Possibly The Fastest Way To Improve Your Ball Striking

So in this video, we're going to focus on helping you hit driver, fairwood, and your irons much, much straighter, and also improve the quality of your strike. Now I was online the other day and just randomly on Instagram, I came across Peter Kostas, one of the legends of the coaching industry. And he basically came up with his six pillars for doing exactly that. Hitting every club in the bag much straighter and striking them much better. Now I've introduced many of these separately on my channel, but he put it in such a brilliant language that only someone with his experience can do. I want to share with you those six pillars. I guarantee you're going to absolutely love it. I was blown away by it too. So before I get into them though, if you're new to the channel, so you're first lessons of mine, please consider subscribing early videos like this one every single week to try and help you improve your game. And as always, you never have to remember a thing. I'll always put a free download practice guide in the description box below. So whether you're looking to hit driver straight or hit your irons better, the first thing in pillar number one is strong grip before weak grip. What is the difference? Well, I want you, if you're particularly if you're slicing golf, I want you to just learn to get the ball curving right to left at the very first thing, because if you can get the ball drawing right to left, it promotes so many great things already in the golf swing. So when a golfer starts to see this ball curving this way in the air, they don't want it to finish left. So what it encourages them to do is move more and more forward to set the ball and more and more and more off to the right hand side. This is great for contact because what you'll see is the more forward you get, the more you're going to hit the ball than the ground. So creating draws naturally improves your ability to get forward, improve the quality of your strike. So if I can help you do that, you're well on the way. Combine that with the opposite is a slice. If someone's slicing it out to the right hand side, what do you think that's going to create? Well, ultimately you don't want it to go there. So you start leaning back to avoid it going right, which affects again, look contact distance and strike. So the key thing, first of all, let's get the ball drawing. So how do you do this? Pillar number one, strong grip before weak grip. This is strong grip. Move your hands away from the target. What this does look is you move your hands away from the target. It moves it more into the fingers. So that's why we call it strong. You've got stronger hold onto it. Take the trail hand, move it, look, twisting it away from the target. Now this is a very, very strong grip here. And you'll see, I can see a lot more knuckles on my lead hand here. And my trail hand is a bit more underneath. Again, promoting a bit of a bit of an arc and a bit of a turnover of the face. So when I do this straight away, watch what happens to the ball flight. As I do this, that ball look has beautifully moved from right to left in the air. Now you start there first, enjoy hitting some shots that are curving right to left. Get used to this. I promise you, your body will start to move much more efficiently in the down swing to improve the quality of contact. Once you've done that, then you can just gradually neutralize it and move those hands just to straighten it up. But that is pillar. Number one, start strong grip before weak grip pillar number two. And I use this all the time with my students on a golf course, feet together before feet apart. Why? Well, look when your feet are closer together, right? If you're struggling, this is a hundred percent, the place to start because what it does, it helps you to make a turn as opposed to when your feet are apart, you sway and move around too much and you're moving around too much. It's very hard to bring that club consistently back into impact. So feet together helps you create a beautiful turn. It also helps you to do that in balance because a lot of people, they may in a sense, turn and go, Oh, I've lost my balance. So here now you can feed feet together. You can turn and if you lose your balance, you could keep going until you start swinging and turning in balance. So it's naturally training a brilliant motion in your golf swing. It also helps look on the way through. I see a lot of people just trying to heave the ball. Well, with your feet together, you're going to feel it and you're going to lose balance again, brilliant feedback. So what does it do again? When you're coming through with your feet together, it's going to train you look to naturally release the golf club for impact here and do it in beautiful balance, right? I use this myself all the time. I haven't played a game of golf. I may not have them this narrow. I might my normal stance would be here with driver. I narrow it in because it really, really helps me just to kind of learn to coordinate my body turn and my arm swing to create a beautiful balance and effortless golf swing. Let's have a look at this in action. So I set myself up look balls on my big toe of my lead foot here, get myself set. And all I'm doing, look, it's the second swing of the day. I'm swinging in balance. And this is exactly what I would do personally, not just for my students, but also for me to learn to hit straight. Oh my God. It can't be any simpler than that. Just tapping it down the fairway. Let's move on to pillar number three. If you struggle to get your ball striking consistent, pillar number three is brilliant. Great rule. Ball back before ball forward. Most of the time if you have got your ball too far forward in your strands, what's going to happen? You've probably seen it. You're hitting the ground. You're thinning it. You're fatting it along the ground. What we want to do is we want to learn look to strike the ball. Then the ground, one of the simplest ways to kind of get this across. If you've been struggling, push the ball way back in your stance, don't make a full swing at this, but move the ball back in your stance. Get used to look, getting the handle naturally striking the ball ahead look of the club head. So we're striking naturally look down on the golf ball. It's a lot easier to do that. If the ball's back in your stance, my body look is ahead of the golf ball. So I just play some small swings. Getting that sensation of the club going down into the turf this way versus look when you, if you're struggling, it's a lot harder to do this when the ball gets too far ahead. So I'm not saying keep it there, but I'm saying, look, if you're struggling, push it back, spend a few, hit a few shots, getting the sensation of this impact because once you've got sensation of this look, you can then move the ball back into its correct position, which is a club width inside your lead heel. And look, you've learned this feeling. You can now move look forward to a place where you want to try and create that feeling right there. And what that means is why we have it for the slightly further forward. Eventually it's so we can make a bigger swing and we've got more space to really go after the golf ball, but start with ball back before you move the ball forward. So let's look at this in action. Now when people do this, they'll naturally hit it a little bit right to start with, but we are after contact first. Look at that beautiful bullet down the middle of the fairway. Naturally for me, it's going to be much, much lower because I'm deloft in that golf club at ball back before learn that feeling before we then push it forward. Take that feeling of this motion here where look, hips are naturally ahead, handles ahead. And then simply we take that feeling and move that closer to the golf ball here. And Hey Presto, you've got a much, much better strike. Pillar number four. And this, my students absolutely love. They don't always commit to it when they do. They are so more consistent on a golf course. Slow swings before fast swings. Now Peter Costas described this absolutely brilliantly when he said, if you can't keep the car on the motorway at 30 miles an hour, how the hell are you going to be able to keep it on the road at 90 miles an hour? Just brilliant, brilliant kind of image, isn't it? So slow things before fast swings. Ultimately, look, we've just done the first put the first three pillars in place. Well, if you want to learn this feeling here, imagine now swinging and going right, this is a feeling. Give your brain time to get a sense of that. So here, look, we're going to go. We've done the ball back. We push it now back forward. We're going to take that feeling we got back here, move it closer to the golf ball. So I'm going to swing now at 30 miles an hour. Hey Presto, nice and smooth, right? So we get, and you can play golf just like that to start with, you know, 30 miles an hour, sacrifice distance, learn the quality of your contact. Remember you've got a lifetime to play great golf. So don't try and rush it. Yeah. So you're 30 miles an hour. Get that sensation, slow swing before fast swings. Give your body a chance to learn the motion. And then look, you might go, I'm learning this. Let's push it. Not to a hundred. Let's go to 50 miles an hour. Look back. There's 50 miles an hour, a bit further, an absolute bullet again. And what you'll find is, is you'll find your speed for that day. And that's what you take to the golf course. So you've learned a bit of technique in terms of how to strike it. And you're learning it by starting slow before you go fast. Pillar number five. And this is a big one. Short effortless swings versus big effort swings, right? So what do I mean by that? Well, look at this. So here I can do a very short swing look here that only goes, let's say a short distance. Now I'm not going to increase the length of my swing. I'm going to keep it short, but I want to see this ball go a lot further. But in an effortless way without increasing the lens, I'm going to swing to here and that ball suddenly gone much, much further. What have I changed? I've changed the rhythm and the impulse to that motion. So what I've done is, is in reality, as opposed to losing control by going longer first, what I've done is, is I've kept the length nice and short. And what I'm doing is, is I've got, this is one rhythm that would hit a certain distance. Now, what I'm doing is I'm imagining, if I want to hit that ball and produce more energy into the back of that golf ball, I don't have to swing longer. I can just picture this bang, bang, bang. That makes sense, right? So shorter, try to get the maximum distance you can from a short swing before you go longer. So look at this one, bang, short swing. That's gone off like a rocket. I haven't got a track man showing the distance, but that has gone comfortably 150 yards with a very, very, very short swing, but with some impulse. Do that way before you start to go long. So short before long. So pillar number six, and this was a brilliant one from Peter Kostas. And you will have seen me doing this with many, many of my students. Left heel up or lead heel up before lead heel down. He talks about how it's brilliant. Golfing played for 400 years with the best players in the world, Jack Nicklaus, Sam Snead, Ben Hogan, all letting this lead heel come off the ground. And then suddenly we've got an epidemic of people saying you must keep it flat on the ground. Well, the reality is, is that's great. Maybe if you're a 20 year old athlete, but for the majority of players, allowing this lead heel to come up correctly, by the way, there's a way to do this. I'll show you in a second, but allowing this lead heel to come up, it does a few things. It unlocks the lower body. Now the lower body is the key for you to make a longer, natural flowing motion. A lot of people are trying to get their turn look with just their torso. And it's hugely restricted if you don't move your feet. So notice this, what I'm doing, I'm allowing my lead knee here to move inwards, to let my heel come off the ground. As I do this, this lower body moves and it allows me to make a naturally fully turn without hurting myself. But the other thing is brilliant at doing, if what goes up must come down. So it's a brilliant way. Also that when that foot comes up, you don't want to keep it there. It's going to naturally want to come down, which again, helps you to transfer your weight back onto the front foot to start the down to naturally correctly and through the shot. Think of a baseball pitcher. Do they start planted? They're up here. Why? Because if it comes off, it gives you something to land into. So start with allowing your heel to come up before you keep it down. There's not a problem with keeping it down eventually, if that works for you, but to start with, get those feet working in such a way that allows a lead heel to come up to make the turn. So you've got something to plant down, want to start that downswing and away you go. You'll see, look, Padraig Harrington turn into senior tour. You'll see him all the time. Lead heel comes up, helps him to generate power, lead heel up to lead heel down and we hit shots like that. So six pillars. Thanks so much Peter Costas for, I just happened to fall on this online. It's absolutely brilliant. I just had to share it with you because I think succinctly a brilliant way of kind of putting some simple elements into your game to hit driver straighter, strike your irons much, much better. Hope you enjoyed the video. Give it a thumbs up, share it with a friend if you know this might help. And look, if you want to see me actually hitting shots with my feet together, check this video out right here. I do it with driver. It's an absolute game changer. People say it's a game changer. Take it out. And look, if you're new to the channel, press that subscribe button and the bell, but until next week, have a wonderful golfing week.