The downswing drills that fix your transition, whether it's costing you slices, pulls, or fat and thin contact.
If you're slicing the ball, start with the face, not the path. Two pieces already on this site, How to Fix a Golf Slice and Why Your Driver Slices When Your Irons Don't, lay out why clubface angle controls most of a shot's starting direction and why grip and setup come before path work in any real fix. This piece picks up after that. It's for the swing flaw that survives a squared-up face: the pull that starts left of target and never comes back, the slice that's still bending 20 yards (18m) or more right even after grip and alignment are sorted, and the fat or thin contact that shows up when the sequence between backswing and downswing breaks down. That flaw has a name. It's coming over the top, and it lives in the transition, not the face.
"Over the top" describes a downswing that starts from the shoulders and arms instead of the hips. The club gets thrown outward and down from a steep angle, which sends it into the ball from outside the target line moving across it, rather than from inside the line moving down it. What happens at contact from there depends on what the clubface is doing, which is exactly why the face-first pieces linked above matter: an open face on that outside-in path produces a slice, a square or closed face on the same path produces a pull, and either way the steep angle of attack is a common source of fat and thin contact, since the low point of the swing arrives before or after the ball instead of right on it.
The move is common enough that it shows up across handicap levels, not just among beginners, and it can cost real distance even on the shots it doesn't send offline, since a low point that arrives 6 inches (15cm) early or late bleeds ball speed compared to a strike right on center. It's a timing problem more than a strength or flexibility problem, which is good news: it responds to drilling.
Motion-capture research from the Titleist Performance Institute (TPI) describes an efficient downswing as a chain reaction that runs from the ground up: the pelvis starts rotating toward the target first, the torso follows and catches up to the pelvis, the arms follow the torso, and the club follows the arms, each segment reaching its peak rotational speed slightly after the one before it. That ground-up order, sometimes called proximal-to-distal sequencing, is what lets the club accelerate through impact using speed handed down from the body rather than speed generated by the arms alone.
Coming over the top reverses that order. The arms and shoulders fire first, before the hips have started clearing toward the target, so the club gets thrown from the top of the backswing instead of pulled down and around by a body that's already turning. Whether your driver swings at 80 mph (129km/h) or 105 mph (169km/h), the sequencing problem is the same: the upper body is doing a job the lower body was supposed to start.
That's the piece a drill needs to isolate: not the swing plane on its own, but the order the body parts fire in during the half-second of transition at the top of the swing.
Work through these in order. The first two need no equipment at all, which matters if you're practicing at home or don't want to add gear before you know the sequencing fix is actually the problem. The second two add feedback tools that confirm whether the change is real or just a feeling.
An impact bag shows you something a ball flight can't always tell you on its own: the actual direction the clubhead is traveling at the moment it makes contact. A Gary Wiren-designed impact bag is a stitched, sand-filled bag built to absorb a full-speed strike without damaging the club, so you can swing at real intent rather than pulling up short the way you would hitting into a towel on the ground.
An alignment stick doubles as one of the cheapest feedback tools in golf, and a set of alignment sticks covers this drill and the swing-plane check that follows it with the same pair of rods.
For a companion drill built specifically around the tempo and sequencing of the transition itself, the Orange Whip full-size trainer is already reviewed on this site and worth reading alongside these four drills rather than as a separate purchase.
Range gains and course gains aren't automatically the same thing, and coaching literature on motor learning generally favors drills that keep some connection to a real ball and a real target over drills that only train a feeling in isolation. On that measure, the impact bag and the pump drill tend to hold up best, since both keep you swinging at something resembling full speed and intent. If forced to rank the four for how well they carry over once a scorecard and a real target 150 yards (137m) away are involved, I'd put the alignment-stick-under-the-armpit drill last, not because the feedback is wrong, but because it's easy to let the stick police the position for you instead of building your own sense of the sequence, so it's worth treating as an early diagnostic step you wean off rather than something to keep leaning on at full speed.
None of these drills fix a slice on their own if the face is still open at impact. They fix the transition. Pair them with the face-angle work in the two linked articles above and the path change actually shows up in ball flight instead of just on the range.
If you'd rather work through a structured, session-by-session way to confirm a swing change like this one has actually transferred from range to course before you trust it under pressure, The 10-Shot Validation Check walks through a simple pass-fail counting method built for exactly that problem.
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