Why You Need This:

Have you ever wanted to know how to hit a dead solid golf shot?

I don’t mean a good golf shot, or even a great golf shot, but the quality that Tiger Woods, Rory Mcilroy, or Ben Hogan hit at their absolute best?

In this video I break down the 7 factors that allow you to hit the most pure golf shots you have ever seen. If you master these, you master golf!

What's Covered: The 7 Factors For A Perfect Golf Shot

Golf Pros Featured:

Instructors Featured: Clay Ballard    

Video Duration: 49:47

Video Transcription:

Hi guys, and welcome back to Top Speed Golf. In today’s video it’s going to be a little different than what we normally do.

Normally in a video I try to break it down, give you just the key concepts, keep the videos relatively short that we can cut to the chase, get right to what we’re doing, and then immediately do some drills so we can take some action on this.

In today’s video I’ve been trying to do this big series on dead solid contact, so where does really good ball striking come from?

If we take Ben Hogan, if we take Adam Scott, if we take Tiger Wood, Rory McIlroy, Jason Day, whoever you like, whoever your favorite player is, there’s an actual science for how they contact the ball.

It’s dead solid, it’s really compressed, hard-hit shots. We can teach that, and in the day we live in now we can measure these types of things, and I can tell you how you can hit just like those players, and what the actually did as they’re contacting the ball, what impact looked like, how they get that great sound.

Well there’s seven factors of this, and each one of those factors we can do a lot of different drills and things in there. So I have this gigantic series I’ve been planning on making, I’ve been putting off for the last couple months because it takes a lot of time, it takes weeks for me to make a series like that.

So I figured why don’t I do something a little bit different, just turn on the camera, go through the whole thing, we’re going to have kind of a longer video here today, pretty long video, and I’m going to break it down piece by piece, let’s go through this entire thing in one video, that way I can get the information to you guys as soon as possible.

So this video’s probably, just a guess it’s going to be somewhere between and hour and two hours long. We’re going to break down those seven factors, I’m going to go over each piece of the body.

I’m going to talk exactly how it happens, how your club comes through contact, and it’s a little bit of a different format, so I wanted to warn you, it may not be for everybody out there.

If you’re looking for quick tip that you can take to the course, this is not going to be the video for you.

But tons and tons of good information, we’re going to have hundreds of pieces of information in this that are really going to help you to improve your contact and get that great ball striking.

So, without any more talking, let’s go ahead and get started.

All right, so the first thing we’ll do let’s go over very briefly what are the seven factors, then we’ll dive into each of the seven factors and break them down piece by piece.

Number one is going to be speed. How hard I hit this golf ball, so doesn’t matter if I’m hitting a pitching wedge, or a driver, if I want to hit this ball really hard I want to really compress this golf ball.

The faster my club is moving into this golf ball, the more speed that I have, the more compression I’m going to get. So think of it this way.

Let’s imagine I have this golf ball here, and I’m swinging this 6 iron, and I come down and I’m swinging say 30 miles an hour, pretty soft swing, that would probably only hit the ball, I don’t know, maybe 60-70 yards, something like that.

It’s going to compress against the face just a little bit with that kind of swing speed. Now if I ramp that up to 90 miles an hour, getting close to what you’d see on the PGA Tour, low 90s, I’m going to be compressing that ball even harder.

Now if I was a long drive player and I’m swinging the 6 iron 100-and, I don’t know what they swing the 6 iron, probably 120 miles an hour or something crazy like that. Well, I could hit this 6 iron a heck of a long way, 220 or 230 yards, or however far a Jamie Sadlowski-type player would hit that.

So as my speed goes up, I can physically compress the golf ball more. If you go out and you watch long-drive hitters, when they really connect with one, they hit it really solid and really straight, the sound is amazing.

It’s like nothing you’ve ever heard before, because they’re actually putting more energy into that golf ball.

Now the rest of these factors when we get away from speed is how direct is that energy going into that golf ball. The more direct we can transfer all of the energy from the club into the golf ball, the more solid it’s going to be, the better the sound it’s going to be, and the more compressed it’s going to be overall.

So the next factor we’ll talk about here is the angle of attack. So as I’m swinging this club, it’s naturally going to come up, and it’s going to go down, and I should be taking a divot, nice shallow divot in front of the ball.

What angle is my club coming down into the ball? So if my club was coming directly level into the ball, I would have a 0° angle of attack, and I would transfer a lot of energy into this golf ball.

Now let’s imagine I’m coming over the top, and I have my over the top slice swing, and I’m coming this way across it. Well now all of a sudden this club is glancing on this ball.

So even if I’m swinging 120 miles an hour, this is going to be a glancing blow, I’m not going to transfer the energy from the club into the ball with a lot of efficiency.

If I’m swinging very level, I’m transferring more of that energy into it. Imagine a piston, a steel piston, and here’s the golf ball, and it’s going to fire directly into that golf ball.

I’m transferring that energy into there, but now all of a sudden let’s imagine that I did this with that piston, well I’m glancing across the golf ball, I’m not going to get as much energy in there.

Angle of attack, very, very important. So when you’re watching a really good player, you know those top-name players. Hogan, Scott, Tiger Woods, Rory McIlroy, if you look at their divots, they’re really, really thin, and we’ll get into that in more detail, but they’re really compressing the golf ball, hitting it very solidly, and angle of attack is a big piece of that.

Most mid and high handicap players, their angle of attack is way off, and I’m going to give you some great drills to work on that. So that’s the second piece.

The next one is going to be face angle. So when I come into this golf ball, if my face is pointed way over to the right and I’m swinging straight ahead, well again, I’m getting a glancing blow.

That golf ball, that club face is sliding across the ball and I’m not transferring that energy directly into the golf ball. That’s also going to cause a slice, a block to the right, we’ll get into percentages and all that kind of thing here later in the video too.

Then path relates directly with that. Usually when we’re talking about am I hitting a fade, am I hitting a draw, we’re talking about path, which means when my club contacts the ball, is my club moving right to left this way across the golf ball? That would be a left path, that direction.

Whereas my path moving inside out to the right across the golf ball, and path is only talking about that split second right when I’m contacting the golf ball, or if I’m looking at a radar, that split second right before I make contact with the golf ball, and what direction that’s going.

So again, face and path, the straighter I get those, the more this club is coming into contact directly straight with the golf ball, the more energy I get into the golf ball, the better it sounds, the more spin, all the stuff is going to be a lot better.

So that’s the fourth key there. The fifth one we’re going to talk about the loft on the face.

So again, if I have this face wide open like this, imagine open up a lob wedge, and I’m sliding underneath this ball, I could swing as fast as I want to swing, the ball’s not going to be very compressed, it’s going to slide on the face, it’s going to pop up in the air.

A lot of players are doing that. As I’m hitting this golf ball, I need to have compression by getting some forward shaft lean and de-lofting the club face.

A good rule of thumb, PGA Tour players are de-lofting – let’s say this is a pitching wedge of 45°, it’s not a pitching wedge, let’s actually grab the real pitching wedge here – 45° of loft coming out of this face.

They’re going to de-loft that about 30 percent of that loft, so from 45 to 30°. If you’re using a 3 iron with 21° loft, 30 percent of that would be not quite as much forward shaft lean when we’re going into the longer irons.

With a driver, we’ll get into a little more detail on that, but you’re not going to have much forward shaft lean with a driver, not very much loft on it.

So we have speed, we have angle of attack, we have face, we have path, we have the loft, and when I’m going to say loft I mean the actual lot that is on the face, which is called the dynamic loft.

So even if I have a number that’s written on this club that says this is 30°, if I turn it down to where it’s only 20° of loft, that’s the dynamic loft, or the actual loft that’s being delivered into the golf ball.

As we move forward from there, we’re talking about contact. So as I contact this ball, if I hit off the toe this club face is going to tend to twist open.

So let’s go ahead and get close to the camera here. If I hit this ball off the toe, my face is going to twist open and that’s going to actually spin the golf ball in the opposite direction, it’s what’s called a gear effect.

So if I hit it right on the dead center, sweet spot, center of mass of the club head itself, that’s going to give me the best contact, the most compression on the golf ball.

Then lastly, probably one of the most common mistakes that I see, is what is my lie angle. So this club is designed in a way to where if I swing this club and I make a really good swing, the sole of my club is going to be flush with the turf as it comes on through.

A lot of times if we get into early extension, which I see lots of players doing, we do kind of one of these things. Our hands raise up, and now all of a sudden you imagine that toe of the club kind of digging down into the ground, and now my toe’s going to be hitting before my heel as I’m swinging down.

The club face is going to twist, I’m going to have a tough time getting compression on it, and that plays into it.

So those seven factors, I’m going to give you drills, I’m going to break it down for you as much as I can.

So those seven factors are going to determine how good at golf you are. So if you’re going to be a world-class player, you’re going to be number one in the world, you’re going to do all seven of those factors pretty dag-gone close to perfect every single time.

Now there’s going to be ranges, obviously if we’re going to hit a ball that’s going to be high, it’s going to launch way up in the air, we’re going to try to get it to land soft on the green.

That’s going to be a little bit different on these factors than if we’re trying to hit like a low, stinger-type shot. Maybe you’re taking a long iron, trying to really hit a low, penetrating shot.

You’re obviously going to pay around with this, but if you’re talking about really, really good ball striking, you’re doing these seven things, you have complete control of all seven of these.

That’s what you’re looking at when you’re watching the best players in the world, they’re mastering these seven scientific factors.

So let’s go ahead and get started, let’s start with the very first one. Let’s do speed.

We’ll take the driver out here, let me grab a tee, that way it’s a little bit more realistic. There’s several places that speed comes from, and this is something that I talk about in a lot of detail in the Top Speed Golf System.

So I have a whole section, the very first one of the power turn, that’s one of the five major fundamentals in the golf swing. We also have lag, so our power turn is going to be how much we load up the bod going back, and how much we rotate the body coming through that creates an overall momentum.

We also have lag which is creating some angles with your forearms. You can see your forearms creating some angles, and then as I get into the straight line release, those angles are releasing and I'm letting that club whip through contact and to really accelerate with a lot of speed.

Let’s start from the ground up, and let’s talk about how we build speed throughout the entire body, and how that’s actually going to affect. We’re not going to get into tons of detail on speed because there’s so much of that on the website in the Top Speed Golf System, that I think that would be better served to really work through those systems rather than me just doing a short synopsis of that here.

So the first thing, probably the most important one is we’ve got to get our body to load up, that’s what we go over in the power turn.

If I want to swing this club 120-125 miles an hour, and et that PGA Tour quality speed, that’s going to be ideal. If you swing right around 130 miles an hour, is probably the maximum that’s for realistic golf to get the most compression on the golf ball.

There are guys that swing 145, I think there’s a few guys that have even swung 150, that’s great, but pretty uncontrollable. People aren’t just big, and strong, and fast enough to be able to swing that hard and to be able to put it in the fairway every time.

So if you’re swinging less than 130, I’ve got a pretty good feeling you probably are. I don’t swing 130 on my normal one, I’m usually around 118-120, we could all pick up a little bit of speed and get a little bit farther, get a little bit more distance.

If you’re an older player, maybe your swing speed is pretty low, this doesn’t mean you have to swing in the 120s, we’re just saying if you can go from 80 miles an hour swing speed to 85, you’re going to hit the ball better. You’re going to get closer to those seven key principles.

So the first one here is, as I’m going into backswing, I want to make sure that let my hips rotate. My hips are going to rotate about 45° roughly in the backswing, and as I turn my shoulders, I'm going to get my shoulders to rotate at least 90°, preferably a little bit more than that.

PGA Tour players actually rotate closer to 120° from shoulder socket to shoulder socket as they’re doing their backswing. That’s really crucial.

You can imagine this like a drag car. As I’m loading up in the backswing, the more I load up, the more space I’m giving my hands and arms, and the more space I’m giving the club to create acceleration.

So if you have a drag strip and one car is going let’s say an eighth of a mile, and another car as a quarter of a mile, or a half of a mile to accelerate, which one do you think will be able to create more speed?

If the two cars are the same, the longer the period of time I have to accelerate, the longer the period of time I have to increase the force in the golf club, the more speed I’m going to have.

So as I go to the top of the swing, if I get nice and loaded up, get that big turn, well now I have a lot of room to accelerate this golf club.

A big mistake that I see people make time and time again, is they pick up the club with their arms. So now I start to pick u with my arms, my shoulders haven’t turned, my body hasn’t turned, my arms aren’t very far back, and now I’m having to really try to accelerate hard.

A lot of times I’ll try to cast to create some more speed in that short period of time. I’ll really feel like I’m jerky, like I’m really not smooth with my swing.

That’s just because I’ve not given myself enough space to create speed. So that’s one of the key concepts we talk about in Top Speed Golf System, it’s one of the key concepts to perfect ball striking.

We’ve got to get those hips and shoulders to rotate, get a nice, full backswing, and then as we’re coming on through we’re going to rotate all the way on around, where now my hips have rotated, my belt buckle’s facing the target, and my shoulders have come all the way on around to where now they’re facing what would be into the left rough.

If I’m going this way, as I swing on through, now I’m coming into the left rough there. So as I’m doing this I want to make sure I have plenty of space, plenty of time to build up that speed. That’s really going to help me to hit the golf ball with a lot of power.

That’s going to increase the club head speed into the ball, which is going to increase the compression of the golf ball.

Now next thing in the speed that I’ll go over is creating lag. We’ve got to create a whip with this club. There’s no way we can create enough force just by moving our body or our arms without creating a whip-like action to get that 120 miles an hour, or that 100 miles an hour, or that any whatever your individual level is.

There’s no way we can create enough speed just by trying to use sheer force. We have to create a lever so as you’re making your downswing, my golf club is setting. So as I go back, I’m not setting the club very much. We go over this in the lag section.

As I start down, now I’m increasing the angle between my wrist and then from here, I’m actually pulling this butt end of this club, starting to turn it back up toward the center of my body to get that club to whip on through as I come through the follow-through.

As that’s happening, another thing we go over is to make that lag we have to shallow out this club.

So if I’m coming in steep and over the top, you’ll see how it appears that I don’t have very much of an angle of lag, so you can see that’s probably maybe 75°. Watch what happens when I lay that down.

Now all of a sudden I have a sharper angle here, what looks like on camera. Same angle, it appears sharper and that’s flattening that club out so I’m on the right plane to be able to get some speed into that golf club. So those are the key concepts there.

Make sure you get your hips to turn, your shoulders are turned going back, that’s plenty of space to accelerate, and then as you’re coming on the through the shoulders and hips are going to turn on through to get plenty of room to keep that momentum going.

When we add lag to that, now we’re getting very little wrist set, increasing that wrist set, and then ooh, we’re going to let that go into what we call the straight line release. Meaning that I took all these angles let those go and my club head will accelerate to get the speed.

So like I said, I’m going to break those things down much more in the system, but I want you to be very comfortable with those and understand the faster I swing, the harder I hit this golf ball, the more compression I’m going to get.

Now the next thing I want to talk about here is the angle of attack. This one is going to vary slightly depending on which club you’re hitting, and what type of shot you want to hit.

So with a driver, let’s start with the shallowest angle of attack. On the PGA Tour, the average angle of attack, or the average -- again angle attack is my club moving down into the ball, is it moving up into the ball, or dead level?

Remember, dead level with no loft on the face is 100 percent compression, that’s the most energy going into the ball.

As I hit my driver, my ball is a little bit farther up in my stance, so I’m from this angle, my driver’s now on the inside of my front foot. As I swing, my arc is going to be pretty level.

PGA Tour angle of attack is -1, meaning the club is moving down -1° into that golf ball. So very, very slight amount.

A clock face, 360° around that circle, one minute on the clock is 6°, so it’s a sixth of one minute, that’s how small of an angle of attack we’re talking about.

The driver, because it’s a little bit farther up, it’s going to be a pretty level angle of attack. Now if I wanted to get a higher launching shot, and I wanted to get more distance.

Let’s say I wanted to launch that ball higher so that it will carry farther, but I don’t want to get too much spin on it, which we’ll get to later on in this video, I may tilt my body back a little bit more and get a higher angle of attack. Or I may play it even farther up in my stance, so I can get a positive angle of attack, and when I de-loft the club I’ll still have low spin and a lot of compression in there.

We can do that and get a little bit more distance. That’s why you see the long drive guys, something that we talk about in the Top Speed Golf System, is that we have to have what’s called the compression line, where as I come into impact this -- this is with driver and irons -- as I come into impact, my left ankle, my left hip, and my left shoulder are all in a straight line, but instead of that line being straight up and down, they’re tilted away from the target.

What that allows me to do is set my body up in a position to where I can come in nice and shallow into that straight line release and I can hit that ball very level with the ground.

So that’s very, very important to getting speed. That’s with the driver. We’re going to have around a level angle of attack, 0° angle of attack would be ideal.

If you want to be one of the best ball strikers in the world, you’re going to want to be around level, a little bit positive is OK. If we start going negative, we’ll talk about in a minute why that’s not a good thing.

Now as we get to longer irons, let’s go back to the 6 iron, I still want to be nice and shallow. So with all the tests that they’ve done on ball striking with the best players in the world, we’re finding that the angle of attack with a pitching wedge is going to be somewhere around -4, -5°.

Remember that clock face, the one minute on a clock is -6, so as I’m hitting down into this ball that’s pretty shallow. If I’m -4 or -5, I’m not hitting down very, very hard.

As I get into longer irons, your 6 iron maybe down -3, about -3.2 on average. Doesn’t have to be exact, somewhere around -3. Your longer irons are going to be high 2s.

So basically, if you want to boil it down, everything is coming in pretty dag-gone shallow, almost like if you’re taking a razor blade and you’re just shaving the top layer of grass off the ground, but you’re not going to go ahead and take a big divot.

You don’t want to have a lot of dirt to fly up, you don’t want to hit down into the ground very hard. I want to come in really level, so that I can get that compression on the ball.

If my club is coming in level, it’s transferring all of its energy into the golf ball instead of across the golf ball. So shallow angle of attack.

Now how do we do that? That’s the big key. How do we get that shallow angle of attack? Before I go over that, I want to go over the face angle, the loft.

Then when you can put those two together and understand how both those play together, you’ll unlock a level of ball striking that probably don’t even know anybody that hits that ball that well, or maybe the very best players at your local club hit the ball that well.

As I mentioned in the intro, we’re going to take about 30 percent of loft off these irons. If this is a 6 iron, whatever the natural amount of loft is, I’m going to take about 30 percent of that loft, so I’m going to have forward shaft lean.

Let’s go back to the pitching wedge, because I know that’s easy math. 45° on a pitching wedge, 30 percent of that would be 15°, so I’m going to take 15° of forward shaft lean, taking 15° off this face.

Now if I come in nice and level with the ground, that’s going to be my angle of attack, that’s this first line here of the spin wedge, this club is called the spin wedge.

That second angle is going to be the face, how much loft, dynamic loft, we have on there. We said we started out with 45° and we de-lofted it until we only have 30° of loft on the face.

So this is the amount of loft on the face, this is the angle of attack. The tighter these two angles are together, the less spin you have, and the more compression you have.

So if I have a pitching wedge with 30° and the angle of attack is 0, that’s 30° spin wedge, that’s a pretty dag-gone high-spinning shot, pretty good wedge difference, and I’m going to have a decent amount of compression for a pitching wedge, but not nearly the amount of compression I would have let’s say with a 3 iron.

My 3 iron loft at impact may only be 16-17°, so my angle of attack is still pretty level. We’ll simply the math and say it’s 0, we know it’s normally -2 or something like that.

Let’s say I have 16° of actual loft, well now I’ve only got 16° difference between the spin wedge. Less spin on your 3 iron, not going to get as many RPMs, because the wedge is tighter.

More compression on your 3 iron, you’re going to get more energy into the ball. So if I take this pitching wedge and I swing this 120 miles an hour, I’ve got that 30° spin wedge, it’s not going to hit that ball that far.

I’m going to swing 120 miles an hour, and a pitching wedge is not going to go 300 yards, no matter how fast I swing it.

I’m going to take this driver, now I’m going to come in level, that’s that level angle of attack, my driver let’s say it has 10 or 12° of loft on it, I’ve got a really tight spin wedge, less spin, more compression, more energy going into the golf ball.

So now, if I hit this driver I make contact at 120 miles an hour, I’m going to boom it out there 300 yards pretty much all day long, because I’ve tightened up that spin wedge, and I’ve increased my compression.

So the two key concepts there, and I’ll walk you through some drills on this, but the two key concepts there are number one, very shallow angle of attack, and number two I’ve got to de-loft my clubs.

Driver you’re not going to de-loft as much, the pitching wedge, the sand wedge, you’re going to de-loft a lot.

If you want to get a lot of spin, just a little side note before we get into the details, if I want a ton of spin, I want that angle to be somewhere in the ballpark of about 47 spin wedge.

So let’s say I’m hitting a 56° sand wedge here, I’m going to de-loft that club about 15°, so let’s say I have about 41° loft on the face.

So 41°, and I’m hitting down into the ball 5 or 6°, that gets me to right at about 47. That 47 to 50° spin wedge is the absolute maximum spin you can get. So if you want to suck the ball back on the green, that what you’ve got to do with your wedges.

If I want to hit my irons long, I’m doing the same thing because there’s less loft I’ll get less spin on my longer irons.

But that 47 to 50° spin wedge, most spin, that ball will start spinning like crazy, it will hold on every single green if you’re de-lofting the face and coming in pretty nice and shallow like we want to do.

So interesting side note, we won’t get too caught up on that.

Let’s talk about how to pure our full swing, our irons, our driver, that kind of thing.

So the first was the angle of attack, we’ve got to get that level. The shallower we get, the shallower the angle of attack, the farther we’re going to hit the golf ball, the more compression we’re going to have.

So how the heck do we do that? I mean it’s nice to say, OK, we’re going to swing level, but then we start thinking well I’m going to get forward shaft lean, it gets really confusing.

Well, let’s start from the legs up. If I’m going to hit this golf ball, move this out of the way. I need to have forward shaft lean on there, and I need to be coming in shallow.

So let’s start and look at the legs. As I make my downswing, I’m going to start to bend my legs, and my chest is actually going to get closer to the ground.

So from there, what’s happening is the butt end of my club is also getting fairly low to the ground, I’ve got a lot of lag here, lot of forward shaft lean.

As I extend up with my leg, the butt end of my club is actually going to work up. So if we’re looking at it from this way, as I go to the downswing I’m bending my legs, my butt end of the club is working low to the ground.

I’m exaggerating here just so we can see it easier on camera. It happens to a much smaller degree when you’re actually hitting.

Then as I extend my legs up and I start to let my shoulder rotate up, that’s going to rotate my hand up, and that’s going to actually get the club moving. The butt end of the club is going to be moving upward as I’m coming into the golf ball.

Because I have forward shaft lean, I’m releasing that forward shaft lean, that’s going to shallow out my club. Let me give you an extreme example of this.

If I do this properly, I’m going to give you a crazy example here on camera. We’re going to do a tenth of this in the real swing, but it will allow you to see it real easily.

If I’m going to go ahead and do this, I’ve got a ton of forward shaft lean, my hands very close to the ground, a lot of leg bend. Watch the butt end of my club as my club’s going to reach the ground here.

So my club is already on the ground. As this turn up, and my club slides forward and releases, now those two things happen together, my club actually has a flat spot that it moves on through there. We call that impact glide.

So basically what’s happening here, is that as my legs extend, my shoulder turn up, so my hip’s turning up, my shoulder’s turning up, the butt end of my club is turning up, that’s when I’m releasing this golf club.

What happens is, is this club swings down and there’s a section where it goes in very level with the ball. So that’s why it’s so crucial to use my legs and to start to extend up because that’s going to help the club to turn on up.

That’s why it’s also very crucial to keep your left shoulder working down, and then that as it rotates around my body, it’s naturally going to work up and out.

That’s also why it’s very crucial to take the bottom couple fingers of your hand here, and do what’s called ulnar deviation, meaning that my hand is doing this. So with the thumb up, I’m turning my thumb down.

As I do that in the golf swing, look at how that’s going to turn this bottom part of the club is going to be turned up.

So to watch it like this, I’m turning that club, the butt end of the club, up and that allows me to have forward shaft lean without chopping into the ground.

If I had forward shaft lean here, and the I just release that, that club would be six inches under the turf, big negative angle of attack, really chopping down into the ground.

Because my body is working up and my club head is working down, those cancel each other out and you’re going to see what’s the flat spot. That club works in very, very level.

If I do that correctly, I can work my club in very level to the ground and still have forward shaft lean, and really compress that golf ball. So I can swing pretty hard here, I just brushed the grass but I had forward shaft lean as I did that. I had lag as my club came on through there.

The best players in the world are going to have that forward shaft lean, and they’re going to be having their body move up as the club releases down. Those are going to cancel out and I’m going to come in really shallow, almost imagine like a 747 plane landing on a runway.

It doesn’t just kind of crash down on the runway, it comes down and it glides in very level with the runway, and that’s going to get that compression on the golf ball. A lot of energy transferring in the golf ball while I’m doing that.

So that’s your angle of attack, through the bag you want it to be shallow. Nice, smooth divots like you took a razor blade, sliced off the top layer of turf. Imagine if you went to the putting green, you start hitting full shots, what you’d like to see is about a dollar-bill-sized divot, maybe a quarter of an inch deep.

That’s a little bit extreme, but that’s that shallow, you’re going to be really compressing that golf ball.

The most important thing to pair up with that is I’ve got to de-loft this club. So I don’t want my angle of attack to be shallow because I’m flipping like this. I want my angle of attack to be shallow and still getting that forward shaft lean.

So my hip, my shoulder, my hand all work up as the club works down. That’s a real key to compression there. I would say maybe a couple people out of 100, probably a less than that, a couple people out of 1,000 maybe, do that perfectly.

All the players on the PGA Tour do that really well, and compress the golf ball really well doing that. So that’s going to really help you guys out.

Let’s go ahead and give you a drill to work on this. What I want you to do is go ahead, set up to the golf ball, as you start your downswing I want you to really bend your legs.

Feel like your hips go back, a lot of leg bend, the butt end of the club is going to get really low, my chest is working toward the ground, and then I’m going to feel like my lead leg pushes back up this way.

So I’m going to be pushing down and out, that’s going to push me back up out of the way. So if I’m here, I’m pushing down into the ground that direction, or this direction, and that’s going to push me back up like that.

Then as I have that forward shaft lean, now I can really compress the ball and come in really shallow. Go ahead and try that out, we’ll go ahead and hit a couple little chip shots doing that.

Just really nice and easy, and then gradually build up some speed, more and more speed.

The next thing here that really helps with that, and I won’t get into this too much, but it’s something we call “the move” on the website. So as you’re starting down I want to shallow this club out, and I actually want to take my wrist and bow it like that.

So I’m de-lofting the club, and now I can come in with forward shaft lean. So watch that move section on the website. That’s in our Top Speed Golf System, that’s a game changer, that’s really going to help a lot of you guys out there.

All right guys, sorry last time it started pouring right after we cut the video there, we rejoin this back here a couple days later, and we’re going to pick up where we left off.

Now we’re going to talk about the face angle as far as the face being open or closed, so is the face pointing to the right, is it pointing to the left, and then also the path.

Those two are very related. That’s going to determine whether or not I get that ball to curve right to left, left to right, or dead straight.

So let’s start out, let me actually grab a couple of little items here. Let’s pretend that this is our golf ball, and the very first thing that we need to be aware of, and actually let’s grab a different stick, I think I have one in here that’s a different color, that will be perfect.

So let’s pretend that this brown stick is going to be the face angle. The ball is always going to start about 75 percent whichever direction the face is pointing.

So for now, we’re going to simplify this even more than that, so it’s usually 75 percent the direction the face is pointing, we’re going to simplify it and pretend that it starts exactly where the face is pointing. We’ll add a little bit more detail here in a second.

But if I swing and I hit this ball, and let’s pretend my face is pointing straight forward, so the angle of the face is directly where this stick is pointing. No matter if I swing out to the right, no matter if I swing to the left, it doesn’t matter if I swing this way, if my face is pointing, whichever the direction the face is pointing, the ball is going to start in that direction.

So if my face is pointing straight ahead, it’s going to start right where this brown stick is. If my face is pointing to the right, or open, the ball is going to start wherever that is pointing there.

If it starts to the left, my face is pointing to the left at contact and we’re just talking about right the split second that the club face hits the ball at contact, it’s going to start to the left.

Now once it starts it’s going to curve away from the path. So let’s go ahead and imagine that my face angle is dead straight, and now let’s imagine that my path or this is the direction the overall club head is moving as I’m coming through the ball, the path is straight ahead.

Now if my face and path are both dead straight, that’s going to be a perfectly straight shot. It’s assuming that I hit the ball with some good, solid contact, right in the middle of the face.

If I do that, that’s going to be optimal, that’s the most compression we can get. We’re taking all that energy from the club, we’re putting it right square through the back of the golf ball.

We’re going to be able to hit the ball really, really solid, time and time again. So that’s really the end goal here.

If we want to achieve maximum compression, we want to hit it as good as the best players in the world, we need to make sure that we’re getting our contact with our face and our path very close to being straight.

Now when we get off track, or whenever we’re a little bit off, we don’t necessarily have to be off track, a little five-yard draw is nice to hit, five-yard fade. Let’s pretend that again, this ball is going to start wherever the face is pointing, that’s the brown stick.

Let’s imagine that my path is now to the right. So my face is pointing to the brown stick, my path, or the direction I’m going to swing the club is going out to the right. That would look something like this.

That ball as we said is going to start about 75 percent toward the face. So here’s the path, here’s the face, that ball is going to start about 75 percent the direction of the face, and then it’s going to curve away from the path.

So it’s going to start here, and this ball is going to curve over into the left side of the fairway.

If we really want to simplify this to make this thing simple, to be make it easy to understand, it’s not going to be the exact truth, but it’s usually going to curve about the same amount of the difference of these two angles.

So if I swing my club face is straight toward the middle of the fairway, the path is toward the right edge of the fairway, and my ball is going to start here, and it’s going to curve about the same amount to the left edge of the fairway.

Now with a driver, or if you start to hit it off center of contact it can do more than that, but that’s just a good visual to think of it, to keep it simple in our minds.

So what happens if we took the path, or the face angle and put it over there? Same thing. My ball is going to start, here’s my target, straight down the middle of the fairway, it’s going to start 75 percent down this face. It’s going to curve away from the path, and it’s going to end up somewhere fairly straight. Nice draw.

What happens if we kept the same path and put the face over here? Well now, that ball’s going to start to the right toward the face, 75 percent toward the face, it’s going to curve away from the path. Now the path is to the inside, and that ball is going to slice.

That’s that ball that you block a mile to the right, and then it slices even more. That’s a big block, that’s my path inside, my face even more open than that.

So if I want to get, and I could do the same thing in the opposite direction. Now if I want to get that nice little draw, what’s really going to happen is my face is going to be a little to the right, let’s say that that’s 3° to the right, just to throw a random number on there, it doesn’t matter exactly what it is.

So my face is a little bit to the right, and my path is a little bit more to the right. Let’s say it’s another 3°. Well now my ball is going to start a little bit to the right, kind of the right center of the fairway, the right center of the green. It’s going to curve away from that path, and I’m going to have a nice little draw.

So when you’re hitting a perfectly compressed draw, or not a perfectly compressed, a really well-compressed draw, your face is a little open to the target, and your path is even more to the right of your face. That’s going to get you a draw.

If we did that in the opposite, that would be a little fade. Face a little to the left, path even more to the left, ball starts close to the face and then fades away, or moves away from the path itself.

So that’s all really good to know. All right, so now we know, we understand where the ball starts, and how it’s going to affect it.

Let’s say that we hit a shot now, and this is very important to practice this. I think we should practice this every time that we hit golf balls we should be working on this.

Let’s imagine that I’m trying to hit a perfectly straight shot. I make a swing I feel like man, this is a perfect swing, everything’s going to be great today.

But I happen to look up, my ball starts down the middle of the fairway, but then fades 30 yards into the woods on the right. Obviously I felt like I was swinging good, I felt like everything was square, but I look up and my ball is going nowhere near where I wanted it to.

Well we now know, since that ball started pretty close to the middle of the fairway, I know my face was pointing roughly in that direction, and then the ball curved away from the path. I got a lot of curve on there, so my path must have been way to the left of that.

So now I’m going to adjust my feel to compensate. I’m going to have my face was already pretty straight, I’m going to keep it about the same. And instead of my path being way to the left, I’m going to feel like I get way to the inside and swing out to the right.

Again, that’s going to be my feeling, I’m going to watch the ball, the ball is going to tell me the reality of what happened. If my next shot goes dead straight, I know the face and the path were really good.

Same thing if I’ve been snap hooking. If I hit a big hook, I think I’m swinging good, I make contact, that ball starts off to the right and then woosh, hooks a mile to the left, well now I know my face was pointing a little bit to the right and my path was so far to the right that that ball really started to turn over and started to hook.

So we’ve got to look at our ball flight, it’s going to tell us everything we need to know about what’s happening in contact, and then we’re going to adjust from there.

If I start to get my path too far to the left, so I want to imagine that this is kind of like a hula hoop again, and we’re going to be hitting on the downswing. I’m not going to get into deplane and all that kind of stuff and make it more complicated than it has to be.

But let’s say I’m swinging dead straight, everything’s great. If I want to tilt my path more to the right, then all I’m going to do is feel like my shoulders and body stay a little bit more closed, I’m going to feel like I’m de-lofting the face by kind of bowing my wrist here a little bit.

That’s going to close the face, make it easier to tilt it to the right, and then I’m going to be swinging out this way. So I’m going to imagine that hula hoop going that direction.

If I’m going to tilt my path more to the left, I’m going to tilt the hula hoop the other direction, and I’m going to feel like I’m swinging this way.

So I’m looking at my ball flight, and I’m determining what do I need to do different with the path, and then I’m tweaking it.

Same thing with the face, if I’m going to have the face more open, I’m going to feel like my toe of my club is more up and down here in the downswing. Then I’m going to feel like it’s holding it open.

As I come on through this leading edge of the club is staying toward the target. If I want to close the face a little bit more as I come into the downswing, I’m going to bow that wrist, get this club face closing.

That’s pulling the face more to the left as we get down here, and then I’m going to feel like I let this club race roll on over, I’m going to feel like it’s going that way. As I come on through to the release that toe is going to turn on over very quickly.

I’m constantly adjusting my path and my face after I look at the shot to get that perfect ball flight, and I’m trying to get that as zeroed out as possible so I’m getting path and face straight ahead, boom, a lot of compression.

So the next thing we’ll talk about here, which kind of relates to this, it’s a little bit crazy to think about, but it’s probably one of the most common problems that people have.

A lot of times that I see people playing, I would say somewhere around 80 to 90 percent of people tend to get the toe of the club digging down into the ground too early. So they tend to stand up a little bit, my toe digs down like this, and now this was a dead level lie angle.

When I contact the ball my toe is down like that. So this is a problem for a couple reasons. Number one – sorry about that plane, hopefully you can hear me all right.

Number one, if I let this toe dig down in the ground, imagine I’m coming down into the turf here, this is the turf, I’m coming down and my toe hits just a little bit before the ball like that.

Well now it’s going to start to twist my face around. This face is going to twist, it could mess around with the angle of the club.

Also, I’m going to keep the leading edge, I’m going to keep the leading edge facing straight toward the camera. As my toe starts to point up, it’s going to tilt this club face pointing to the right.

So imagine it like this. Take my hand, and if my front of my hand is pointing toward the target, and I have some loft on my hand, this is kind of like a pitching wedge.

Well if I turn my hand like that, now all of a sudden because this club has loft it’s pointing over there to the right. If I turn my hand like this, even though the leading edge is still pointing toward the target, the face because it has loft is now pointing over to the left.

So as I start to tilt my face one direction or the other, I’m going to have a glancing blow on the ball. It’s going to affect my face angle, and plus if I have that toe down, now all of a sudden my sweet spot, or the middle of this club, is getting farther and farther from the ground.

So some of you guys probably have a tough time hitting off a bare lie, you find yourself on a tight, hard-pan lie and you can’t hit it solid, always hit it thin, that’s because your toe is digging down deeper and your sweet spot is raising up off the ground so there’s no way to get the sweet spot down to the ball.

That’s really, really common. The opposite of that would be the heel coming down first, I rarely see this. Most players tend to do the other way. That would be the heel coming down first. It is possible, but it’s just a little bit more rare.

So when you look at your divot, you should see if you take a divot, let’s imagine, don’t really want to do this, but if you get on a putting green, you hit a ball off the green, it’s that really short, tight mown grass, it should be a perfectly square divot, kind of like a dollar bill.

Really thin, like you took a razor blade and scraped the grass off down to the roots, and really didn’t start digging down into the dirt. That’s a perfect divot.

If you’re toe deep, so if I’m doing this motion, my toe’s digging down, what you’re going to see is the toe of that club is going to dig in first and the front edge of your divot is going to be kind of angled, and it’s going to be kind of a crooked, or a cock-eyed divot rather than being perfectly straight like a dollar bill.

So how do we fix this? Well, the reason that most people do this is because most people tend to be over the top. So my club’s coming a little over the top, just slightly, getting too steep in the downswing.

Then to counteract that, what I tend to do is you’ll stand up, and as I stand up watch how the shaft moves up, the toe moves down.

So what I need to work on here, is I need to feel like the first move as I start down, especially if you guys are too steep, you’re going to feel like you’ve shallowed this club plane a little bit.

So my club goes back, you can imagine it on the nice plane, as I come down it starts to shallow out a little bit. As I do that, it looks like it increases some lag as I start to shallow this out.

The angle of lag is getting a little tighter, if you’re looking from face on in the camera. At the same time, I’m going to feel like I’m bowing my wrist. So I’m doing this to start to close the club face a little bit as I start down.

What that’s going to do is that’s going to get me on a shallower plane, and now as I’m coming through my shaft is going to be lower, the heel of the club is closer to the ground, and as I contact the ball that’s going to be more of a square divot.

For those of you that are doing the opposite, let’s say your heel’s hitting first, it’s possible you could be getting too shallow, but I don’t see very many people with heel-first divots, so not quite as common.

So that’s what I would look for. Look for those perfectly square divots. If I want to compress the ball, I’ve got to have the sole of that club perfectly flush with the ground.

You look at the best players in the world, when Tiger Woods, when he was playing in the early 2000s, if you looked at his divots, it was amazing. It was the best divots I’ve ever seen. I’ve seen Adam Scott, he has really good, clean divots.

If you get on those really tight mown practice facilities like they have on the PGA Tour sometimes, you would have an area of turf like this, he’d hit a whole bucket of balls, and this whole area of turf would look like he took a scalpel, like some type of machine and just perfectly sliced off the top layer of grass.

He was coming in so shallow, such a good angle of attack, such a good lie angle, everything was just ideal, and it was really pretty cool to watch when he was doing that. I watched a few tournaments on the practice range, and it was pretty great.

So that’s the lie angle of the face. We’ve gone over speed, faster the better. We’ve gone over angle of attack, we want to be shallow. Loft, we want to de-loft the face. We’ve gone over path, which is when I swing to the right or to the left I want to get that as square as possible.

We’ve gone over face angle, is it open or closed, I want to get that as square as possible. We’ve gone over the lie angle, which is the sixth thing, that’s going to be is it up, or down, or perfectly smooth with the turf.

I want to get that as flat as possible, that way all of this energy, I’m lining all these things up to where when I swing the club, all that energy is going directly into the ball, and it’s really, really going to be compressed.

The last thing on here is what’s called gear effect, and this means where I’m hitting the ball on the club. So if I take this golf ball and I hit it on the toe at contact, what’s going to happen is that toe will start to open up and as a result this ball actually spins in the opposite direction.

Let me go ahead and grab my yellow ball here, because I have an arrow on it. You’ll start to see how this could work.

So if I go off the toe, because the ball is stuck to the face as this face opens up, this ball starts to curve that way off the face. Hopefully you can see that.

If I hit off the heel, the club does this and goes that way, and the ball curves the opposite direction.

That’s when you hit off the heel of the club you tend to get more fade spin, that ball starts to curve left to right. If you hit off the toe of the club you get more draw spin, that ball starts to curve right to left. So I’m adding spin when I do that.

To give you an example of how important this is, if I hit a perfectly good everything else, my face, my path, my contact, all that, everything is directly square but I hit this ball way off the toe, I could get 15 or 20 yards of hook with a driver, sometimes even 30 if I’m swinging fast enough.

Same thing with the heel, doesn’t twist quite as much on the heel because you have the shaft, you’re holding onto the shaft and it’s going to kind of slow it down. It won’t turn quite as much over in the heel.

Just know that ball is going to curve right or left if I hit it off the heel or the toe. Same thing off the bottom of the club. As I hit off the bottom, so if I hit this ball thin, let’s go ahead and try right here.

If I hit that thin that’s going to tilt this face down, which is going to spin the ball up more. That’s why if you hit it thin those shots tend to rise up in the air and that’s taking off a lot of distance.

As I hit it a little bit higher on the face, it gets a little bit less backspin and it’s going to knuckle through the air a little bit more.

If I’m hitting a driver, I want those nice, high-launching, low-spinning shots, and I’m going to hit it a little bit higher on the face. Everything else I’m going to hit right on the sweet spot.

Now this is probably one that takes some time to do, you have to build some coordination with the golf club, hit a lot of golf balls to get a feel for this. But if we wanted to get really good, we need to be able to feel this club head.

It doesn’t have to be any more complicated than I’m going to work on shots making swings and purposefully hitting them off the toe, the heel, thin, and higher on the face, and be able to adjust that.

I need to work on my overall technique, so in the Top Speed Golf System, we have those five keys, specifically the stable fluid spine, and the compression line.

If my spine is staying pretty stable throughout the swing, it’s not moving around all over the place, and my compression line is good, I’m going to be putting my body into a position to where I can consistently time after time again, deliver that club face square into the ball.

Those two things need to be correct. Once we’ve done that, then I just want to go ahead and take practice swings. When I’m hitting balls on the range, I’ll do this all the time.

I’ll purposely try to hit a ball off the toe, and try to get that ball to kind of curve over right to left. I’ll purposely hit a couple off the heel, the inside of the club. I’ll purposely hit a couple a little bit thin, and a little bit heavy.

Depending on your swing you may have a little bit of difficulty with this at first, but just keep on drilling it over and over again. Doesn’t have to be any more complicated than that.

If you’re doing the five pieces of the Top Speed Golf System, you’re going to have the ability to feel the club head a lot more, because your swing is a lot simpler, and you’re going to be able to have the ability to move that around.

So if all of a sudden I show up to the range, I feel like I’m going to be doing good, I make a couple of swings, and man, I’m way off the heel here, I’m immediately going to know how to feel the club a little bit differently.

I’m going to feel like I go more to the toe, and it’s going to end up in the sweet spot, or the same thing if you’re hitting it too thin, you’re going to try to feel like you hit it higher on the face. If you’re hitting it too far off the toe, you’re going to feel like you’re more on the heel, and that’s going to get you on the sweet spot.

So I’m constantly adjusting this, and every single time I’m doing all these five factors and putting it together.

So tie it all together, high swing speed, nice shallow divot, shallow angle of attack, I’m de-lofting the club getting some forward shaft lean to get more compression. My face and path are square, my contact is good and my lie angle is good.

If I can do that, I’m going to hit this ball pretty dag-gone long, and pretty straight. It’s going to feel like a million bucks. There we go, really hit that one good.

Good luck to you guys, you’ll see those nice shallow divots, you’ll see those good penetrating ball flights. Work on those seven keys, and you’re going to hit the best you ever hit in your life.

I’ll see you all soon.