate adaptation. Jacob puts it simply — the closer you make it, the harder the drill, and the better your center contact gets.