This $5.88 piece of foam is a great training aid (it can also fix your gutters)

Like most suburb-dwelling golfers, Home Depot is a pretty central part of my existence. When I'm not at home, at work, or on a golf course, there's a solid chance I'm lost in some aisle at Home Depot buying something to fix some homeowner problem that was thrust upon me.

But this time, the problem that needed fixing was in my golf swing.

Sure, it started as a homeowner problem. We needed one of these gutter foam things for one of our annoying gutters. But the more I looked at that foam gutter thing (which is actually called GutterFoam), the more I realized its true purpose: A training aid.

One of the problems that constantly plagues my golf swing is that I tend to get my club and arms "stuck" behind my body on my downswing. I've written about it before, but it can cost me power, and lead to high-right and low-left misses when things go wrong.

One thing coaches and players will often do for players to combat this is to put something between their feet and the golf ball, like an alignment rod sticking out of the ground. It works, but I do most of my practicing on mats, so I can't stick anything in the ground.

Besides, I also get a little worried I'm going to hit the stick, and it's going to hurt.

Enter the GutterFoam.

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They're shaped like right angles because they're designed to go in gutters to stop them from getting blocked. As a result, the flat side sits perfectly on the ground, and the diagonal side (the hypotenuse, if you remember from high school geometry) should face out towards the golf ball, if you swing too in-to-out like me. If you tend towards over-the-top, you'd need to place it on the opposite side of the golf ball, as Golf Digest's Chris Mayson demonstrates with a towel below:

From there it's pretty simple: I place the club close up against the foam, and the golf ball in the middle (I chopped my GutterFoam thing down to about 20 inches). Then, I hit balls.

If I get stuck, the foam was sitting just high enough off the ground that I'd hit it, but impacting it didn't hurt at all. I hardly felt it, and the foam only flew off a few feet.

Pretty soon, it was helping me get my club and arms back out in front of me. I was swinging less in-to-out, all thanks to a $5.88 piece of foam.