"Up It, Under It" Swing Plane Drill

Set the pathpal to match your shaft angle at address — the angle the shaft makes with the ground when you're set up to the ball. This is typically between 55 and 65 degrees depending on the club, with longer clubs producing flatter shaft angles and shorter clubs producing steeper ones. Position the rod so it extends along the shaft plane line from the ball. No ball is needed for this drill — Eric specifically instructs golfers to take setup and make practice swings without hitting a ball, allowing full focus on the plane relationship. The cue is two words: "up it going back, under it coming down." Up the rod on the backswing, under the rod on the downswing. If the club deviates from the correct relationship in either direction, it contacts the pathpal and the feedback is immediate.

"Up it going back" means the club travels up along the plane line established by the pathpal rod — the shaft traces the rod's angle as the club moves away from the ball. The fault this prevents is the low inside takeaway — when the club rolls under the plane on the backswing and travels below the rod rather than along it. A club that goes under the rod on the backswing is already in the over-the-top setup position before the transition begins: the only way back to the ball from below the plane is to come over the top of it, which produces the outside-in path that causes slices and pulls. "Up it going back" keeps the club on or just outside the plane, preserving the correct relationship for the transition that follows.

"Under it coming down" means the club drops below the backswing plane in transition — the downswing plane is shallower than the backswing plane. This is the fundamental geometry of a powerful, on-plane swing: the backswing goes up the plane, and the downswing comes back on a slightly shallower angle, delivering the club from the inside rather than retracing the backswing path. If the club comes down on the same plane it went up — or above it — the result is over-the-top, outside-in delivery and a slice. "Under it" is the transition instruction that produces shallowing: the club drops below the pathpal rod as it starts down, creating the inside approach that produces a draw or neutral ball flight. The rod makes "under" a physical spatial reference rather than an abstract feel cue.

Removing the ball eliminates the ball-contact fixation that disrupts movement pattern learning. When a golfer swings at a ball, the brain shifts into outcome mode — the primary goal becomes making contact, which often triggers the compensatory movements that cause the fault being corrected. Without a ball, the brain can focus entirely on the movement task: up it going back, under it coming down. This is a well-established motor learning principle: new movement patterns are acquired more quickly in a non-outcome environment where the nervous system can attend to the movement itself rather than its result. Eric's protocol — take your setup, make practice swings, feel the plane relationship — is the cleanest possible learning environment for a drill that teaches a spatial concept rather than a contact skill.

The "Up It, Under It" drill is the conceptual parent of every other plane-related drill in the pathpal library. Kevin Sprecher's corridor drill, Shawn Koch's Wall Drill, Pat Bernot's Path Exaggeration Drill, Cody Carter's Vertical Swing Plane Drill — all of them address specific expressions of the backswing and downswing plane relationship. Eric's drill teaches the underlying principle that all of those drills apply to specific fault populations: the backswing goes up the plane, the downswing comes under it. Any golfer who understands "up it, under it" has the conceptual framework for understanding every other plane drill in the library. Eric's drill is the entry point — the most foundational, the most universally applicable, and the simplest to execute — making it the natural first drill for any new pathpal user regardless of their specific fault.