"Inside Path" Corrector Drill

Eric Barlow sets the pathpal at an angle just slightly above the shaft angle at address — creating an upper boundary that the hands and club must swing underneath. The goal is to make a full swing while staying below the rod. If your path is too far from the inside and your hands are rising through impact, you'll catch the stick. Clearing it means your hand path is staying lower and more on plane through the hitting zone.

When the club approaches from too far inside, the golfer often has to raise the hands through impact to avoid the ground — essentially lifting the club through the hitting zone rather than driving it down and through. This is a compensating move: the excessively shallow path creates a low point problem, and the hands rise to solve it in real time. The pathpal rod above the address shaft angle catches that rising hand path, forcing the swing to stay on a more neutral, direct plane where hands don't need to lift.

An overly inside-out path typically produces one of two misses depending on the face angle: a push or block to the right when the face is square to the path, or a snap hook when the face closes through impact in reaction to the steep in-to-out angle. Both are difficult to predict and control because the path is so far off neutral. Golfers with this fault often describe a "two-way miss" — blocking it right one swing and hooking it left the next — because the face-to-path relationship is unstable at impact.

Yes — and it's more common than most golfers realize, especially among players who've worked hard on shallowing as a slice fix. When the club gets excessively flat on the downswing, the path moves too far from the inside, the angle of attack becomes too shallow, and the hands have to compensate to find the ball. Eric's drill exists precisely because shallowing is taught so frequently as a slice correction that some golfers overcorrect and create a new, opposite fault. The pathpal gives you an upper boundary to define "shallow enough without being too shallow."

The two drills are mirror corrections for opposite path faults. The Over-the-Top Elimination drill places the pathpal outside the lead leg to catch a club that exits too far left — fixing an out-to-in path. This drill places the pathpal just above the address shaft angle to catch hands that rise through impact — fixing an excessively in-to-out, too-shallow path. Together they define the correct corridor from both sides: not too steep, not too shallow. Eric uses the same tool to solve both problems simply by changing the placement.