Vertical Swing Plane

Set the pathpal to 75 degrees — a steep, near-vertical angle — and position the ball close to the device. The drill task is to take the club just outside the 75-degree rod on the backswing, ensuring the club travels up and along the steep plane rather than working inside and flattening. Cody's key setup instruction is to begin with pressure on the lead side and maintain that pressure throughout the backswing — the lead-side pressure and the steep plane are not independent variables but causally linked: when pressure stays left, the swing plane naturally rises; when pressure shifts to the trail side, the swing flattens and the club works inside. Start with the ball positioned close to the pathpal to make the outside-the-rod backswing a precision task, then start, stay, and finish left through impact.

Tour players' wedge swing planes typically range from 74 to the low 80s degrees — steep enough to produce the descending blow that creates ball-first contact, friction with the turf, and spin loft that generates stopping power. Recreational golfers tend to shallow their wedge swings — letting the club work inside and flat — because the shallow delivery feels more controlled and less aggressive for a short-distance shot. But the shallow delivery produces a sweeping contact that reduces friction between the club and ball, lowers spin loft, and produces the low-spin, unpredictable wedge shots that land and run rather than landing and stopping. Cody frames this as a "hot topic button" in modern instruction precisely because data from TrackMan and Swing Catalyst has made the tour player's steep wedge plane measurable and teachable in a way that it wasn't before technology-assisted instruction became widespread.

Spin loft is the combined angle between the dynamic loft of the club at impact and the angle of attack — it's the angular difference between the direction the clubface points and the direction the club is traveling. Higher spin loft produces more friction between the face and ball at contact, which generates more spin and more stopping power on the green. A steeper swing plane increases the angle of attack — the descending blow — which widens the gap between the downward-traveling club and the upward-facing loft of the wedge, producing higher spin loft. A shallow delivery reduces the angle of attack toward zero or positive, narrows the spin loft angle, and produces the low-spin, hot wedge shots that run through greens. Cody's 75-degree drill directly trains the steep plane that creates the negative angle of attack that increases spin loft.

When weight and pressure stay on the lead side during the backswing, the pelvis remains relatively stable over the lead leg, which limits the body's ability to make a wide, rotational backswing that flattens the club. Instead, the arms and club are forced to work more vertically up the steep plane because the body center hasn't moved away from the ball to accommodate a flat, around-the-body motion. When pressure shifts to the trail side, the body rotates behind the ball, the hip clears, and the natural result is a flatter, more inside swing plane as the club follows the body's rotational direction. Lead-side pressure is the setup condition that makes the steep plane achievable without a mechanical overhaul — it's the body position that naturally produces the plane Cody is training.

Both drills target the same mechanical outcome — a steeper, more descending delivery — but for different shot types and with different hardware configurations. Pat's drill uses a two-rod ground tunnel at low angles (45–60 degrees) to force a steeper angle of attack on chip and pitch shots, targeting the shallow delivery that produces thin, flippy short game contact. Cody's drill uses a single high-angle rod at 75 degrees to force a steeper swing plane on full wedge shots from 50–100 yards, targeting the shallow delivery that reduces spin loft and produces low-spin approach shots. Pat's drill is a ground-plane corrector for short game; Cody's is a full-swing plane corrector for scoring clubs. Together they address the complete range of steepening needs across the short and medium game with the pathpal calibrated to each shot type's specific angle requirements.