Why You Need This: Today you get "Clay Ballard Golf Swing | All Angles"

In this video you're getting a breakdown of my swing from every angle.....slow motion and full speed.

You'll discover the differences in my swing as I go from driver, to hybrid, to mid-iron and wedge.

This video is packed full of little nuggets including what I focus on when I'm not hitting the ball solid, or feel like I'm losing some power on the course.

You'll discover:

• what I consider the #1 fundamental of the Top Speed Golf System
• what I focus on to send my body into "auto-pilot" on the course
• the two things you need to check first if you notice a lack of distance

Golf Pros Featured:

Instructors Featured: Clay Ballard    

Video Duration: 18:22

Video Transcription:

G106. Clay Ballard Golf Swing | All Angles

Hey, it’s great to have you here today, and one of the questions I get asked all the time is, you’d like to see video of my swing.

Not only in full speed but also in slow motion, and to be able to see maybe some of the differences that there are between the driver, the 3 wood, the 5 iron, the pitching wedge, what differences are there in my swing.

That’s exactly what we’re going to do here. This video is not going to be necessarily an instruction video, it’s going to be more of me talking a lot about things that I focus on in my swing.

Even more specifically, when things get off in my swing, maybe I lose a little bit of club head speed and the ball just isn’t going that far, what was my fall back game plan?

How do I go back and make sure I get my swing speed as high as I can to start really getting those distances back up? Where do I start?

Then some suggestions of where you should start there. Also, for consistency, let’s say I’m not quite hitting it as solid as I like, what are my go-to keys that I focus on in my own swing, and that’s exactly what we’re going to do here.

So in the beginning here, I’m just showing you a variety of swings of mine from different angles, different clubs. Then from there, we’re going to work into more of the keys that I focus on.

Now one of the things you’ll probably notice in all these videos, is that something kind of unique to what I do is I’ll lift my left toe, so you’ll see all the way from driver to pitching wedge, any club that I’m hitting, my left toe starts to lift up a little bit.

That’s kind of my swing trigger. A lot of times you’ll see kind of unique swing triggers, even on the PGA Tour, players will have unique things they do to start their swing.

Some players don’t have them, either way is completely fine. I like to really lift up that lead foot, and I think that started from, or I know that started from, me feeling like I’m going to get a little weight shift to my right.

Whether it’s a driver or a pitching wedge, any club in between, I’m always going to make sure that as soon as I start my backswing, my weight is shifting to the inside of my right foot right off the bat, that way I can get that full weight shift and get a lot of power.

Also like to feel pretty athletic, and I like to set up to where I feel fairly comfortable. Sometimes you may notice that my back is a little bit rounded.

That’s completely fine, a lot of times I see players trying to set up with their posture absolutely perfect, and they’re kind of locked in, their back is dead straight, maybe if you’re not that flexible that’s not a very comfortable position for you.

That can lead to kind of a lot of forced tension, a lot of things that aren’t going to help you to hit the ball that much better. They may look good on camera, but the swing isn’t going to perform as well.

So I like to get where I feel pretty athletic, but I don’t want to be locked in and forcing myself into any kind of posture.

I think it just makes it a little easier to make solid contact when you feel comfortable over top of the ball. When you feel comfortable, you get some confidence. When you have confidence, you hit the ball a little bit better.

Now another thing here we’ll talk about some differences in the swings. If you compare my driver swing specifically between like a shorter iron like a pitching wedge.

If we look here from face on, as I get to the top of the swing, you’ll notice that the driver goes a little bit farther back than the pitching wedge.

So if I pause at the top, the driver’s almost parallel with the ground, my pitching wedge is well short of that.

But what you’ll notice here, and a lot of players take this idea and they tend to think that OK, if I’m swinging my pitching wedge shorter, I’m just making kind of an abbreviated swing.

Well you’ll notice that my shoulders on both of these swings are making a good, full turn. So I’m getting past 90° from my shoulder turn, and that’s really a big huge key for power.

One of the most important things you can do in your golf game. The only reason my pitching wedge is going a little shorter back is that it’s a shorter club, it has a little bit less momentum.

So as I turn my body to the top, that’s just where the club sets and it’s the little less momentum since the club shaft is longer, which keeps it from going all the way back.

As you add that longer club, it’s going to be a little bit tougher to stop it.

A great way to visualize that, imagine you had a driver that’s 40-foot long. Huge, long club. Once you get that club moving, it’s going to want to keep on moving.

If you try to slow it down or stop it, it’s going to take longer to slow it down and stop it. So it’s going to go a little farther back.

That’s really all that’s happening when you talk about the difference between a driver and a pitching wedge, as far as the backswing length.

You’ll also notice that when you look at your swing plane, so if I look at my driver, maybe a middle iron, and again the pitching wedge, and I take a line. What I like to do is if you line up the camera shooting down your toes toward your target.

Ideally if I’m hitting, shooting toward the flag, let’s say, my camera’s going to be lined up about waist high shooting down my toe line and toward the flag out in the distance.

I can draw a line from the hosel of my club up through my right elbow, that’s what I like to call the elbow plane.

In the downswing, no matter if I have my driver, middle iron, short iron, whatever it is, I want to get that club shaft going pretty well down that red line, or just a little bit inside that red line, specifically the club head inside that red line at some point kind of halfway down in the downswing.

Now the reason for this is that’s going to allow me to get the club kind of in the slot as some people call it. I also call it The Move, or shallowing out that club in the transition and what that allows me to do is be very, very consistent with my contact.

So from that position, I can now turn through the shot, release the club head, and I know it’s going to be coming pretty squarely through the ball.

Now if I get a little steep and I was outside that red line, significantly outside that red line, that’s going to cause me some problems.

I’m going to end up having to reroute the club hitting a lot of blocks, or hooks, or slices, and different things. That can cause a lot of inconsistency in your contact when you get above that red line.

So the one thing you will notice, and people ask me this, is well isn’t that line different with every club? So if I’m hitting a driver, that’s going to be a little flatter, that red line isn’t going to be as upright.

When I’m hitting a pitching wedge, it’s going to be a little more upright.

The only difference there, I don’t have to make any conscious adjustment in my swing, it’s just because the club shaft is shorter and more vertical with the pitching wedge, and it’s automatically going to go shorter and more vertical.

With the driver, I’m a little flatter and farther away, and it’s automatically going to go flatter and farther away.

I don’t make any conscious adjustment whatsoever, with any club in my bag. I feel like I’m swinging them all basically the same with the exception of maybe swinging a little harder with the driver, hitting a little bit more on the upswing.

Pretty much all the clubs I’m hitting off the ground, I feel like the swings are identical, even though they may look a little bit different based on the lie angle changes I talked about, or the momentum of the club wanting to swing farther back.

That’s a question I get all the time, you really don’t have to change your swing depending on the club.

Now one thing that I always look at is my Stable Fluid Spine. What this is, whenever I’m making poor contact, or when I’m not hitting the ball that solid, this is the absolute first thing that I look at.

What I look at here, is I look at my spine angle to be tilted away form the target, and I’m looking for my belt buckle, if I drew a line form my belt buckle up through my shirt buttons at address.

I want that slightly tilted away from the target. As I got to the top of the swing, if I look at my overall upper body, I want that tilted away from the target just like my spine angle was at address.

Then at contact, this is the big one, I want my spine angle tilted away from the target at contact roughly 20°.

Now I’ve measured over 50 Major winners on the PGA Tour, and they were all tilted significantly away from the target, averaging about 20°.

It’s amazing how every single one of them was within just a few degrees on their spine angle. Nobody was totally off.

The reason for that is, that’s what’s going to allow you to make consistent contact with the ground, to release the club out in front, to get a lot of good forward shaft lean and release the lag out in front of the golf ball.

That all happens when I get my body set up in the right position. So it’s no mistake that players from all over the world, from all different ages, from all different coaches and backgrounds all ended up in this same position.

That’s just the easiest way to play golf. That’s why I call it the number one fundamental in the Top Speed Golf System, and that’s why whenever I’m hitting it poorly, that’s the very first thing I look at.

If that’s going good, then I’ll move on to other things, but I really try to check that first. The most important position there is right at contact, you want to be tilted away roughly 20°.

Now the second thing if I’m losing some power, this is a really big one.

Sometimes you’re just out there hitting the ball, and just doesn’t feel like it’s going that far, or maybe you don’t really notice it until you get up to a hole where you usually are 150 yards out, and all of a sudden you’re 180 yards out, and you don’t know what happened.

My number one fundamental there, the number one thing that I always look for is my shoulder turn and what I call the Power Turn in the Top Speed Golf System.

Now we talk about this a lot in my distance course which is called the 20-minute Distance Fix, and there’s a specific way that I like to turn.

That will allow you to get that good rotation whether you don’t have any flexibility at any age, and I’ve had players in their 70s gain over 20, some of them over even 25 miles an hour club head speed which is crazy.

You get about 2.5 yards, 2.6 yards for every mile per hour you swing faster. When you’re talking about 25 miles per hour faster, you’re talking over 60 yards, even up into 70 yards farther on the solid hit drives.

That’s one of the number one fundamentals for that. If you’re ever losing distance, always look at how big your shoulders are turning. Then make sure that you don’t limit your hips.

A lot of times what players are taught is to limit the amount of turn that they have from their hips, really restrict those hips, and then really try to stretch out the hips and the upper body.

That’s not the right way to do it. Specifically if players, if you don’t have as much flexibility as you’d like. If you’re Adam Scott you can reach down and put your knuckles on the ground without bending your knees, then you may be able to get some kind of turn like that.

But for most of us, myself included, we’re not very flexible. You’re really going to want to turn the specific way I talk about in the 20-Minute Distance Fix, which is going to allow you to unlock that, kind of unlock your swing and feel really free.

One of the cool things is one of the videos I go over in the very first section of that, we talk about getting that bigger turn, and a good drill for doing that.

Players who are able to actually 7 miles an hour, or roughly 17 yards of distance just in the first 20 minutes.

That’s the average, we have players that gain much more than that, and that’s a fun course to work through.

If you’re a member of Top Speed Golf, be sure to go the Instruction tab, click on the 20-Minute Distance Fix, start working through those drills, and it’s a blast. People are having tremendous results with that.

One other thing I like to do with speed, and this is just my own personal preference, but I think it’s kind of interesting, is that I like to hear the speed of contact.

I like to really visualize in my mind’s eye, kind of see that ball shooting off the face really, really fast, and then what’s that going to sound like. We’ve all heard somebody hit a ball really solid, really hard.

I like to hear that sound in my mind first, and then kind of feel what that would feel like, and make that kind of fast motion, and to hear that kind of speed when I hit the next shot.

That helps me to kind of get my body amped up to hit a good shot. That just works really well for me. I haven’t talked to tons of good players, everybody’s got their own different thing, but I recommend giving that a try. I always, if I’m struggling with speed a little bit, just hearing that contact in my mind before I make the swing always helps.

Another thing that, and if we listen to a few of these drives, you can really hear just how loud that is.

Now another thing I like to do, is I like to visualize basically an impossible shot. If I’m struggling with my distance, I may pick a target, so if we look at these trees way out in the distance, those are like 500 yards away.

I’m going to pick out just one limb, or one little piece of the trees that would be lined up with my target, go down the middle of the fairway, and what I’m going to do is I’m going to visualize my ball going into the trees there.

Now that’s never going to happen, I’m going to be 200 or 300 yards short of those, but if I visualize that, you’ll be amazed how much your body kind of goes into autopilot and it just hits a nice drive down the fairway more often than not if you have that kind of visualization.

If we start to too much internal, and we start thinking about what our body’s doing, and we start letting the bunkers, and the water, and the trees that are on the sides of the course distract us, then we can lose some confidence.

We’re not feeling very comfortable over top of the ball. If I see that tree way out in the distance and I say, hey, I’m going to pound this ball.

Try to hit it to that tree, and just react, then you can more times than not get a better shot than you would if you start to get too analytical and too focused on what’s happening around you on the sides of the fairway.

Now another key thing when I may feel like I’m not getting as much speed as I’d like is what we call lag and the Straight-Line Release. Basically, that’s a one-two punch.

You want to get a lot of lag in the swing, that’s that big angle between your forearms and the club, and then you want to release that, and that releasing of the lag is what creates the speed.

That one’s happening in front of the golf ball, and the golf ball just gets in the way. I’m visualizing that in my Straight-Line Release, I’m releasing about 45° in front of this golf ball, and the golf ball is just happening to get in the way of that releasing club.

That club’s still speeding up and accelerating as it’s hitting the golf ball, and it also helps with some byproducts of being very consistent.

Because now my hands are kind of leading the way, my club head is lagging behind, because I’m thinking about swinging through the golf ball out in front and now I can really get that consistent contact because my club head’s trailing behind.

Imagine that you had a pull cart, or a push cart that you go and walk around and play golf with.

Imagine you’re on the hood of your car and you have that push cart, and somebody’s driving 56 miles an hour, and they’re trying to keep that push cart straight in front of the car when you’re on the hood of the car.

Going to be very difficult, it’s probably going to slam back into the car, you’re going to wreck. But if you sit in the trunk of the car and you’re just holding that push cart, or that pull cart, it’s going to trail right along with you.

That’s because the mass of the club or the mass of that pull cart, if it’s trailing behind, if it’s following, it’s going to be much more consistent and it’s going to want to line up with my hands or line up with my hands that are holding the push cart or the pull cart.

That’s just how the physics work out. So if my hands are leading, that makes it a lot easier.

Again, having that visualization of my Straight-Line Release, that 45° in front, and having that point out in front of the golf ball that I feel like I’m releasing the club at, allows a lot of that to happen without me having to get too conscious of it.

When you work the Top Speed Golf System, the cool thing is as you go through level 1, level 2, and level 3, what’s going to happen is you’ll automatically start to build in those reps, and you’ll start to get these Straight-Line Release, and the Power Turn, and the Lag, and all the Stable Fluid Spine, like I mentioned.

Those will all happen naturally. You get to a point where you do all your reps through level 3 and you just make a golf swing and all this great stuff is happening, this good contact is happening, and it’s completely on unconscious.

You don’t even have to think about doing it at all. A lot of times when I get up and hit a shot now, players will sometimes ask me too, you give so much instruction, you talk about a lot of this stuff, doesn’t it kind of mess up your swing to be thinking about this?

To be honest, when I’m hitting a golf shot, I’m not thinking about any of this. I’ve kind of already gone through the process of thinking about it, doing my reps, checking on video, and doing the technical stuff.

Now when I get up, hit a shot, all I’m seeing is that tree out in the distance, or the flag where I’m visualizing what kind of shot I’m hitting. I’m letting my body completely react to that.

If I get a little bit off, I may check my fundamentals here, and it’s amazing how much quicker it will come back once you’ve put in the reps and you’ve really ingrained that into your swing, at least the big keys of this.

Now one of the most important things I’ve ever done in my career is really diving into the science of swing speed.

As I started to investigate this I actually learned how to drive, now almost 45 yards farther on my best drives versus when I was playing on the mini tours and practicing 8 hours a day, that was from no lack of effort, I was really working my butt off.

I was trying to swing hard back then, but I really didn’t know what I was doing to create swing speed. I gained almost 17 miles an hour of club head speed on my fastest drives and can really crank them out there now.

It came from an understanding of a lot of the myths that were out there. I had a lot of preconceived ideas of what allows me to swing fast, what allows me to get distance that were just dead wrong.

Once I started to dive into that, not only learn the science but then also test that out with hundreds of different students.

Test out the best drills that worked the best, throw away the drills that didn’t work as good, and I really just took that mindset that I’m going to test this out, and I’m going to see which drills help players to increase their speed as much as possible and I’m going to discard the ones that don’t work.

I’m not going to have any bias toward this, I’m just going to see what works and keep on finding the best drills that work the most.

As I did that over the years, I really found the best of the best drills, and that’s what’s turned into now what I call my 20-Minute Distance Fix.

The reason it’s called the 20-Minute Distance Fix, as I alluded to earlier, just in the first 20 minutes, the very first drill that I give in this course, you can add 7 miles an hour, or 17 yards, that’s the average miles per hour and yards gained just in the first couple drills with the students that I had go through my pilot class.

Tom Hester: Hi, I’m Tom Hester for Louisville, Kentucky. I’m 71, I’m overweight, out of shape, and stiff as a board, but I love playing golf. So I signed up for the distance master class.

The very first lesson, serious distance in 20 minutes, my base of 80 jumped up to 89 and everything was straight down the middle. My accuracy got better. That’s like 20 yards, I’m really loving this course.

Clay: OK, so here’s what to do next. Go ahead and click on the Instruction tab, go to the 20-Minute Distance Fix and watch that very first video that teaches you how to gain serious distance just in your first 20 minutes.

Now once you’ve done that, make sure you print out those drills, take them with you, write the drills down, however you want to take the drills. They’re right below the video, it lists them all out.

Take those with you to the range, and then finish just that one video, and you’ll be hooked. You’ll complete the rest of the course, and then once you do that, now you’ll have a lot more speed.

You can jump back over to the Stable Fluid Spine, work on the number one fundamental, and start building that consistency.

Over the next just few weeks, you can really turn around your game, be hitting a lot farther, having a lot more fun, and it’s going to be fantastic. So I can’t wait to work with you to get more distance. Let’s go ahead and get started right now.