Sure you have.

Most golf instruction will make this a center piece of your growth period in the golf swing. It is one of the mainstay ideas related to golf lessons. Hit from the inside. It has to do with clubhead path or swing path as some call it.

How about the guy who figures this out by himself? Or, perhaps he reads it somewhere. That you must have an inside swing path in order to hit the ball straight.

So what does he do? He runs to the range and he decides that it doesn't seem that hard. He'll just drag the club inside on the take away and he'll be all set to hit it from the inside.

This makes perfect sense to him. So it isn't long before he is wrapping the club around his ankles in an attempt to get the damn thing inside more and more and more. Only to find that he is still hitting a big banana because, try as he might, he is still hitting from the outside to the inside.

You have seen this guy. He is the one that has the funny looking backswing. You know something is wrong with it but you just can't quite figure it out. He bends in ways that don't seem possible. His hands practically disappear behind him as he attempts to get the club deeper and deeper to the inside.

You feel sorry for him, but of course you have no idea who he is or what he is trying to do.

Whatever it is, you are thinking, it ain't working.

The club is so far to the inside that it gets stuck behind him. The only way he can get it back to the ball is to throw it out over the target line and hit .... you guessed it, "hit from the top" or do exactly what he trying not to do and that is use an outside in swing path.

The result? A repeating weak slice that has no hope whatsoever of finding the fairway and so now he is suffering from another problem as well.

He is standing too close to the ball AFTER HE HITS IT! ( Grinning)

There are several golf swing lessons to be learned from watching this guy.

The first is that you almost never can feel what you are doing in the golf swing.

And you can almost never figure it out by yourself. There are millions of words written about the golf swing from some very experienced folks. Trying to re-figure it out by yourself is a very bad idea.

So what happens to our unknown friend?

He finds that after hundreds of swings, his slice is still there and he was unable to hit from the inside. What he did wrong was miss the very idea of an inside swing path.

It is not the backswing that sets this into motion it is the first move on the downswing that causes an inside path of the clubhead.

Have a look at Jim Furyk on the PGA tour. His backswing is a mess. His downswing is a thing of beauty.

Our range friend has a backswing that only his mommy could love, and as he gears up for the massive downswing it only gets worse. He either never knew or never discovered that an inside move is on the downswing and not on the backswing.

It is true that a great backswing certainly sets up a great downswing, but if you are athletic enough you can re-route (not recommended) the downswing as long as you make that one magic move on the downswing first.

And what is that?

It's the bumping of the hips laterally and the dropping of the right elbow into the right hip. While maintaining the set up position of the head.

Your hips will turn and your elbow will drop to it's proper position if you allow them to do it. You have no choice if you bump your hips far enough laterally.

And then as if by magic, you will have hit from the inside. Unlike our friend who is totally mired in confusion and correction in his attempt to do what you now can do, but he will never do.

So remember that dragging the club to the inside only promises that you will hit more from the outside and make you look like a great blue heron on a Florida Golf Course.

People love to watch them but they don't want to get too close to them.