How to fix a slice at home using AI swing analysis

A slice has two possible mechanical causes — an open clubface at impact, or an out-to-in swing path — and they need different drills. A phone camera, filmed correctly, can tell you which one is actually happening in your swing rather than which one usually causes a slice in general.

That distinction is the whole article. Most slice advice describes the average slicer. Yours might not be the average case.

Full disclosure: this is published by FlyAway, which offers swing analysis among other things. The method below works with any tool that measures swing path from video — we're describing the mechanism, not just our own report.

Why you slice: the three causes AI can identify from a phone video

A slice is a ball that starts left of target (for a right-hander) and curves further right. The curve comes from sidespin, and sidespin comes from the clubface being open relative to the swing path at impact — how open, and why, is where the causes diverge.

Open clubface at impact

If the face is open to the target line at contact, the ball starts leaking right no matter what the path is doing. This is the least reliably measured of the three from a single ordinary camera — clubface angle at the moment of impact is a small, fast rotation that a down-the-line view estimates rather than measures precisely. A face-on angle sharpens the estimate but doesn't eliminate the uncertainty.

Out-to-in swing path

The club travels from outside the target line at the top of the downswing to inside it through impact — a "path across the ball" rather than down the line. This is the fault a down-the-line camera sees best: it's a large, visible movement of the club relative to a fixed reference (your body and the ball), so it's one of the more reliable numbers a phone-based system reports.

Early extension and loss of posture

Standing up out of the swing through impact — hips and spine moving toward the ball — pushes the arms up and out, which steepens the path and opens the face as the body compensates. This is a body-position fault rather than a club fault, and it's visible from either angle, though down-the-line shows the forward drift most clearly.

Path and posture are close to what phone-based pose estimation is good at: large, visible movements of the body and club relative to fixed points. Face angle sits in the tier that's estimated rather than measured — worth knowing before you treat a face-angle number as gospel.

How to film your swing so the analysis is usable

The steps above are the mechanics of it. The reasoning behind them: down-the-line is the one angle that captures path without any real ambiguity, which is why it's the minimum viable setup even if you never film a second angle.

Distance and height matter more than most guides suggest. Too close and the top of the backswing gets cropped, which is exactly the frame a fault detector needs to measure X-factor and swing plane. Too far and the club becomes a thin line pose estimation struggles to track through impact, where it moves fastest.

Reading the report: which number tells you which fault

A useful report separates what it measured from what it estimated, and says so. FlyAway's analysis screens for 26 named faults across both camera angles and returns each with a severity — high, medium or low — plus the exact frame range where it happens, so you can scrub to the moment instead of taking a label on trust. Metrics that need an angle you didn't film come back marked unmeasurable rather than guessed, which matters here specifically: if you only filmed down-the-line, treat any face-angle number in the report as a hint, not a fact.

For a slice, three fields are the ones to read first: swing path (the number that names out-to-in), clubface angle at impact if you filmed face-on, and early extension, one of the 26 named faults, flagged with its severity and the frame where it peaks.

The four at-home drills matched to each cause

For an open face — the gate drill. Place two tees in the ground just wider than your clubhead, a few inches ahead of the ball, gate-width matching the face angle you want at impact. Hit slow, controlled shots through the gate without touching the tees. This trains face control at contact, not path.

For an out-to-in path — the two-tee alignment drill. Set one tee outside the ball on the target line and one just inside it, both a few inches ahead. Swing so the club travels between them without clipping either — this rehearses an in-to-out or neutral path instead of the across-the-ball motion that causes the slice.

For early extension — the chair or wall drill. Set a chair (or stand close to a wall) just outside your trail hip at address. Swing back and through while keeping contact with the chair through impact. If your hips push into it, you're standing up early; the drill is the feedback, not a swing thought to hold in your head.

For all three — slow-motion rehearsal with a mirror or a second phone. Half-speed swings let you feel the position a full-speed swing hides. Filming the rehearsal and comparing it to the AI report on your full swing shows whether the slow version is actually different or just feels different.

Do one drill at a time. Combining a face drill and a path drill in the same session usually cancels the useful feedback from both.

How long a slice fix realistically takes

There's no universal number, because it depends on which cause you have and how long the current pattern has been grooved — but the general shape holds across most golfers. Path corrections (out-to-in) tend to show up on the range within one or two sessions, because the two-tee drill gives immediate ball-flight feedback. Face-angle corrections take longer, typically several sessions across a couple of weeks, because clubface control at speed is a finer motor skill than swing direction. Posture faults like early extension often take the longest, because they're rooted in a stance or core-stability habit rather than a single moving part.

The honest marker of progress isn't a straight shot on the range — it's a straight shot you weren't specifically thinking about, three swings after the one you were.

The same method applied to a hook

A hook is the mirror image: a closed face relative to an in-to-out path, curving left for a right-hander. The same three causes apply in reverse — closed face at impact, excessive in-to-out path, or a compensation for early extension that closes the face reflexively. Film the same way, read the same three fields in the report, and use the mirrored versions of the same drills: the gate drill with tees set for a square-to-closed face, the two-tee drill rehearsing a straighter path instead of an exaggerated in-to-out swing.

Golfers who slice occasionally hit a hook when they overcorrect the fix — usually a sign the face drill worked better than the path drill, and the two are now out of sync. If that happens, the report will show a path number that's flipped from where it was; that's useful information, not a setback.

---

Want to see which of the three is actually happening in your swing? Try swing analysis — film down-the-line first, add face-on if you can, and read the path number before anything else.