Everyone’s Driver Swing Is BAD Until They Learn This

I bet you always wonder why your golfing pals sometimes out drive you by 10-20 yards. I will share today the key things that enable you to add up to 20 yards more distance without changing your physique or increasing your spin speed. Let's get started. So the three keys are strike, where you hit the ball on the club face makes a huge difference in distance you create. Delivery angle, and we'll come to that in a second, whether it's coming from the inside, down, up on the golf ball, but we'll get into that in huge detail as we get stuck in. And the last thing really is the loft you present at contact. Those are the three keys that make a huge difference in your distance. So let's get stuck into those three things with some solutions that can make a difference to you straight away without a lot of work on your behalf. So for the purpose of this video, I'm going to try and keep my speed around 90 mile an hour. Normally I'd be just in the hundreds. So for me, fairly comfortable to be just in the hundreds, but you know, I'm not a hugely fast player anymore. Tour averages about 113. I average, as I said, about 102, 103 when I'm warmed up. But most golfers I would teach would be between that kind of 85 and 95 mile an hour, you know, for a generally reasonably solid player. So the one I just hit there was 91 mile an hour speed, hit in the centre of the face, and it's gone basically 241 yards. So that's what we're looking like for a centre strike around that speed. What I'm going to demonstrate now is when we don't hit in the centre, what kind of numbers we get, just to give you the idea of how much distance we lose. And the optimised distance for that speed would be about 238 yards. So I've actually gained three yards. Carry distance was down a touch because the spin was a little low. These balls tend to be a little low spinning. But let's get stuck into it. Okay, so there's purposely trying to hit a toe. So initially, I'm just going to set up a door out the toe of the club and try and do the same swing as I just did. Oh, way out the toe. See, there's a strike way, way out the toe. So that one 190 yards compared to the 248 optimised. Slightly faster as well, that was 92 mile an hour. So you can see there I lost basically quite a hell of a distance on that, you know, circa 60 yards in round numbers from a toe strike. Again, severely in the toe. But this is what I mean, the amount of distance you can lose just by having the contact not perfect. I'm going to try and hit one out the heel. So again, set up on the heel of the golf club. Sorry golf club, sorry hand, this is going to hurt. Oh, a little high in the face too, that one. Let's see where I got the contact on. Yeah, centre and highs in this. Disregard that one. The speed, right? And that one there went 226 compared to 242. So again, hitting it high in the face cost me almost 20 yards. Right, come on, in the heel of the club. Yep, yep, yep. Not a long way in the heel, but in the heel of the club. Slightly faster and getting warmer. Again, lost 13 yards from that tiny bit in the heel. So more severely in the heel would cost even more yards. The big point from this video is basically if we hit it off centre, we're going to lose loads of yards. If we know our speed is excellent, you can work out what your efficiency should be basically from there. So for a 90 mile an hour golf swing, we should be getting pretty close to 240 yards distance. So if you're on 90 mile an hour and you're not getting 240, it'll be to do with one of the things we're looking at. Now when we look at the delivery angle later on, that will be kind of how we can hopefully increase the speed from the delivery angle and also hitting up on the golf ball will make a difference there. That one there hit 1.6 degrees up on the ball. Based on the science, hitting down on the ball, 3 degrees versus 3 degrees up on the ball at about that speed is about 10% more distance. Around about that according to the science. So let's talk about strike, how we can change that strike. So for strike, I love using barriers. Obviously, we can look into the reasons why your strike is not in the centre, but if we use barriers, we can try and make an instant change. So if we put a barrier on the outside part of the ball, if we put the golf club down, I want to be able to just fit my club head in so I can get a centred strike without hitting that barrier. If I put it on the inside, again I want to make sure the shaft doesn't hit that. I'm going to go a little bit easier on that one. So those two barriers now, a bit like a bowing arrow with the sides up, I can put those down there now and that will focus the intention of getting that strike in the centre. Obviously, if we're favouring one side to the other, we can put it just on one side. If we're always hitting it in the toe, putting the barrier on the inside will make the club go out more and vice versa. Obviously, I'd love to look at the reasons behind why you're hitting it in the toe and heel and that might be because you're standing up and doing all sorts of things like that or the delivery angle of the club popping out. So we can work on those things too, but if we set up the golf ball now with these barriers down and I try and make contact now without making any contact with these barriers, we'll see what happens. That was good. Let's see what we get there. That felt solid. Pretty central, slightly faster, apologies. But again, efficiency-wise, meant to go 250 and I hit a 251. So putting the barriers down will certainly challenge your mind to get you more focused on that initial contact. Okay, for the delivery angle, we're going to look at a couple of props and also Swing Coach app, which is one of my favourite, favourite apps to use for golfers to practise and also for analysing your golf swing. We're also going to use a towel here. This is kind of where I want the club to kind of feel like it's going to land and the angle it's going to land at. So from the inside, I'm also just hitting up on the golf ball. Before we do that, I'll also look at just what my standard swing is. So before we get into using the props, let's just look at what my standard golf swing would be. I tend to be a little steep. I've got this on Swing Plane. It will talk. That's part of the beauty about this app. At takeaway, inside by eight. At half down, steep by three. At delivery, on plane. So steep by three on the way down is something that's not going to help speed. So I want to try and feel that my plane is going to go shallower on the way down. So in order to help that, we're going to look at a couple of things. You know, with the setup here, we're going to use these devices for sure, but also what I'm going to try and do is really feel as I start down, I'm going to feel like I can go back to target for longer, let my arms go very, what I feel is deep and behind me, and try and really work that feeling of a big draw. So let's just try and do that now. I'm going to make this a bit slower, really trying to change that up. At takeaway, inside by four. At half down, steep by one. It's only steep by one then instead of three. Shallow by four. Shallow by four, in fact, because I'm used to shallowing at the bottom. I'll get into that in a second. My start on my downswing there was better, but my impact became potentially slightly worse because of my compensation. So what normally happens in my golf swing is I start down steep, then I shallow it at the bottom. So that time there, I shallowed it more, but I still shallowed at the bottom, which is why then I can get some dodgy contacts. So it's important when I learn to shallow it earlier on the way down, that the delivery angle, then I rotate through the golf ball more to stop that getting shallow at the bottom. So we know from the feedback helping me, and me trying to constantly not rotate, that I improve that delivery, start down move, and then I've got to try and turn onto it at the bottom. At takeaway, on play. Shallow by one. There you go. For a practice swing. Shallow by two. The beauty of this, it will measure practice swings too, as long as it's some kind of noisy tree that kicks it. So that showed me that practice swing is exactly what I want it to be. Now I've got to do it in the real world, which is obviously a challenge, as we all know. Takeaway, inside, by six. At half down, steep, by two. At delivery, shallow, by four. Let's try a different technique. So in order to try and change that start down, I'm going to stick a T-peg, very subtlest, which is near the end of my club. And what I'm going to try and do is I as early and as aggressively as I possibly can. At takeaway, inside, by two. At half down, on play. At delivery, shallow, by four. Okay, so within five minutes or so, I managed to change how I start down in my golf swing, which ultimately then will start to allow me then to be able to get the golf club more in the delivery slot here, and then I can rotate to create more speed and more force. The further behind me this golf club is as I come down, the longer it has to go and the more speed it will generate just from momentum and torques and forces. So using the visuals of the towel, using this to get the ascending angle of approach to impact will help speed, and then getting it behind me, and to make sure I get a good contact, we're onto a good start here. Now the last thing we want to talk about is loft. When we're talking loft, we're talking about how we can get this loft of this golf club to be basically doing this through impact. So de-lofting that club through impact. So if we've got the right loft and our driver at impact, we've maximised how this will work for the spin and so on. But the more we get what we call a spin loft lower at impact, that helps create more distance. Now to understand spin loft, just look at these two rods. The white rod will be kind of the angle of approach that the club's travelling on, this will be the loft of the club. So if you imagine we have this kind of differential, if this narrows the ball goes further, if this widens the ball goes higher and shorter. So what we're looking for if you imagine in a driver swing, if you imagine this is horizontal here, we want the angle of approach to be two to three degrees up and we want the dynamic loft of the club to be coming down. That then will make us hit the ball further. So what we want to be feeling we're doing is releasing the golf club, but feeling the top of the golf club is climbing on top of the bottom of the golf club. But also when we get into this delivery position here, we're trying to make sure that toe of the club is more down to the ground. So more like that. So what I'd like you to do is do some rehearsal swings, where we swing back, get the club head behind the hands, toe pointing to the ground, as we get to the golf ball, let the shaft level up with the hands, but feel that that club is pointing more down to the ground. Now these are exaggerations but that's the feel we want. We want to feel ideally we're hitting the ball in the centre, getting the golf club to come from the inside, but the loft be reduced and the club face to be strong pre-impact. And then we want to be releasing the levers for maximum speed too. There's one last element which we'll talk about in a second for speed, but let's just have a go at doing this initially now. So I'm trying to feel like I'm getting the golf club behind me and closed and then keeping it closed through impact. Felt strong, felt de-lofted, speed went up to 97 miles an hour, speed's increasing, the potential distance is 265 now. So I am getting warmed up too, but the idea is obviously we're creating all these movements that are going to help generate what we call more free speed, without me trying to hit it harder or going to the gym or doing things like that, you know, having to change physically. The last thing we want to talk about for speed gains is basically trying to swing back faster. Now when you swing back faster we generate more speed on the way down. So a lot of golfers are very scared about swinging back fast because they think that's going to wreck their rhythm, but the science would show that when we swing back fast that increases our overall club head speed. Now the fastest one I've done so far today in here is about 97 mile an hour, again I'm trying to keep it around that 90 mile an hour to make it more relatable and relevant, but this one now I'm going to swing back faster to try and keep as many of the things that we've been talking about. The poor poor strike, I definitely thought I swung back faster and that one there was 101 mile an hour. So the key is obviously when strike gets compromised by trying to go faster that negates any gain by the extra speed, so the potential distance there was but obviously that ball went 204 yards because the strike was poor, so let's try one more of those. It's still a little bit off centre but I did hit it a lot better, 101 mile an hour, slightly off the toe, potential distance 277 and I hit it 268. So what we're saying basically is to unlock that extra speed what we need to do essentially is make sure we swing it from the inside and hit up on the ball. If we can swing back a little faster that will also help increase club speed. Now to be efficient with our distance we need to hit it in the centre of the face and we need that loft, a spin loft to be closing down and obviously release the club so it's still in the square fashion so we hit straight shots. So the magic keys are hit in the centre, hit it from the inside, hit up on the golf ball and feel like you're de-lofting that club to your impact and that will get you the maximum speed and this is from a science perspective as well as from a practical perspective. So when you're on the golf course if you were trying to do these things we'd find a location to set the ball that gives you the most sweetest spot. So if you find the setting spot the heel gives you the best strikes or the toe gives you the best strikes or the middle gives you the best strikes, follow that mantra. Then ideally for me setting up the club head just slightly backwards I talk about in most of my videos with the driver that helps you hit up on the ball and from the inside. Then feeling that we are staying closed, getting the golf club really hitting the ground way back before the ball and doing that as your little practice swing and staying behind the wall and doing it with a fast swing would be the way I'd approach every drive in the course. The driver's there to be hit quite hard, don't be scared, don't steer drives, hit them quite hard. We want to be the most efficient version of you but also make sure from a science point of view we're maximizing the opportunities to create speed. If you do that you will become the best version of you.