Why You Need This:

“If you can’t stay in your posture…it actually has nothing to do with your posture and everything to do with your right elbow and your right wrist.”

This video will show you how to stay in your golf posture during your downswing. If you tend to stand up as you hit through the ball, it’s likely because of how you’re using your right arm and wrist. To fix this issue and hit the ball more solidly, this video provides you with several drills. You’ll learn:

• Why you naturally stand up to try to make solid contact
• How to get rid of the “right arm throw” so you can stay in your posture
• Drills to help you re-train your body
• How a low launch angle improves wedge accuracy, distance, and consistency

Think of your golf swing like casting a fishing line. To get maximum distance, you don’t throw the rod forward with brute force. You use a smooth motion, bending the rod to store energy and then releasing it at the right moment.  You achieve this with leverage, not muscle.  Similarly, a powerful golf swing isn’t about violently throwing your arms at the ball.  The real power comes from proper body rotation and a low launch angle, giving you effortless accuracy and distance, especially with wedge shots.

What's Covered: See: " Perfect Practice Plan" Sheet In " Practice Keys" Section of This Page

Golf Pros Featured:

Instructors Featured: Clay Ballard    

Video Duration: 21:37

Video Transcription:

Clay: It's absolutely fantastic to have you here today, and I'm going to talk about how if you can't stay in your posture, if you're standing up in your downswing out of your posture, it actually has nothing to do with your posture and everything to do with your right elbow and your right wrist. And once I show you this trick, it's going to be easy to stay in your posture.

Now first, to prove that it's actually your right arm and not your ability to stay in your posture, let me show you how anyone can stay in their posture in just a couple of seconds. Now, what I want you to do is take your club and grip all the way up until your thumb and your index finger are on the steel part of the shaft.

So basically just grip up on your club about eight inches or so. My left hand, the tips of my index fingers are on the steel and I take my right hand, it's going to be completely on the metal of the shaft. So basically what I've done here is I made a little tiny short club. If you got a little tiny junior club, you can do the same thing, but I recommend using a club that you could hit with.

This is a sand wedge. You can do the same thing. I recommend getting a sand wedge, but it works with. Any club, non iron, uh, gap wedge, sand wedge, any of that. I'm going to talk about a little trick here later to get your ball flight right. So if you use a 56, everything's going to match up. Now here, as I choke down, I'm going to set up to this ball and I'm way bent over.

Now, when I do this drill and I ask somebody to hit a golf ball, I've yet to see anyone that does this, stands up out of their posture and completely misses that golf ball. What most people will do is they'll just hit a little easy shot. Now you're not going to hit it very far doing that, but you'll stay down in your posture.

Now on a little side note, you'll notice that when you're doing this, you can only stay in your posture to about right here in your follow through. So you hit the ball, you're there. You really can't go any farther than that. You're going to notice that you have to stand up out of your posture in the follow through.

And that's correct. What you should be doing when you hit a shot, let's say I stay way down in my posture. As I come on through the shot, I'm going to stand straight up or basically straight up as though I was talking to you. And instead of my spine being completely vertical like this, it's going to be just slightly tilted to the right to where my eyes would be kind of slightly outside my toes.

If I'm following through, that's how you should do it. Don't try to overdo it and stay way down here into the fall through your arms are going to collapse. It's going to be uncomfortable. You might strain your back a little bit, so don't overdo it. Do what's comfortable. If it doesn't feel good to you, just do a little bit less.

You don't have to stay that much in your posture to hit fantastic shots, but hit a few like that. And you'll notice immediately, like my spine angle is way down here. So that shows that you're able to be down there. It's showing that something else is keeping you from doing that. Now with the right arm in a good golf swing.

We all know that we're going to tuck our elbow kind of halfway in the downswing. That elbow is going to be bent. So the angle between my upper arm and my forearm is going to be pretty sharp. Not quite 90 degrees, but fairly sharp there. It's going to be nowhere near this. If I was to throw that right arm or straighten that right arm out, we get the dreaded cast, which is going to be this motion.

The elbow pops away from the body. and now all of a sudden I'm casting this club and losing all my lag. So we all know we need to tuck that elbow. We know that we need to have the right wrist back. So what I mean by that is if this is a neutral right wrist, flexion would be toward my body. Extension would be back here like this.

That's lag. I want to have this angle of lag. So elbow tucked, lag in the downswing. Now the problem is after you get in that position, and maybe if you're struggling to get in that position and have a lot of lag, It's because you feel like you get the power in the swing by releasing the right arm or throwing the right arm.

And when I throw the right arm, it makes the club really long. See if I'm lagging here, like I just showed, and I come to impact in that great in posture position. Well, if I stood up here, look how close the club head is to my body. Very close. If I throw this right arm and this right wrist. Now the right arm straight, the right wrist is flat.

Look how much farther away from me that club it is. It's another foot or more away from my body. This is great impact. This is throwing the club casting. So when I'm farther away from it, well, what do I have to do? I have to stand up. out of my posture to be able to hit the ball solid. If I stayed in my posture and threw my right arm, I'd bury the club into the ground so deep I would, I'd dig a giant hole that you could bury a squirrel in.

I mean, this thing would be really, really deep. You're not going to do that. Nobody's ever going to do that. So you naturally, to accommodate the right arm throwing, stand up out of your posture. When you try to stay in your posture, it never works because that right arm says, I got to throw to get the speed and it's going to win out.

What we have to do is train the body to get rid of that right arm throw, stay in the posture, and then it's going to flight this shot down. So let's go through a series of drills that are going to help you with that. And it's going to start out with that same drill that I did first. So we're going to choke up on the shaft until the index finger and the thumb are on the steel.

Right hand is completely on the metal there. And then I want you to just hit a few shots and get nice and comfortable with this to get the feel of what it's like to stay in your posture. Like I said, you're only going to be able to make a half backswing and stay down there. If you want to make a full swing coming through, then you're going to have to go ahead and let your body stand up something like that and make a full finish.

Now there, I'm only hitting these shots 63 yards. You can hit 30, 40 yards. You don't have to do hard at all. Just get used to what your body feels like when you're down there. Now, when I get down there, I'm not going to, this is way exaggerated. We're going to get the right amount here in a minute, but when I stay in my posture, What you'll notice is the only way to keep from throwing that club in the ground is to let my body rotate open and let my club shaft lean forward.

So what pros are doing is they're taking the natural loft of this club and they're de lofting it, meaning that the shaft, instead of being vertical at impact, is leaning forward. On average, the loft of a sand wedge, a 56 degree wedge, for a pro at impact is going to be closer to 38 to 40 degrees. So they're taking 16 to 18 degrees of loft off me.

And that club shaft is leaned forward quite a bit like that. Now that's universal. And in fact, after doing a lot of research and working with pros, I found that nearly every single professional golfer, every single great player gets their wedges to launch under 30 degrees. And it's like magic when you get under that 30 degree number.

because I get my hands in front enough to where my hands are leading the way. My contact is very consistent because the club's just trailing my hands. I de loft the club so now it flights down and the wind doesn't really mess it up. My distance is not only going to be much better with my wedges but it's going to be much more consistent because I don't get those balls that roll up the face and kind of die out of the air and you just feel like wedge after wedge after wedge is really easy to Now here's a trick that I found.

that makes this easy to train. All right. So I wanted to stop the video for one second while I was editing this, the first prototype of what I call the brick came in. It's going to be perfect for the drill that I'm going to show you. Now, all you're going to do is you're going to stick this in the wedge launch angle hole on here.

And we're going to take it two alignment sticks forward and the back of the brick goes at the end of the alignment stick with the hole for the wedge launch on this side, the ball side of it. You go ahead and stick this in there and it is the perfect thing to work on what we're about to go over here in a second.

And if you want to get yours, just scroll down below this video, there'll be a button to where you can get your own brick. And I can't wait to show you the other stuff it does too. This device also shows you how to shallow out the club. It shows you how to get ball then turf contact. It shows you so many things that are going to get you a lot better.

And I'll share those with you in future videos. All right, so let's jump back into it. So if I'm going to stay in my posture, it goes hand in hand. I got to get rid of the right arm throw. I've got to stay down in my posture and I've got to get shaft lean and get that low launching 30 degrees. So essentially, if I'm getting that 30 degrees launch, And the ball is going nice and straight.

I'm not, like, snap hooking it to get it to launch lower, but I'm hitting it nice and straight. That's going to tell me that I'm in my posture. So what you can do is you take an alignment stick. We have a little setup here where there's a wooden block, a flag holder, so you can adjust that. And then I put an alignment stick in this.

Quinton Patterson, one of the instructors that works with me, did this one. Very easy if you want to practice at home. If you're on the range, all you need is the alignment stick. I like to put a pool noodle on it. So when you hit the stick, cause you're going to, if you're practicing this the right way, it doesn't break over time.

But all I'm going to do here is I'm going to set up this, start this out where my ball would be. So let's say I'm going to hit from there. And if I take whatever length of stick I have, if I rotate it forward twice and then stand it up, the tip of the stick is going to be about 30 degrees. Now it's going to be perfect if you're using alignment stick outside, because once you stick it into the ground, four, four inches or so.

It's going to be exactly 30 degrees, but here it's going to be a little bit off of that. That's okay. I know the math people out there are going nuts right now. They're saying that's not 30 degrees. They're doing the math. They're figuring it out. It doesn't have to be that precise. This will be slightly over 30 degrees.

We're going to be hitting down on this to try to hit this noodle. So you'll be under 30 degrees if you do what I'm saying here. So I'm going to take this forward once that gets me to there. I'm going to go ahead and rotate it forward again. Just pass these golf balls. And I know if I'm right here with this noodle, if I hit the tip of this, so my ball launches hits the tip of this, that's about 30 degrees, maybe slightly above it, this measurement, anything below that's going to be under 30 degrees, which is like the golden, you get in that zone, you're going to be hitting it amazing.

All right. So now we have a set up automatic feedback. If I can hit that sticker lower on a straight shot, I know I'm staying in my posture. I know I'm getting the shaft lean. You're gonna hit some great shots. Step number one, choke up on the steel shaft and just hit a few shots here. I don't care if I hit the stick.

I'm just working on staying in my posture. I don't care what I'm doing with my swing yet at all. So there I hit a little to the right of the stick, but it would have hit the stick. I could see as I rotated through, it would have hit that stick height wise. I'm going to do the same thing. And you're just going to do a few of those same thing.

I was just a little right of it, but it was probably launching around here. And in fact, when I look on my flight scope, it tells me my vertical launch angle was 20. 4 degrees. Remember, we just want to be below 30, 27, 28 is ideal. 20 would be over cooking it a little bit, but again, I want to over exaggerate.

I want to get way down there at first. Now, once I get comfortable staying down in my posture, what I want to do is instead of choking up, I want to use my normal grip. So what I'm going to do first, I'm going to go ahead and pause and impact with my choked up grip. I'm going to feel, where is my body, where does my chest feel?

I really like to feel like my shirt buttons, so instead of facing out parallel with the ground if I'm standing straight up and down, they're down toward the ground. So I'll notice when I'm here, my eyes are like perpendicular to the ground, my shirt buttons feel like they're down to the ground, and I'm way down there.

Now I'm going to get that feeling and I'm going to hold it for a few seconds. And then I'm going to go back up to my normal posture, take a normal grip. And I'm going to try to recreate the feeling that I just had at impact. Now notice when I do this, if I throw that right arm at all, that thing's getting buried in the ground.

In fact, you may chunk a few at first until you get comfortable with this. So I'm going to get like way down there and I'll have to get a ton of shaft lean. Too much. This is way too much, but we're going to exaggerate. When I get a lot of that shaft lean now, that ball is going to launch really low. So we see it's halfway down the stick.

That one launched at 18 degrees, right? Way too low. Way over exaggerated. But that's exactly what I'm gonna do. So I'm gonna choke up, get my posture. I'm going to feel like I go to impact, get the feeling in my body. Then I'm going to go back to my normal posture, normal grip. I'm going to try to swing and feel like I get in the same position that I was just in with a short club.

There we go. That was absolutely fantastic. 22. 6 degrees launch. It's a little too low, but nice, easy swing. I only swung 70 miles an hour. It went 104 yards off the sand wedge. Let me go ahead and swing one a little, a little harder. And I'll show you just how awesome this is. When I start to swing a little harder, if I de loft it like that, I'm going to start to get 110, 120 yards with the sand wedge.

But notice I'm not swinging at it hard. I'm letting the loft and the correct technique get this ball to go those distances. I'm not trying to do it by muscling it. So there's my little drill. I'm feeling way down by choking up on the shaft. I get that feeling. I take my normal grip and try to recreate the same thing.

122 yard sand wedge, 23. 8 launch. Again, that's overcooked a little bit. If I go over to my computer, I'll show you a little screenshot here. My dynamic loft, meaning the loft that was on my club at impact, there was a 56 degree wedge. If I look at my last one, they're 39 degrees. So I'm over cooking a 40, 41 degrees would be fine.

Anywhere in that ballpark would be great. Again, you're probably not going to have a $20,000 launch monitor laying around. Just look at your ball as it goes past the stick and see if it's below the tip of the stick and you're doing it right. I'm going to scoot my stick over so I'll be hitting it. So I get everything lined up.

There's a couple more tricks I want to go over here that are going to really help you to get this down. Now, number one, you'll notice when I'm doing this, right? That's a lot of shaft lean. I found for most players, it's difficult to set up with the club straight up and down like this, and then at impact, get way more shaft lean.

I like to go ahead and have the shaft leaning forward, almost where it's laying on my left leg at address. I found it just works better for players. When you take your grip, go ahead and get the club shaft where your hand is in front of your left leg at address. You kind of pre build in some of that shaft lane.

Then when you swing, got my stick that time, right? So I know it was slow enough, sure enough, 21 degrees loft, and that was 114 yards. If it hadn't whacked into the stick there. So pre setting that shaft lean helps a lot. Another thing is if I'm closer to the ball, it's easier to get that shaft lean. It's easier to stay in my posture.

So as I scoot up, let's do this. Okay. Let's imagine I'm way too close to it and I'm down in my posture. Well, the only way to get to that golf ball, I can't really even get to the golf ball here. I'd have to lean the shaft way in front. That's the only way I could even get my hands to move through impact.

So I could still hit this golf ball being this close. If I had a ton of shaft lean, well, as I back up, so we'll do a split view. Notice when my feet back up from this camera angle and my shaft from this camera angle is I back up. Look how that shaft has to straighten out. And if I get farther enough away, it has to be straight up and down to be able to even reach the ball.

So get a little bit closer, a little drill there that I like to do. Set the club up to where it's just a little bit toe up. So lower the shaft a little bit, put it on the left leg. And that's about how far I want you to be away from the ball at address. When you bend forward, your hands are going to bring that club just barely off the left leg.

And now you've done it correctly. So ball in the middle of stance. And do that now, that's gonna help you to really exaggerate. Now finally, weight. This is so crucial. You could do all these other things, right? But if you don't get this right, you're gonna revert back to old habits. If my weight goes on my toes, what does my upper body have to do to stop falling over?

So imagine I'm in my posture and I put my weight on my toes. Well, all of a sudden I'm gonna fall over this way. So what that means is. When my weight goes to my toes, my upper body has to counter balance that by going back or standing up. So weight toward toes, I have to stand up or I fall over weight toward heels.

So if I'm going back, especially to my face on here, I'm going to go to my left heel outside of my left heel. So I'm going to feel like I'm putting pressure in these shots into the heel and on the lead side. So I feel like I'm getting my weight to the left as I'm coming through there. Well, as I do that, now notice I can go, if I go heel, I can really get in my posture and be balanced.

If I had my weight on my heels like this and I stood up, I'd fall backwards the other way. So the weight has to be in the heels. Putting it all together now. We're going to grip up on this short shaft, make a few swings. Then I'm going to go hit a few shots. Then I'm going to go to address, I'm going to feel a good impact.

What does it feel like in my body? I'm going to go back to address and I'm going to try to recreate that feeling I just had of impact. I'm going to be fairly close to it, shaft on my left leg, weight on my heels, and that's going to allow me. And again, you can get this shaft a little bit lower. I don't want to have the shaft very vertical like this and my feet on it.

Notice my, my feet are about, let's call it 14 inches or so from the ball. So from the ball to my toes is about 13, 14 inches. forward. And now I feel like I'm going to get on my heels, get a lot of shaft lean. And again, anything under that 30 degrees is going to pretty much be exactly what I want.

25. 9 degrees. Very well struck shot 119 yards with a sand wedge. And it's not like I'm swinging superhuman speeds to get this roughly 120 yard sand wedge. I'm only swinging 81. 9 miles an hour. Pretty typical for what a tour player would be doing with a sand wedge. You'll be surprised even very low speeds.

We'll do one more little trick here. I'll show you. Even if I swing super slow, watch how far this ball goes when I get the correct impact, right? Little half follow through half swing. That's a 97 yarder with a sand wedge, 170 yards after it rolled out a little bit. And it's actually not going to roll out as much when you do this because it's going to get more spin on it.

I had 70 miles an hour club head speed. Notice how I'm only taking it halfway back and halfway through and I'm getting that 100 yards with a wedge. All right, so this is the drill recap for the first outdoor drill of the 20 minute posture fix. The first thing we're going to do is 15 reps. We're going to choke up until the thumb of our left hand is on the steel of the shaft all the way down here at the bottom of the grip.

The entire right hand will be on the steel of the shaft. Then from there, we're going to really exaggerate being in our posture. We're going to make a little half backswing, half follow through. Say hitting any wedge in your bag, sand wedge, lob wedge, gap wedge, doesn't matter. We're just going to hit it about 30 to 60 yards.

So you're going to do 15 reps. You have to hit the ball. If you thin it, you chunk it, you do anything like that. Maybe you're not used to the motion. Make sure that you hit 15 fairly decent shots. We're ready to move on to step number two. All right, so step number two, we're going to do another 15 reps, choking up, left thumb on the steel, just like last time.

We're going to set up the brick. We're going to put this foam pool noodle with alignment stick under the wedge launch setting. We're going to do another 15 reps where we hit shots 30 to 60 yards, a little half backswing, half follow through. And we're just going to make sure that when we're hitting these, they're launching under the tip of this stick or under 30 degrees.

Now, a couple of quick tips with this. Make sure when you're doing this that you go ahead and let your hips open up. That'll allow you to get your hands in front. to get the shaft and the club de lofting to launch under that 30 degrees. Now we're ready for the third part of these drills. We're going to do in these, for each rep, we're going to do 15 reps in total.

There's two parts to each rep. One is a pausing rep, and then one is a little half swing. First, let's do the first part, the pausing rep. Choke up with your left, left thumb on the steel, just like we did on the last two drills. We're going to go down to impact. My club needs to be touching the ground. And really exaggerating me being in my posture, just like we've been working on.

Then from there, I'm going to stand up. I'm going to rest my club on my left leg to get my spacing. I may feel a little closer to the ball than I'm usually feeling. I'm going to take my normal grip now. So instead of being choked up way here, I'm going to just use my normal grip. I'm going to have the same key feelings.

So my hips are opening, my hands are in front. I recommend for these drills, you set up with your. address position to where your hands are leaning forward in front of your left leg to go ahead and recreate that promoting you staying in your posture. As you're doing this, now that we have our normal grip, you're going to notice that if I'm going to recreate that same feeling I had on those exaggerated choked up drills, my right arm's really going to have to be bent.

My right elbow is almost going to be touching my side as I'm doing this, and my weight really needs to be on my heels to have space to hit this golf ball. So from there, all I'm going to do is another 15 reps, one pausing rep to fill the exaggerated position, one little half swing, feeling those same little tips that I mentioned there.

And if you're lucky enough to hit it well, you can knock the little stick out of there and make sure that you're launching it nice and low. So another 15 reps, go slow on this. These are just little half swings. We'll build it a little faster as we go through the drills, start nice and easy and slow.

You're just trying to get the feeling here.