Why You Need This:

Do you ever feel like you are all arms in the golf swing? You feel like you could get some more swing speed, but you aren’t sure how.

In this video, we have a great drill to build golf swing speed, all in the comfort of your living room. Can you do the Wall Drill?

What's Covered: How to load the body in the takeaway with the wall drill.

Golf Pros Featured:

Instructors Featured: Clay Ballard    

Video Duration: 5:55

Video Transcription:

All right you guys, today I have a great drill for you talking about how to get this good, powerful shoulder turn.

You can do it anywhere that there’s a wall, and it’s really going to teach you how to stretch out the obliques, really, really crucial to getting power.

Stretch the obliques, load up the shoulders properly as we go on back, and it’s really going to help your power and get you to boost up your yardage with your drives, your irons, every full swing that you make.

So here’s a couple things before I start here that I want to kind of draw a note to that can really get you off track.

You may hear these a lot, a lot of times other instructors will tell you that you want to go ahead and set your wrists early.

That’s one of the worst things that you can do when trying to load your shoulders in the backswing, because that initiates my swing with my arms.

It’s very, very easy just to pick my club up with my arms, and not get a good full shoulder term when I do that, and when I’m trying to pick up and set the wrists early.

So I definitely don’t want to do that. Also know an awful lot of other instruction out there doesn’t really tell you which parts of your body you’re going to be using.

In this video we’re going to focus in on how to properly use the obliques, and how to use both the right and left shoulder to really load that up, and to boost your power.

So if you’re ready to learn the wall drill to get you a better turn, more powerful swing, let’s go ahead and get started.

OK, so in the wall drill we’re going to do the first few feet of the swing.

If you’ve watched my other videos on the power turn, you know that the first few feet is the most crucial in order to load those shoulders.

So let’s go ahead and get started. How we’re doing to do this first is we’re going to put both hip pockets, both pant pockets on the back of our pants, right against any wall.

I’m going to keep them there throughout the entire takeaway. What this is going to force me to do is to really load my obliques and that’s key.

As I mentioned, you have to use your obliques and your midsection, those are the muscles that run up the side of your midsection here.

If you can stretch those out, you’re going to need to do that to get power in the downswing.

So what we’re going to do is we’re going to do our takeaway motion here, and I’m not going to take my left hip off the wall.

Both pant pockets are going to remain on the wall.

If I do this correctly, you can see as I turn back, now I’m really forced to use my obliques to turn and I can feel a really good stretch in my obliques as I’m going to the end of the takeaway here.

Now the next thing I want you to focus in on is how to properly use the shoulders.

That’s kind of the whole point of it here, we’re trying to get a good shoulder turn.

There’s two motions that you can really key in on, the first one is retraction of the right shoulder.

So if we’re looking at my address here, if we’re looking from the side, pulling this right shoulder back is what’s called retraction.

My shoulder’s moving back behind my body.

My shoulder socket is actually moving behind in relationship to the shoulder itself, and my left shoulder is doing protraction which moves the left shoulder forward.

When I put both of these together, there’s really going to rotate my shoulders, and that’s very, very crucial when we’re doing this.

So when I do this properly, again, both pant pockets against the wall, using the obliques, using retraction of the right shoulder, protection in the left shoulder, and that’s really going to allow me to load up and get a big shoulder turn very early in the takeaway.

Now a few key checkpoints to make sure that you’re doing this correct. I want to make sure that I’m not setting the wrist early as I mentioned.

If I set my wrist early, I’m just going to pick the club up, as you can see how my shoulders are not turning here.

I want to make sure that I’m keeping the club very little wrist set, keeping very little wrist set in the club all the way back.

My wrists are going to be nice and soft, and if I do this correctly, my club’s going to be about pocket height as my club’s parallel to the ground here.

So it should be in this zone. An inch either way is going to be OK.

Another key checkpoint for this, is I want my arms to be relaxed, and I don’t want my right arm to really be bending behind my body.

So if I do this incorrectly, if I let my right arm bend, well now I’m just picking the club up with my arms, you can see how little my shoulders are rotating as I’m doing this, it also tends to get the club sucked in behind your body, which is also another negative side effect of this.

So if I do this properly, again, using my obliques, using my shoulders, my arms aren’t pulling the club back, and they’re going to stay pretty relaxed and pretty straight as I’m doing the end of this takeaway.

So focus on those four key checkpoints, both pockets against the wall.

I’m making sure that I’m retracting this shoulder, protracting my left shoulder, both arms are going to be nice and straight, and my club’s going to be about pocket height.

I’m going to do a good 100 repetitions of this, and once I’m done with that, we’re going to go ahead and do the second part of the drill where we take it all the way to the top and it’s going to feel really good to you guys.

All right, so once we’ve done 100 repetitions on the wall, really checking those, going slow, making sure we’re getting a good full turn, now what we’re going to do is we’re going to allow the hips to rotate, to take us all the way to the top of the swing.

So if you’re indoors, you have low ceilings, you go ahead and grab a club, choke up on the club, nothing wrong with that, we don’t actually need to be hitting a ball or anything yet.

If you have plenty of room, go ahead and just take your normal setup.

From here, as I’m doing my full repetitions to the top, I’m simply going to move through the position that we were just working on.

So I’m going to get the exact same feelings, and then continue all the way to the top of the swing, and I want to go ahead and videotape myself.

Use your camera phone, use anything that you have, your iPad, anything that’s going to take a picture will be absolutely fine.

Just make sure your shoulders are rotating as you complete the top of your backswing, at least to 90°, preferably even a little bit more than that.

So I’m going to go ahead and try to recreate that same feeling as we go into the takeaway, as I continue to the top, all I’m going to do let my hips start to turn, and continue the feeling that I’m rotating both my right and left shoulder, and that will look something like this as I go to the top.

So you can see here, good full backswing, plenty of rotation, I should feel pretty tight in my midsection because those obliques are stretching.

After you’ve done this, you’ve checked on camera, go ahead and do 100 repetitions of that, going to the top, good full turn, and then you’re going to complete the swing all the way on through.

So once we’ve put it all together it’s going to look just like this, nice and easy, good balanced finish, another 100 repetitions of that, and then you’ll be done.

So 300 repetitions total, 100 against the wall, 100 to the top and pausing, and then 100 good, full swing, trying to get the exact same feelings that we had in the takeaway and the top of the backswing.

Good luck to you guys, work on that power turn, and you’re going to start hitting it farther.

I’ll see you guys soon.