Why You Need This:

If you’re struggling to get that crisp contact….

…and hear that distinct, solid sound from either the tee or the fairway….

This video may be exactly what you need.

You’re going to find out the perfect amount of axis tilt at impact (i.e., your spine’s angle away from the target at impact) necessary for proper ball striking.

This video can help to correct coming in too shallow, resulting in topping the ball…

…or coming in too steep causing a crater of a divot.

Once you have this angle down, you can hit balls with distance, control, and confidence.

Check out the video now to ensure your spine isn’t killing your impact!

What's Covered: the proper amount of secondary axis tilt (i.e., your spine's angle away from the target at impact)

Golf Pros Featured:

Instructors Featured: Clay Ballard    

Video Duration: 7:19

Video Transcription:

Hi guys, and welcome back. In today’s video we’re going to talk about how to get into the proper position as we’re coming into impact with the stable fluid spine.

This is the real goal, if you’re looking at pro players this is the position they’re trying to get into, and I’m going to go over the proper angles to look for here and also the reason why we’re doing this.

So the angle that I’m talking about is as we’re coming into contact, I want my upper body, if I take my hips, so I’m coming into contact here.

If I’m filming myself from face on if I look at the right side of my hips, left side of my hips, and I take the center of my hips, and I make a line up to the center of my sternum or the center of my chest at the top of my chest, that should be angled away from the target about 20 or 25° as I’m coming into contact.

So this angle here will be angled away about 20 or 25°. You’ll also notice that that angle is going to be, if I draw a line all the way down to the ground, it’s going to be about six inches to a foot outside of my left foot as I’m coming into contact.

The reason we’re doing this is so that we can get compression on the golf ball, and we can get speed as we’re coming down through contact.

This is to position our body where we can do this very, very easily. So as we’re coming down, this ties in directly with what we’re talking about with the straight line release.

We know that we want to release the club about four feet in front of the golf ball as we’re coming through contact and into the release.

If my body’s tilted away, now I can get to that release point. That’s also going to allow me to more easily get lag as I’m coming down, because as I’m tilted away everything angled forward and I’m going to be able to get that club to lag.

I’m going to have more forward shaft lean as I’m contacting this golf ball, and a lot of other good things that we want to have.

So this is a positioning of the body to allow us to do all these good things that are happening.

Again, that’s what the Top Speed Golf System is all about, fixing one thing that’s then going to allow us to fix three, or four, or five other things without even having to worry about them.

So we want more speed, we want more compression, more lag, more forward shaft lean, all that’s going to be possible if we can get angled away about 20 to 25° at contact and have that line somewhere around six inches to a foot in front of our left foot as we’re coming into contact.

So if we take a look at these top pros that’s exactly what you’re going to see when we draw the line on them.

You can take every single pro on the PGA tour, draw that line on their body at contact, and they’re going to be right in that ballpark of 20 to 25°.

If we go a wedge we may be a little closer to the 20° angle, if we go a driver, because we’re coming in a little bit more shallower, we may get closer to that 25° angle.

Let’s go ahead and talk about a couple of the keys now that are going to make this easier to do as you’re practicing this.

OK, so as we’re working on this and we’re filming our self, we’re doing a video from directly from face on as we’re hitting shots, there’s a couple things I want you to keep in mind as you’re practicing this.

Number one, we want to make sure that we’re in the proper compression line as we’re coming into impact.

So if I have this tilt away from the target as I’m coming into impact here, this would be about the right amount, 20-25° or so with my upper body.

I want to make sure that my left ankle, my left hip socket, and my left shoulder are in a straight line tilted slightly away from the target.

One thing that I see that’s very common is people are trying to get tilted away a little bit more is they may let this left hip bump a slide forward and then the upper body really starts to tilt to the right.

So as I’m doing that, if I do this now we can see from my left ankle, to my left hip, to my left shoulder is not a straight line, it’s an arcing line like this, it’s a little bit bumpy toward the target that way.

That’s going to allow my right side to really kind of halt as it’s coming through, my hips aren’t going to be able to rotate, my body’s not going to be able to rotate to the shot because everything’s kind of jamming into that left hip.

Then my body stops and my right side is collapsing to the right and I’m going to chunk the ball much more easily and I’m going to slow down my speed because now everything can’t rotate on through.

I want to make sure that as I get into that contact position again, I’m having my ankle, hip, shoulder stacked and now I’m going to be able to rotate my body as I’m coming through into a good full finish, and I’m going to make those nice thin, clean divots as I’m doing that.

So that’s really, really a good key for this.

The second piece that I want to make sure that I do, is I want to make sure that as I’m coming into contact, that my hips are opening up.

If my hips stop opening, imagine my belt buckle’s facing to this ball and I’m swinging down.

Well now as I tilt away again I’m slowing down my body, and it becomes very difficult for me to get into the right angle if my hips don’t open.

If my hips open up then I’m going to be able to get in the proper angle much more easily, my body can position itself that way.

The final piece is that even our body is angled away from the target, we are shifting to the left.

As we went to the top of the swing, our weight shifted a little bit to the right, as we started down our weight is shifting to the left even though we’re angled away at contact, and it’s going to continue to shift all the way through, all the way to our left as we finish the swing.

So work on those three pieces, grab your camera, look at those lines, make sure that you’re at that good 20 to 25° angle.

You’re going to be able to compress the golf ball a lot more, and it’s going to make it so much easier to get into your straight line release.

Good luck to you guys, I’ll see you all soon.

All right, so now it’s time to do a little bit of work. We’re going to do a three-step drill where we work on getting into the proper stable fluid spine at contact.

For the first step all we’re going to do is we’re going to do this in slow motion, we’re going to go ahead and get into our impact position and I’m going to draw a line just like what we did in the video, I’m going to video from face on directly toward my body, and I’m going to pause.

I’m going to draw a line on this, you can do it with your phone, you can do it with your iPad, whatever you want to do, and make sure that that’s about that 20 to 25°.

I’m going to go ahead and come up out of that, relax, and then I’m going to go back down into that same position again, and I’m going to check to make sure that I’m about 20 to 25° tilted away.

I will feel a little bit of pressure on my right foot as I’m doing this. The reason is when I’m making a full swing my weight momentum is shifting to the left and my right foot is going to be rotating up off the ground.

When I’m pausing like this I don’t have that momentum pulling me left, so a little more weight’s going to be on my right side than it actually will be in the swing, and that’s completely fine.

After we’ve done about 100 repetitions we get the feel of that, now I’m going to go ahead and do some full speed, or about 75-80 percent speed practice swings.

I’m going to do another 100 repetitions here, just like that, making some full practice swings, making sure that I’m feeling the right positions.

I can go ahead and go frame by frame if I want to and make sure that my body’s tilted away the proper amount as I’m coming through.

If I’m not tilted exactly right, go back to the slow motion drills, get your body angles right, and then come back to the full swings.

Then finally, I’m going to go ahead and make some full swings hitting the ball, checking those again, about another 100 shots, and if you can get that angle right, that’s going to make everything else tie in together and become much more easy and the swing is going to start to meld together.

Because not only are we doing the stable fluid spine, we’re doing our compression line, we’re doing our release, all that’s going to start to tie in together.

So good luck to you guys, get those drills, work hard, I’ll see you all soon.