Film yourself face-on and watch your belt buckle during the backswing. If it slides away from the target — even a few inches — you've found where your inconsistency is coming from.

Swaying feels like loading up. It isn't. A backswing stores power by turning — hips rotating against stable legs while the shoulders coil above them. When your hips slide sideways instead, nothing winds up. You've just moved the entire swing over there, and now you owe the ball a perfectly timed slide back. Arrive a little late and you hit it fat; a little early and you catch it thin or off the toe. The strike becomes a scheduling problem.

The old teachers had a picture for this: turn in a barrel. Imagine standing inside one just wider than your hips. You can rotate freely — the barrel doesn't care — but the moment you slide, you hit the wall. A swaying golfer would knock the barrel over going back and again coming through.

What separates a turn from a slide is measurable: how far your hips travel sideways during the backswing, in actual distance rather than feel. It's one of the first things CoachVision flags from a face-on clip, which matters because sway is nearly impossible to feel — sliding golfers almost always believe they're turning.

The fix is the Feet-Together Drill, and it works by making sway physically impossible.

Set up with your feet touching — actually touching, not just narrow. Take a short iron and hit easy half-shots at 50 percent effort. With no base to slide across, your body has exactly one way to make a backswing: rotate. If you try to sway, you'll stumble, and the drill will tell you so before the ball does.

Hit 10 balls with a short iron this way. Expect the first few to feel absurdly restricted — that restriction is the drill showing you how much sliding your normal swing was doing. Somewhere around ball six or seven, you'll feel it: coil. Hips resisting, chest turning, something winding up in between. That's the load you thought the sway was giving you, except this version doesn't need to be timed.

Then widen back to your normal stance and keep the feeling of turning inside the barrel. If the old slide creeps back, two or three feet-together swings between shots will bring the coil right back.

Your ball-striking has been paying a timing tax on every swing. Cancel the slide and you cancel the tax — and the centered contact that shows up in its place tends to stay.