85% of Golfers Don’t Understand This Principle (And It’s Killing Their Swing)

So, right now, in this moment, 85% of the golfers out there come over the top, okay? We see it all the time in our golf schools. We measure club path in the very beginning when the students get there, eight degrees over the top, 12 degrees over the top, and we explain to them one basic fundamental principle of science that they're not understanding, and it's the same thing with you. I guarantee, if you see your divots going left, you see, for a right-handed golfer, your ball curving to the right, a glancing weak hit, you don't understand this one principle, okay? And you can't fight science. It's literally the laws of science. It has to do with centripetal force. Once you know how to counteract that force correctly, you're going to be on your way to having a neutral club path, maybe even hopefully hitting a draw. Before we get into it, though, if you've never watched one of my videos, I'm Zach Allen. I do videos like this every week. Please feel free to subscribe down below, and we're going to go ahead and listen to the goat of all goats, Mr. Jack Nicklaus, talk about exactly what I'm telling you. Byron Nelson, when I went to see him years ago, Jack Grouse sent me down to see him. Byron made one statement. He says, I don't believe you could ever have your hands too close to your body as you swing. And I felt like that's getting your arms and hands underneath you, swing. Johnny was very much the same way. You were well under the ball, and hands were way close to your body. So I love what Jack Nicklaus had to say there. Get your hands underneath you. Do these gentlemen, these golfers look like their hands are underneath them? Are their hands coming in close to their body? They're not. And that's something that so many golfers struggle with, is to start the downswing, the hands instantly move away from the body. And the farther your hands are from the body, the harder it is going to be for you to hit it solid. So 63-year-old Vijay Singh, what makes him so great and hit it so far? Guess what? His hands come in really close to his body. So that's kind of the underneath that Nicklaus is talking about. His hands are underneath his left shoulder. They're not out and away. And we're going to show you exactly why that tends to happen to many golfers. So this is so common here, right? Just a nice, relaxed practice swing. We actually measured that practice swing at 45 miles per hour. But watch what's going to happen when he goes to hit a real shot. Wow, that really speeds up. Okay, so taking a look at the position of his downswing on his practice swing here, right, when he's swinging 45 miles an hour and there's no ball there to hit, the club comes in pretty well. And then inevitably, as we put the ball out there, you see the body really start to open up and spin, and his hands and clubs start to kick out. And he's about a nine handicap, but still, you're going to see that that position is going to give him some pretty inconsistent results. Okay, so take a look at this great piece of footage. This is how professionals make practice swings before they hit. This is a couple weeks ago, Farmers Insurance, Torrey Pines, Justin Rose won wire to wire. This is him and Jason Day on the first tee. Very similar rehearsals of getting the hands, like Nicholas said, underneath them, right? They know that when they go to hit a ball, there's going to be a large impulse to swing harder, and we're going to have some orbiting out of the hands, okay? They know exactly how to get their hands. Watch Justin Rose get his hands down underneath him. And then at some point, he rehearses the outward rotation. Jason Day, same thing. He's going to get those hands nicely down and underneath him before he starts to feel some of the rotation and some of the through feels. So really important that we know that. If we don't know that in our practice swing, we're not actually practicing for the real thing, right, for that larger speed buildup of power. We need to know exactly what's coming. So we see it on TV every week. So many golf professionals out there playing every week on tour that make practice swings where they get their hands underneath, like Nicholas said. This face-on, you'll see I keep my back to the target as my weight moves forward and downward, okay? What amateurs aren't quite understanding are just the laws of centrifugal force, right? Here's a quick demonstration. If I hold this like this and I spin slowly, it barely flies out, right? The faster I spin, the more it flies out, okay? So the faster you swing, the more throwout action is going to be occurring. And professionals are aware of that, anticipating that, and they know how to not let it overtake their golf swing. So that's what Nicholas is talking about when he talks about getting his hands close, getting his hands underneath, at least until this position at about parallel to the ground, and then we start to turn on the jets and we start to move much faster, that's when the rotation really starts to kick in. It's not until about this point, then we really can spin ourselves around the corner. Most amateurs out there, like we saw on video, they'll take a nice, easy practice swing, things feel good. Soon as they see the ball, they see blood, the urge to hit kicks in, and everything just fires hard from the top. Their body's spinning, and it's unweighting or getting lighter, and their hands are orbiting out, just like that centrifugal force demonstration. So basically, the drill would be, right, is to make sure and practice in a way to where you're feeling your hands get underneath. So by underneath, look at the position of my left arm. It's straight vertical. Watch when I set up. You see how my natural arm hang is vertical. I need to make sure my hands get back to that position, and then there, there is the outward motion. We cannot have that outward motion from the top. It's as much mental as it is physical. So you've got to be very patient from the top. We're not going to try to hit the ball hard until we get closer to the ball. Now we speed up. So I would attempt to hit some in that vein of a little pump drill, and then I speed up down at the bottom. So I'm preserving, I'm waiting, I'm not letting that urge to hit, I'm not letting centrifugal force take over my golf swing. And I hit that ball great. I don't have my launch monitor running, but that was an 8-iron, probably went 140 yards. It went farther than I thought, and I actually could feel my body speed up on the way through, right? I could really feel some acceleration. When people go hard from the top, they have to hit the brakes, slow down, get the club on the ball, but they're actually not going that fast at the ball, which is where we really want our speed. So I think doing that, and then if I was out on the golf course, normally I would take my practice swing slightly behind the ball, but I would do some rehearsal, kind of like these professionals, that gets my hands down and underneath, like Nicholas talked about, and then feel the rotation coming through. And then as you start to hit some, you've got that same exact sense of patient from the top, my back stays to the target, my hands drop into position, and then we turn the jets on down at the bottom. So if you're struggling with any of those issues, and your playing partners perhaps comment that your real swing looks quite a bit different than your practice swing, that's that throwout action, that centrifugal action, taking over your downswing. Learn from these professionals, learn how to control that until we want to use it at the proper time, and that's down at the bottom. Makes a huge difference in your tempo and your consistency. You really get the club on a nice plane, helps with the smash factor, with driver, helps with our club path delivery so we don't get outside in. All those things that so many golfers struggle with, but really the biggest thing is mentally it takes away all that anxiety over the ball, right? Because that's what we're anxious. We know it's going to change from our practice swing, and that's not what professionals do. So I hope that tip helped you out. If you like what you're seeing, I've got some information down below. If you want to sign up for my email list, you'll get tips like this every week. Have a great week. I'll see you next video.