If you have been working on your slice for months and it is still there, this is probably why: every fix you have tried addressed a symptom, not the cause. The generic slice advice — stronger grip, closed club face at address, “swing more inside-out” — is designed for one specific type of slice. If you have a different type, those fixes do not transfer.
GOATY’s 7-gate AI evaluation system was built to solve exactly this problem. By measuring your specific gate failures on every rep, GOATY identifies which of the three primary slice causes is producing your ball flight and delivers a targeted coaching cue between swings. Not the same cue every video gives. Yours.
Find Out Why YOU Are Slicing
GOATY evaluates your swing gates in real time and tells you which one is producing your slice — then coaches you on the fix between every rep.
Start a Free Live LessonThe 3 Causes of a Golf Slice
Every slice produces an open club face relative to the swing path at impact. But that open face has three completely different origins, each living at a different gate in your swing:
The Stall Slice
Hips stop rotating at address position through impact. Correct path, but the face never catches up because the body stopped driving the release. The most common slice type.
The Path Slice
Insufficient trail hip coil in the backswing. Without the load, the club comes over the top producing an outside-in path. Both path and face are open to target. Club face fixes are useless here.
The Posture Slice
Hips thrust toward the ball through impact. This raises the arc and forces the arms to flip and open the face as a compensation. Looks like a face problem but starts in the body structure.
Here is why this matters so much: the standard slice advice — strengthen your grip, aim the face at the target, feel like you are swinging inside-out — addresses the G5 stall pattern. It provides some relief for one slice type. For G3 load failure or G6 early extension, applying those tips can actually make your ball flight worse, or briefly mask the real problem until the compensation breaks down under pressure.
Why the Club Face Fix Does Not Always Work
The conventional slice wisdom focuses heavily on club face angle at impact. “Most amateur golfers have an open face.” This is statistically true. But it treats the face as the cause when it is almost always the effect of something happening earlier in the swing.
Think of it this way: If your G3 trail hip load is insufficient, your swing path comes from outside-in. Even if you close the face aggressively to compensate, you have changed the symptom but not the cause. The outside-in path remains. The face fix produces a pull instead of a slice — you moved the miss, you did not fix the swing.
Club face tips are surface-level corrections that can produce temporary improvements while the actual mechanical problem continues below the surface. When you hit a real shot under pressure, the original failure pattern resurfaces because it was never addressed at the gate level.
This is the same structural limitation that affects instruction systems like TopSpeed Golf’s. Clay Ballard’s slice content covers the correct biomechanics clearly. But his videos apply the same framework to all three patterns. Without per-rep detection of which gate is failing, there is no way to know whether the viewer has a G5 problem, a G3 problem, or a G6 problem. The right content for the wrong gate does nothing.
How GOATY Identifies YOUR Slice Cause
GOATY uses AI pose detection through your phone camera to evaluate 7 mechanical checkpoints (G1–G7) on every single rep. For slice diagnosis, it specifically measures:
- G3 hip coil depth — how far the trail hip socket coils in the backswing relative to baseline. Low G3 score = over-the-top path coming.
- G5 clearance completion — whether the hips complete their rotation through impact or stop at address position. Low G5 = stall slice incoming.
- G6 extension pattern — whether the spine angles are maintained through impact. Low G6 = early extension producing face manipulation.
After each rep, GOATY speaks a cue targeting your lowest-scoring gate. The system does not give you generic feedback like “swing more inside-out” — it gives you a cue specific to the gate failure it just measured. If G3 was the problem, you get a trail hip loading cue. If G5 was the problem, you get a clearance cue. If G6 was the problem, you get a posture cue.
This is what 152,000+ coached reps teaches you: The slice is the most common pattern reported in initial sessions. After 3–5 sessions of gate-targeted coaching, the majority of slicers see their G-score on the primary gate improve by 8–15 points. The ball flight changes because the underlying mechanics changed, not because the symptoms were masked.
The Fix Path for Each Slice Cause
The trail hip needs to coil around the socket in the backswing, not slide or sway. The cue: “Coil around the trail hip socket and let the turn carry the arms.” Passive framing is critical here — you are not aggressively loading, you are allowing the socket to accept the coil. Once G3 is loading deeply enough, the path naturally moves inside-out and the slice path disappears at the source. Club face tip required: none.
The hips have loaded in the backswing but are stopping at address position instead of continuing through impact. The cue: “Let the trail hip carry all the way through — past the ball position, not to it.” The constraint window that held the load must release completely. Many G5 slicers find this feels like they are “spinning out” at first — that feeling is the correct pattern. The ball will stop curving right within 5–10 reps of truly completing the rotation.
The hips thrusting toward the ball through impact is the root issue. The cue: “Feel your tailbone moving toward the target line, not toward the ball.” Maintaining the spine angle you established at address through the impact zone keeps the arc consistent and removes the need to manipulate the face as a compensation. This is often combined with a G5 cue because the hip thrust and the stall frequently occur together.
What TopSpeed Golf Teaches (Honest Assessment)
TopSpeed Golf’s Clay Ballard has produced some of the best slice content on YouTube. His explanation of the over-the-top move, his trail arm connection drills, and his hip clearance content all contain solid biomechanical theory. If you have watched his slice videos, you have not wasted your time.
The limitation is not the quality of the instruction — it is the delivery medium. Video gives you the same teaching regardless of which of the three slice causes you have. It cannot adapt to the rep you just hit. It cannot detect whether your G3 is at 0.35 SHW or 0.28 SHW. It cannot hear that your GOAT score dropped on the last rep and switch cues accordingly.
GOATY fills that gap. The 7-gate system is not in competition with TopSpeed Golf’s content — it is the detection layer that tells you which part of that content actually applies to your swing today, and which cue from GOATY’s coaching bank is most likely to move your specific gate score on the next rep.
Identify Your Slice Type in One Session
15 minutes of GOATY live coaching tells you more about why you are slicing than 3 months of YouTube research. Gate scores. Real-time cues. No hardware needed.
Start a Free Lesson NowFAQ
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