The L-to-L drill is the single most efficient checkpoint exercise in golf instruction — a half-back to half-through rehearsal that exposes plane, face and pivot faults you’ll never see at full speed. In the next 1,800 words you’ll learn what the L-to-L positions actually look like, how to build them, why they fix slices and hooks at the source, and how to progress from rehearsal to full swing without losing the feels.
What The L-to-L Drill Actually Is
The drill is named for the two positions it trains. In the backswing, you stop when the lead arm is parallel to the ground and the club shaft points straight up — your arm and the shaft form a capital “L.” In the through-swing, you stop in the mirror image: trail arm parallel to the ground, club shaft vertical, forming a flipped L. Players who own these two checkpoints own the most important 18 inches on either side of impact.
Coaches reach for L-to-L because it isolates the part of the swing where face control happens. The takeaway and the finish are easy to fake; the moments just before and just after impact are not. If you can hit ten clean shots stopping at the L on the way through, your full swing has nowhere to hide a fault.
Why Half-Way Checkpoints Beat Full-Swing Tinkering
Most range sessions are spent making full swings and hoping the result improves. The problem is that a full swing happens in roughly 1.2 seconds, and your conscious brain cannot rewrite motor patterns at that speed. Slowing down to half-back and half-through gives the nervous system time to feel sequence, face angle and low-point — three of the four variables behind every miss.
The L-to-L drill also automatically caps swing length, which is useful for two common faults. Players who get long and across the line at the top can never feel the correct halfway-back position because they overshoot it; rehearsing the L forces them to stop where the swing should already be on plane. Players who collapse the trail arm in transition can feel exactly where the casting starts because they’re moving in slow motion through the very window where it occurs.
The Backswing L: Building The Position
Lead Arm
From a normal address, swing back until your lead arm (left arm for a right-handed player) is parallel to the ground. The arm should run roughly across your chest, not lifted off it. If you can see daylight between your bicep and your pec in a mirror, the arm has separated from the body’s rotation — that’s a connection problem the drill is designed to expose.
Shaft Angle
From a face-on view, the shaft should point straight up at the sky, perpendicular to the lead arm — that’s the L. From a down-the-line view, the shaft should point down at the toe line or just inside it. A shaft pointing across the line (right of the toes for a right-hander) means the club has rolled open; a shaft pointing well inside the toes means it has rolled shut. Both produce face-control problems through impact.
Clubface
At the L, the clubface should match your lead forearm. If the toe of the club points straight up at the sky, the face is square. If the toe leans toward the target line, the face is shut — which leads to the classic “stuck” trail-arm position and a hook pattern. If the leading edge points at the sky, the face is wide open, which is one of the swing’s most reliable slice triggers. Use a phone in slow-motion mode to film this from face-on; it’s the single most useful piece of feedback you can collect on a range.
The Through-Swing L: The Position That Fixes Most Faults
If you only train one half of this drill, train the through-swing L. Stopping in the post-impact L position is the most direct way to teach the body what release actually feels like.
Trail Arm
Past impact, the trail arm should now be parallel to the ground with the elbow rotated so the inside of the elbow points up at the sky. This is the position that proves your forearms have rotated through the ball. If your trail arm finishes with the elbow pointing back at the camera, you’ve held off the release and pushed or blocked the shot — a familiar feel for anyone who fights a chronic hook and over-corrects.
Shaft And Hands
The shaft is vertical, the butt-end pointing at the ground, the hands roughly belt-high and on or just inside the trail-side hip line. Faults to check: hands above shoulder-height (you’ve stood up out of posture), hands buried into the body (you’re stalling the rotation), or shaft tipped well past vertical toward the target (you’ve flipped the wrists at the ball).
Body Rotation
The hips and chest should be visibly rotated open to the target — chest pointing roughly 45 degrees left of the target line for a right-hander. This is the rotational signature that prevents coming over the top on the next swing: the body has done its job of clearing, so the arms have somewhere to go.
Three Common L-to-L Mistakes
1. Treating It Like A Putt
Players who shorten the drill into a chip motion never train pivot. The point isn’t a small swing — it’s a real swing, with real rotation, just stopped at the right checkpoints. Your hips and shoulders should turn the same way they would in a full swing; only the arm length changes.
2. Hitting Too Hard
The drill is calibration, not power training. If you swing it at 90% you’ll lose the ability to actually stop in the through-position because momentum will carry the club past the L. Aim for 50–60% effort, half-distance carry, and a clean, audible stop at the through-checkpoint. If you can’t stop the club at L, you’re swinging too hard.
3. Skipping The Mirror
Feel and real diverge fast in the L positions. A player who feels their trail arm is parallel to the ground often has it 30 degrees high. Either rehearse in front of a mirror or film every fifth rep on your phone. Without feedback, the drill turns into the same swing you already make, just shorter — which trains nothing.
Drill Progressions: From Rehearsal To Full Swing
Stage 1: No Ball, Mirror Reps
Take a 7-iron and rehearse 20 L-to-L motions in slow motion in front of a mirror. Stop at each L for two seconds and check shaft angle, face, and rotation. The goal is to hard-wire the positions before adding ball-flight feedback. This is the boring part. Skip it and the drill becomes guesswork.
Stage 2: L-to-L With A Ball
Tee a ball low. Make L-to-L swings at 50% effort and try to carry the ball 60–80 yards with a 7-iron. The ball should fly low, straight, and with a small draw if you’ve trained the through-position correctly. A weak fade at half-speed is the same fault that produces a slice at full speed; it’s just easier to feel and fix. If you’re already working on a draw on command, the L-to-L is the cleanest place to feel forearm rotation without exaggerating it into a hook.
Stage 3: L-To-Full Swing
Once stage two is consistent, alternate one L-to-L swing with one full swing. The full swing should feel like the L-to-L extended at both ends rather than a different motion. If your full swing immediately reverts to the old fault, drop back to stage one for ten reps and try again. The bridge between rehearsal and real golf is repetition, not effort.
Stage 4: Pre-Round Use
The L-to-L is the best warm-up drill in golf because it primes plane and face before you swing full. On the range, start with five L-to-L wedges, five L-to-L 7-irons, then move to half-swings, then full swings. Players who skip the L-to-L and start with full driver swings on the range are training their worst pattern of the day.
How The Drill Diagnoses Common Faults
Because the L-to-L exposes face, plane, and rotation in isolation, it doubles as a diagnostic. If you film yourself doing the drill, the picture tells you which fault you’re working on without needing a coach.
An open clubface at the backswing L predicts a slice or push. Run the drill with a slightly stronger trail-hand grip until the toe points up at the L. A shut face at the backswing L predicts a hook or pull; weaken the lead-hand grip half a knuckle. A trail elbow that finishes pointing back at the camera in the through-L means the body has stalled and the arms have rolled past it; pair the drill with a swing path drill that emphasizes hip clearance.
Players who hit the ground behind the ball during the drill are usually stuck in early extension or fall-back patterns. Because the L-to-L caps both arm length and clubhead speed, it makes those low-point misses obvious within five reps — far faster than any full-swing range session would.
How Long Until It Shows Up On The Course
If you do the drill for 10 minutes per range session, three sessions a week, expect noticeable changes in ball flight inside two weeks and changes in your full-swing video inside four. The drill is not flashy and it doesn’t generate Instagram-worthy distance gains, but it produces the trait every amateur claims to want most: predictable shot shape under pressure. Pair it with one face-control drill, one path drill, and a short-game session and you have a complete weekly practice plan.
The L-to-L drill works because it removes the variables you can’t control at full speed — momentum, anxiety, swing length — and forces you to own the two checkpoints that decide where the ball goes. Get the L’s right and the rest of the swing tends to fall into place around them.
The L-to-L drill works inside whichever swing model you favor. If you have been exploring different approaches to the backswing pivot, the Stack and Tilt swing system pairs naturally with this drill: its centered, weight-forward turn makes returning to the post-impact L position even easier because there is no lateral shift to recover from.
Going further: The L-to-L drill builds the on-plane structure; the next step is timing the release. For an in-depth look at how the all-time greatest ball striker controlled hand action through impact, read Ben Hogan’s Secret: The Late-Hands Move Explained.
