Prevent inside takeaway - "wall" drill

Set the pathpal to 90 degrees — fully vertical — on the inside of the club's takeaway path, simulating a wall that the club cannot roll into. Shawn also uses a white alignment rod at 30 degrees as a heel reference for alignment. The drill cue is simple: work the club up the wall on the backswing, not into it. The 90-degree vertical rod creates a plane barrier that the clubhead must travel parallel to — up and down the wall — rather than rolling inside and behind. Any inside takeaway will contact the rod immediately. The 30-degree heel rod is secondary, providing alignment context so the swing is oriented correctly relative to the target line.

An inside takeaway occurs when the club moves behind the body in the first few feet of the backswing — typically accompanied by a face roll that closes the clubface early. From an inside takeaway position, the club is already behind the correct plane at halfway back, which forces a steep re-routing or a stuck delivery at the top of the backswing. When the downswing begins from a stuck, behind-the-body position, the only paths available are an over-the-top re-route that produces an out-to-in path and a slice, or a continuation of the inside track that traps the club and produces a block or snap hook. The inside takeaway is where the fault chain begins — and the wall drill catches it at the exact moment it starts.

"Up and down" refers to the dominant direction of the swing motion when the takeaway is correct — the club works up the plane on the backswing and back down the plane on the downswing, rather than around the body or inside. The wall drill enforces this by making "into the wall" the wrong answer: the wall is vertical and parallel to the target line, so any movement toward the wall is lateral and inside. The only movement that clears the wall is upward — along the plane. Shawn's cue "working up the wall, not working into it" gives the golfer both the correct direction and the error direction in a single image, making the drill unusually easy to self-monitor.

The traditional wall drill requires an actual wall — a room, a garage, a specific indoor space. Its benefit is well established in instruction, but its limitation is that it requires the golfer to be indoors and stationary. Shawn's insight is that the pathpal at 90 degrees is a portable wall — it goes in any golf bag, sets up in under 30 seconds on any range or tee, and provides the identical tactile feedback that a physical wall provides. This matters for two reasons: it brings one of instruction's most proven drills to the practice range where ball-striking feedback is also available, and it eliminates the commute between indoor wall drill practice and outdoor range practice that breaks motor pattern transfer.

Both drills address stuck swings — but from opposite ends of the stuck fault spectrum. Shawn's Wall Drill corrects a takeaway that goes too far inside on the way back, causing the club to be stuck behind the body before the downswing even begins. David Potts' Tommy Fleetwood drill corrects a club that drops too far behind in transition — stuck in the downswing after a normal or over-shallowed backswing. Both use the pathpal as a barrier, but on different sides: Shawn's wall is on the inside of the backswing path to prevent the inside rip, while Potts' 65-degree rod catches the delivery that falls below the correct downswing plane. Together they cover the complete stuck fault — takeaway-caused and transition-caused — in the same drill library.