Why You Need This: Today, you'll discover "'THE Drill' For a Perfect Takeaway & Open Hips"

In today's lesson...

Discover a rarely discussed focus for your takeaway that can set your downswing up for success...

...and help you avoid the common distance-crushing move that I see in WAY too many recreational player swings.

Getting your swing off to the right start can be crucial for getting into the right impact position.

 

 

 

 

Golf Pros Featured:

Instructors Featured: Clay Ballard    

Video Duration: 9:34

Video Transcription:

If you've had trouble with your takeaway, most likely what's going on is we're picking it up with our hands and wrists and that club gets stuck to the inside. Well, I found most people are so focused on the club head that they just can't feel exactly what's going on. So even when they try to keep the club head out, they don't have any feedback knowing what to do to actually fix it.

So the butt into the club, if you think of it a little bit differently, is, I have this club on plane. Or in line, the butt in the club's gonna be pointing more toward my body all the way until parallel to the ground and then it's gonna start to come up if I suck the club back inside. As soon as that club head goes in, the butt in the club starts pointing out to the right.

So if you can imagine a laser shooting outta the butt in this club, as soon as I get the club to inside that's pointing over there and it would be nowhere near the edge of my body or the left side of my body. Well, there's a great little feedback drill you can do with something I almost guarantee you have laying around somewhere, which is alignment stick.

I'm gonna take this and put it against my grip, and I'd like for it to stick out at least a good three feet. That way you can do a variety of drills that we're talking about here. So the first one is gonna be, as I do my takeaway. Now, as soon as I bring it to the inside, you see how that comes off my body and my left leg.

I'm gonna work on feeling like I get that to stay against my body as I'm all the way in the back swing until my club's about parallel. So again, if we look at it from this angle, if I do my takeaway, if that club goes inside, it pops off if I do this correctly. It stays against my left leg here all the way until the club's about parallel with the ground, and then it's gonna start to come off my, my body.

It also helps to shallow it out, which we'll get to here in a second. Uh, but first, let's take care of the takeaway piece. Now, most of the time when you're bringing the club to inside, it has to do with your weight shift and picking it up too early with my hands and arms without shifting my weight, without turning my body.

So what I wanna do first is I don't wanna just yank it back with my hands and arms. I've picked everything up with my wrist here I have, it rotated my body. You're not gonna be able to hit it outside of your shadow if you do it that way. So that's one piece that's wrong, or the one piece that could be improved there.

And number two, when I pick it up this fast, it doesn't gimme time to get that weight shift to the right and then back through the golf ball. If you've been struggling with your weight shift, that's one of the root causes there is things are just happening too fast. So we're gonna solve this. Put this where it's against your left hip.

So if we're looking at it set up. It should look just like that. Touching my left hip. I should have enough pressure where I can feel it there. And then from here, the first move is gonna be a little weight shift to the right, and then I start my takeaway. So it's a little weight shift. I feel some pressure on the inside of my foot, and then I start to move the club.

I don't move the club back with my hands and arms and then start my weight shift. That's way too late. When you look at the best players in the world and you test them on pressure plates, that shift to the right happens almost before the swing even starts. So I'm gonna get a little pressure on the inside of my right foot, and then from there, instead of letting this club slide down or this alignment stick slide down my left leg, I'm gonna feel like it stays up by my hip until my hands are about waist high.

Now the reason I say that is cause I wanna be nice and wide and get that rotation from my shoulders. If I'm picking this club up and getting it to set very early like this, then I don't rotate my shoulders at all. So this is me taking it back all hands and wrist. No shoulder or body rotation at all.

This is me feeling like it stays against my hip as I go back wide. So you shouldn't feel this slide down your leg right away. Now, once I get to parallel and it's still touching around the top of my hip, then it's gonna go ahead and set to the top of the swing. So weight shift early to the right. Feel like my hands are nice and wide as I'm going back and my shoulders are rotating what feels like almost 90 degrees by the time my hands are parallel with the ground.

And if you wanna really perfect this, Get the toe of the club. Instead of it being open this way or almost fanning open, you wanna feel like it's straight up and down, or even a little bit closed is totally fine. If I have it open, I'm just gonna be trying to play catch up with the face, the entire downswing.

So once I've perfected that little weight shift nice and wide, then I'm gonna go ahead and go to the top of the swing. And as I start down, if I wanna shallow it out, I gotta get the butt into that club or this alignment stick pointing toward the golf ball or outside the golf ball. Never inside the golf ball like this, we're gonna be steep.

And man, it's just gonna throw off everything in the downswing. So now here I am, I'm in my downswing. I have the butt in the club pointing toward the ball. And again, another checkpoint here is don't get your hands outside like this. I wanna feel like my hands are inside or as deep as they can possibly be.

So I'm coming from the inside. And then from there I can rotate and still hit a nice draw if my hands get out here, even if my club is pointing toward the golf ball. I'm in a bad position, I'm gonna be chopping down over top of it and it's simply not gonna work. So once I shallow it out, I get my hands from the inside, lemme give you a couple checkpoints for rotating through the shot.

Now I wanna be able to hit little shots like this, doing this little drill. So I'm gonna halfway back, get the button toward it, and then as I come through, I wanna feel like there's some space between this alignment stick in my body so I come through. I don't want it to whack into my body. If it does, that means that I'm casting or flipping the club, and that's gonna make it smack into there.

If you do this the right way and you get it from the inside, then you can rotate through and you'll notice that there's a little bit of a gap, or if it hits your body, it won't smack into it hard, it'll just barely fill it in your ribs. If you feel it smacking in your ribs, slow it down, get it going at a really smooth, slow pace, and then we'll build it up from there.

So let me go ahead and start out exactly how I do this. Against my left hip, I'm gonna start with some little mini shots, so against the left leg to here, and then I'm just coming back and through and hitting some little, you know, 10, 15 yard shots to get the feel for this. There we go. Really nice and solid.

Dead straight. That was a eight iron, I believe I have here. Yeah, eight iron and it went 60 yards. That's gonna feel like a chip shot with an eight iron. That was very, very short, but I hit my checkpoints. I kept it against my leg. The alignment stick against my leg on the way back. I kept it from smacking into my side as I came through, and then I'm gonna build up to say, an 80 yard shot or a hundred yard shot.

And then eventually I'm gonna get to about three quarter shots. With this drill, you'll never be able to make a full swing speed, or it will start smacking into your body just from the forces that go into the club when it's at full speed. But this is a great little drill all the way up to little half shots.

So let's go a little bit farther here.

And that one just left it a little bit open. And that's the tendency, cause you're trying to lead this shaft ahead, sometimes easy to get the head open, but hit that one about 108 yards. Let me give you, that's a great time to talk about that. So what I don't want you to do here, if you're doing this correctly, is I don't want you to feel like, oh, I'm gonna keep this away from my body and just drag the club face open as I'm coming through.

I want you to feel like as you come through, you're letting it get Shaf lane, but you're squaring up that face. So pause it impact for me here and make sure that the leading edge of the club is square to the ball and not open like this. And the stick is still in front of your body. And that way you'll know you're doing it correctly.

So I'm gonna go ahead and exaggerate here. Get another nice little draw. Let's give it a whirl. There we go. So started a little bit to the right, but you can see that one's starting to draw back. That just means I had my path inside out and had the face releasing like I was supposed to. So that one, 116 yards, that's about all I want you to go with an eight iron, middle iron, um, and then just gradually build it up to there.

So this is a great one. I find if you can hit a nice little tight draw on there, it really helps you to accomplish almost everything you're wanting to do. You get lag, you get Shaf lane, you get a better takeaway, you get better rotation of your body coming through there. And as long as you can get that ball starting a little bit to the right, starting to draw back.

Then, I mean, you can't do this drill enough really. Let's do one more. I'll exaggerate that draw. So again, I'm feeling like that face is closing on down. Let's give it a whirl here. We'll half swing. There we go. And that was a nice tight draw, really exaggerated on that time. And if you can do it that way and get that ball turning over from right to left, this is a fantastic drill.

You're gonna love it. Now there is one more piece of this you see. A lot of times we don't have the correct grip to be able to scrap that face and hit a draw like we talked about. And like I said, it's so common when you're trying to get this stick away from your body to leave the face open. So you wanna get lag, you wanna get shaft lean, but the face isn't cooperating with you when you're doing that.

Well, I found that everybody has their own natural wrist position. It allows them to square the face up. And most people are taught to take their grip at a dress, which is the totally wrong way to do it, because that's not where we hit the golf ball. We hit the golf ball with a totally different position at impact, and if we don't have the right grip for impact, thingss gonna be tough.

So I go over this in the 20 minute Shallowing Fix course. There's a few separate drills you do in there. You can do 'em all in one single rain session, and I promise you, you're gonna hit the most solid shots of your life and shallow it out after just one single rain session. So I can't wait to show it to you.

I can't wait for you to find your natural wrist position. And make things a lot easier. So if you're a member of Top Speed Golf, go ahead and head over to the instruction tab, top Speed Golf System and the 20 minute showering fix there. Uh, you can find that entire course, and I can't wait to share with you the secrets.

It's just gonna make things so much more fun when you go out to play golf. Let's go and get started right now.