LIV Lessons： Branden Grace - Chapter 1 ｜ Pro Tips to Fix Your Driver

Hi, I'm Brandon Grace from Stinger GC. Welcome to my live lesson. Goodness me, Brandon Grace. Nine under par, a 61. But that is a certain birdie. Now it's perfect. He is as gritty as they come. In this lesson, I'm going to teach you all my techniques on how to be successful from the tee. Oh, it's a big cut right back to the middle of the fairway. Fine shot. He's very comfortable hitting a nice low slider. It's the one thing everybody grabs first. You know, when you see amateurs and even juniors, they want to see how far they can hit the ball. It's probably, well, it's the biggest head obviously in the bag, and it's the one that you can't miss really. My approach is, you know, start at the bottom, start at the wedges, get your rhythm, feel your speed, feel contact on the club face. And, you know, then you go into the bigger stuff. And I think if you start slow and you work your way up to the driver, get the speed going, it's going to really help you instead of just starting at the driver. And then it's going to be harder to feel everything with the other irons. It's weird, like everybody's got their own thing. Like I actually prefer, and what I actually want to start doing is going into the shot with your grip already set. Because then it shows there's a lot less movement, a lot less fiddling before you actually get to hit the shot. A lot of guys just don't have anything. They go left hand in, right hand in, whatever. I almost want to feel that. I fiddle a lot to try and get comfortable. So a lot of times when that happens, the mind almost takes over and you start thinking about stuff that you shouldn't be thinking about, missing it right, missing it left. It's almost like take that split second out of it, get into the shot with already with a fixed grip. So let me start off this way. I'm going to hit a normal one and I'll take you, afterwards I'll take you through what I felt and what I tried to do with that. What the normality of that was with the stance, the ball position, everything from there. All right, so that to me was just a stock standard driver. So what I mean by stock standard, there was probably a 85% effort into that shot speed wise. I felt the ball position was just inside my left heel. I was in a comfortable width with my feet, with my stance. I wasn't very wide. I wasn't very narrow and it was just a swing on good tempo, concentrated on my ball flight. So that was just a stock standard shot that I would hit on the golf course. Then the one thing I like doing on the golf course as well is we all get into a pressure situation. So meaning you have to, when you're coming down the stretch, you're in the last hole of the tournament. You've got a one shot lead and you know you have to hit the fairway and you have to make par to win the golf tournament. So a lot of guys do have a shot like that. And don't be surprised, a lot of pros, even at our level, they don't have it. They like hitting the same shot over and over whether it works or not. That's just the way it is. So something I like doing, move the ball position a little bit back, get a little bit more narrow. And then it's important when you practice this golf course or when I've practiced this golf shot all over the years, I know that this shot comes out with a little cut, about a 10 yard cut left to right. It probably flies only 265 in the air, but it still runs out another 30. So I'm still going to get it to 295, around 300, maybe a little shorter than that as well. But I know I've got a 90% chance that I'm going to hit the fairway when I hit the shot. It's still where a lot of guys tell you now these days to get the power, you have to really hit up on the golf shot. So this I'm more trying to get on top of the golf ball. So I'm most probably going to be a little bit down or very level on attack angle on that specific shot. And then obviously aim it down the left side of the fairway, play for a little 10 yard fade. And I know I'm going to have a good chance of hitting the fairway. Golf has changed so much over the last 10 years, I want to say. I want to say in the past it was hitting fairways. I want to say now hitting it long and hitting fairways is ideal. But with a driver, I think they just try to hit it way too hard. But that's the name of the game these days. The further you hit it, the more wow it is for everybody around you and the more ego you have. But I would still want to say just scale it back and try to hit some fairways and play golf that way. For me, it's more trying to see what the hole requires of me, what shape I need to hit, what a height I need to hit, and what's going to give me a best chance to hit the fairway and try to make a birdie. I'm not the longest out there, but I do hit pretty much more fairways than most of the guys. So that's one of the strengths of my game. And then obviously, I want to say that one of the main things with the driver is just really work on the rhythm. When amateurs get on the driving range and they have one specific miss, whether it's right or left, I always want to say it starts with the ball position. A lot of guys, again, they're trying to hit it hard. So the ball position is too far forward. When the ball position is too far forward, you start reaching for the golf ball. So you're either going to come way over the top to try to get to the golf ball, or a lot of guys are going to be late and then they get to the golf ball late and you're going to have both misses. You're either going to have the one snap hooking it left or the one slicing it to the right. A lot of times when I see guys hitting it to the right, I always find there's two ways of seeing it for me. The one is the person goes way too much on the inside, so they roll open. The club gets behind them. They don't have the power or the hands or the practice, the time and the effort that they put into it to really get the hands, again, on a good position to get contact with the golf ball. So a lot of times they go from the inside and then the only way they know about getting it is in the same path to get back to the golf ball. So again, if you can see I've over-exaggerated now, but the club face is open, head is back, there's only one way it's going to go. The other way I feel what a lot of times the guys do, instead of going inside, they go out. A lot of times when you go out, I always find the swing works in opposites. If you go out, it has to loop sooner or later and then it's going to drop on the inside, you're going to get to the same thing. So if somebody struggles, one of the fixes that I always tell amateurs and even my mates back home is, so if you see that and I see them looping, I'll tell them almost feel like you're going inside on the way back. Inside meaning if there's a straight line there, inside is they go inside of that line and they're really going to go flat and they're going to feel like the club's behind them. So this is probably what it would look like. So when you go flat, again, your hands most probably roll with going flat, so the club is going to open. Again, so when I say if you're out of practice and things like that, you're never going to be able to square the club face up. It's either going to be open or they're going to over-exaggerate and they're really going to flip the hands and that's when you get the one left. So the other one that I see is again, if there's a straight line, the guys are going out and make a big loop at the top and then they try to square it up on the way down after the loop. So there's your straight line there. A lot of times they go out, they loop in. When they loop in, they get stuck and they're behind it and you're going to hit it right. For me, I'm always a guy, I take it out a little bit. I have a little bit of a movement at the top, not a lot. My plane probably stays the same, but my hands drop a little, so that's how I manipulate it. So everything is different, but you have to put time and effort into practice. You have to see what works for you. You really just have to commit to hitting a golf shot. It's quite hard if the player plays once a month. You know, it is pretty hard. The feeling isn't going to be there every single time. You're going to feel different. Everything is just going to be a little awkward really. If you can try get on the range once a week and try really put a little bit of time in, I think that's the only way you can really get to a point where you can actually feel what you're doing and feel the difference from week in and week out. So when I hit the normal shot, I do tee the ball down a little bit. When I tee it up low, the reason is for me to stay with the shot a lot longer. I think the one thing that amateurs do wrong is they almost want to see where the ball goes and they look up earlier to see if it's in the fairway, if it's right or left or trying to find it. So for me, it's just teeing it a little lower, try and stay on top of the ball. When you stay on top of the ball, you're in the shot a lot longer. So there's a lot less room for things to go wrong. Again, that was only on that specific shot. When you go full speed at a shot, I would prefer to tee it up a little higher. Again, like I said, get a little more power behind it, that sort of thing. So this shot, so if my previous drive was in that tee, that height from the ground, this one, I'll try to get the maximum out of the tee. I only like using short tees. For some reason, something I've just always done. So this one, when I try to hit more of a fuller golf shot, trying to fly the bunker 300, the ball position will be a little bit more forward than the previous one in the lower shots. I'll try to get it on the right toe or maybe just inside the foot. And then I'll try to go a lot wider with my stance to get my weight to shift from almost left of the golf ball head position to more behind it. When you're behind it, square everything up with the shoulders. I think the one important thing is, a lot of times when people shift the weight so far back with the right foot, a lot of time they reach for the golf ball because the ball is forward. So it's important to keep straight behind it, push the hands almost a little bit forward, get behind it. And then when you hit, because you're wider, you're already a bit more behind it. So you're creating a lot more space and speed just by doing that. And then it's important to hit up on the golf ball. The accuracy and things goes out of the window for me when I hit that full flat out go of a golf shot. I call that, that's my number four. My number four is pretty much all that I have in the tank, trying to carry a bunker 300 or 305 or whatever the distance might be. Cause you're doing something a lot different than what you're doing over and over the whole day and even on the driving range. But I know certain times in the golf course and in the round or even on practice, you need to practice those shots. You need to pull a shot off like that. So it is important to do it. But I find when you get into that situation where you need to do it, I still think that you need to slow things down. When I, what I mean by slow things down is more on the way back. I think it's important to get the transition at the top, you know, stable. And when you get there, then really start picking up the pace and going from there. Cause I think a lot of guys, especially amateurs, when they start hitting the full shot, it's kind of like a pull from the start. You know, they speed it up, the hands go, everything goes back. They're trying to get the speed from the go at the top. You've got so much more speed than maybe what you used to have. You're losing at the top. And that's when, that's when the shot, that's when you make mistakes and one goes right, one goes left. So I think really try slow it down going back. And then when you get to the top, then really try to create your speed. See, I should just listen to myself more often. All right, so I already showed you guys all the fundamentals on the driving range. So I want to take into golf all year, kind of what I like doing, what I like to discuss with my caddy before I hit a shot like this and working on my shape, hitting it left to right. Like I said earlier on the driving range, what I like doing with my low shot is like with my irons, get a little closer to the golf ball, get a little bit more narrow. When I do that, especially with the number one that I hit the lowest one, I like moving the ball back a little bit. And then again, you have to take speed off the shot to get the spin down, to get the ball to fly lower. So I'll need to pick a target down the left hand side. So today, let's say the target, my starting line is going to be the right edge of that left bunker. Try start it there and work it towards the fairway and then let it run down the fairway. So when I hit the number two, I'll do everything exactly the same. The only difference I will do is I will speed the swing up a little bit and I'll move the ball position a little bit forward. There you go. Okay, the number three would be my stock standard drive out on the golf course. The one I'll hit the most on the day. This is probably looking like a 280, 285 carry. So this way I'll do it, I'll get a little bit wider in my stance. Ball position will be about a ball inside my left foot. And obviously I'll swing this one at probably about an 85% speed. All right, so that was my number three. So then when I get to the four, the four is everything I have. I would try aim this a lot straighter. I think when you put so much speed and effort into a shot, it's very hard to really control the shape on it. So I would try aim it maybe straight over this bridge, try cut the corner a little bit. So one thing I do with the four, I get a lot wider with my stance, get my weight from on top of the golf ball, more behind it, and then go a little bit more up on the golf shot. I want to say just full commitment, trust in the process and just stay patient. I know it's easier said than done, but that is the name of the game.