Chris Ries: Hello everyone! My name is Chris Ries, I'm one of instructors here at TopGolf in Alexandria, Virginia, and today, we're working on how to improve your golf swing, more specifically your long game. Before we get in the full swing, we're now going to talk about clubface awareness. I just need to understand two elements about the head of the golf club and the first is the part that is farthest away from me and the face is called the toe.

The part that is closest to my body as I set the golf club down is called the heel. So the best way to visualize this is to actually use a putter. The reason for this is the more of a block design of the head of this putter than this hybrid. With the curvature of the face and everything here and the toe, it makes it very difficult to visualize the actual face angles as I'm swinging the golf club.

Now that I have my clubface angle pointing at my target, we always want my face of the golf club pointing at the target. As I swing the golf club back, I'm now going to rotate my forearms to allow the toe of the golf club to point up in the air. So I want the toe and the heel to remain square with each other. As the face of the golf club we're to point downward, this is shut or closed. This is going to promote the golf ball going fairly dramatically to the left.

If the face of the putter is pointing skyward that is dramatically open and we'll have a major impact on the golf ball; most likely it's kind of go way off to the right. So once I do get that putter face back to square and the toe and the heel are still together, as I swing a golf club to the top of my swing, I want to maintain that face angle, so that hopefully when I get to the top of the backswing, the face of the golf club is matched up with my left arm angle.

Now, as I swing the golf club down, I'm hopefully returning the face angle to a pretty familiar position, basically where it was on the backswing. I now want to initiate the toe of the club rolling over the heel so that it gets to square when I get back to the golf ball and I now want to continue having the toe of the golf club roll over the heel.

When we get the golf club out in front of us, you want the toe of the golf club pointing fairly dramatically left of my intended target. If I leave the face of the golf club pointing skyward, when it's out in front of me that's actually open in relationship to the golf ball. So I need to roll that toe over the heel as the club gets out in front of me and then we would go through to a nice big balanced finish.

Let's see what that looks like using a driver. As we swing this club now, I want to look at the bottom of the face of the club or the leading edge. This is now square in relationship to the golf ball.

I swing to the top, same position; hopefully, that face angle matches up with my left arm. Swinging in the golf club back down, hopefully returning that face back to where the toe and the heel are together and matched up, rotating my forearms to get the driver face back to square and now continuing to let the toe roll over the heel post-impact, getting to a nice balanced finish.

So that's club face awareness. Hopefully, that's a very powerful visual for what we need to have the clubface doing throughout the duration of the swing.