Tommy Fleetwood's Club in Front drill

David sets the pathpal at 65 degrees — matching the natural shaft plane of an 8-iron at address. The rod is positioned just to the inside of the club's downswing path so that a correct, on-plane delivery clears the stick, but a club that loops behind and gets stuck catches it immediately. The match between the 65-degree rod and the 8-iron shaft angle is deliberate: the pathpal rod mirrors the correct shaft plane, so it only penalizes a delivery that drops below that plane rather than blocking any legitimate path.

Getting stuck occurs when the club drops too far behind and below the correct downswing plane — typically caused by the body rotating too aggressively ahead of the arms or the club being over-shallowed in transition. From a stuck position, the clubface is wide open and the only way to square it through impact is to flip the hands or roll the forearms aggressively, producing a block to the right or a snap hook depending on timing. David notes this is specifically a better player fault — lower handicap golfers who have worked hard on shallowing sometimes overcorrect and shallow too much, leaving the club trapped behind the body.

Tommy Fleetwood has been widely documented performing this drill throughout his career as a calibration check for his downswing delivery — keeping the arms and club in front of the body through impact rather than letting the club fall behind him during transition. Fleetwood's swing is renowned for its efficiency and consistent ball-striking, and the "club in front" principle is central to his movement pattern: the trail elbow stays in front of the body, the club stays on the correct plane, and the body and arms sequence together rather than the body outrunning the club. Multiple instructors at the Tommy Fleetwood Academy have confirmed this drill as a regular maintenance exercise for his game.

Every other downswing plane drill in the pathpal series — Kevin Sprecher's corridor, Matt Tindale's takeaway blocker, Shawn Koch's wall drill — targets the opposite fault: a club that rips inside or stays too flat and needs to be brought more vertical or more on plane. David's drill targets an over-shallowed, behind-the-body delivery that needs to be brought more in front. The pathpal rod is on the same side of the shaft but positioned to catch a delivery that falls below the plane rather than above it. This makes the Tommy Fleetwood drill the mirror image of the corridor drills — same tool, same angle concept, opposite fault direction.

David explicitly endorses practice swings as equally effective for this drill — even suggesting that slow-motion rehearsal swings are a great practice session in themselves. The pathpal provides feedback without a ball: the rod either gets caught in the downswing or it doesn't. For better players working on a subtle delivery refinement rather than a gross fault correction, practice swings are often superior because the absence of ball-contact pressure allows a more conscious, precise feel of where the club is in the downswing. David's framing — "good feedback, we know what we're doing, we know we're working in the right direction" — reflects this: the drill is a calibration tool as much as a fault corrector.