Why You Need This: Today you'll get "3 Power Leaks That Are Killing Your Driving Distance"

I know how scary it can be to make any changes to your swing...

...typically your game has to get worse before it can start to get better.

But what if I told you there were some simple changes you could make right now...

...that wouldn't drastically impact your current swing...

...but could make a major difference in your distance off the tee?

Today's video will help you learn 3 minor changes...

...that could make major improvements in your game.

Including how a tiny change with your trail wrist on your takeaway...

...can lead to a ton of extra power.

 

Golf Pros Featured:

Instructors Featured: Clay Ballard    Quentin Patterson    

Video Duration: 11:08

Video Transcription:

Clay Ballard: All right, I’ve got Quentin here manning the FlightScope X3 Radar.

Let me go ahead and hit a couple of shots, and let’s dive into those three things we just talked about, talk about if you do the wrong thing can really cut into your distance.

So let me go ahead and hit a few shots here, and we’ll compare the numbers here. So on this first one, this is the set the club early.

A lot of times what happens is not necessarily that setting the club early is a bad thing, is that picking the club up just with your hands and arms, and not rotating your body, your shoulders, is really going to cut off your distance.

If you look at PGA Tour players, on average, they’re rotating their shoulders about 120° actually past the golf ball.

So if you put a club on your shoulders like this, put the grip end off your left shoulder there, put your fingers up way on the tips of the shoulder, you should be able to rotate enough to get this club past the golf ball.

If you do that, you’re going to have potential for a lot of speed. Now picking the club up early can be one of the worst things you can do to make that happen.

So if I pick this club up early, I can get just no shoulder turn at all. I can bend my arms, I can get the club all the way back here to parallel, but you see I really haven’t rotated my shoulders.

I’m not going to have very much power when I do that. So here, let me go ahead and try to hit one Q, I’m just going to pick it up all hands and arms, and we’ll see what we can do.

So I swung as hard as I could, and I hit that one well. Dead straight, pretty dag-gone solid. I mean that’s about as good as I’m going to be able to do with my current athletic ability.

Think a bird just pooped on us.

[laughter]

Clay: I think we’re all right. What are the numbers on the arm swing, the bird poop swing?

Quentin Patterson: The club head speed was almost 102 miles per hour, 272 total distance.

Clay: OK, so on this one, we’re going to go ahead and make a little bit wider swing here. I’m really going to load up my shoulders and then we’re going to go ahead and give it a good rip.

So here, I’m going to feel like I get very little wrist set in the backswing, I’m really going to rotate my body early in the swing, and then I’m going to go ahead and hit this one. Let me go ahead and try this one out.

There we go, much better. Right down the right side of the fairway, pretty well hit there. What was the club head speed and the distance on that one?

Quentin: Club head speed was 122 miles per hour, total distance was 315.

Clay: So when I loaded my shoulders more, I was able to get a lot more power, but the key with that was I didn’t pick the club up with my hands and arms and just do a hands-arms swing.

I really rotated my body quite a bit early in the swing. So that’s the first piece. Number two is, what we talked about getting a stretch.

So I first mentioned that I want to get as much stretch as I can between my hips and my shoulders. A lot of people will recommend that you don’t rotate your hips very much when you do this.

So on this swing, I’m going to go ahead and try to hit one really feeling like I get tons of stretch, don’t really move my hips very much, and my shoulder’s going to turn as much as I can.

Let’s go ahead and try this one out, and see what kind of speed, what kind of distance we can get with this swing.

So that felt very stretched out, and I hit that one, again, that’s as good as I’m ever going to hit a ball. That’s dead solid, dead straight, that’s about as good as I can do.

Now I felt like I was swinging hard on that one, and that went pretty dag-gone good. So if you’re someone that may be doing that, you may be playing some pretty good golf already, but you don’t that you have another 10, 20 yards in the bag if you’re it that way, because that was a good hit shot.

What were the numbers on that one, Q?

Quentin: Club head speed 109 miles an hour, total distance 285, and like you said, you hit it about as good as you can, 1.49 smash factor.

Clay: Yeah, so dead solid, right on the middle of the club. Again, 109 is pretty dag-gone good swing speed.

If you’re not quite as strong or as fast as I am, you may be making that same kind of swing and swinging 90 miles an hour, when in reality you could be swinging 100 miles an hour, or 110 miles an hour.

So now, I’m going to do the opposite of that. Here’s the big misconception, I still want to have that stretch between the hips and the shoulders, but I want to wait until the downswing to get that stretch.

So in my backswing, for me, if I really want to crank one out there, and I’ve done about as much swing speed research as anybody.

If I want to crank one out there, I want to go ahead and let my hips really rotate in the backswing, really turn those shoulders just like the PGA Tour players, getting well past 90°.

If I restrict these hips, then I can’t turn my shoulders, I’m all locked up. I want to go ahead and get a big turn and then it’s in the downswing when my lower body gets my weight shift to the left. That’s when you have all the stretch.

So players that turn their hips a lot in the backswing have just as much stretch as a player that restricts their hips in the backswing, they’re just going to be able to hit it a lot farther.

Let’s go ahead and try that one out. Again, I’m going to focus in on a big backswing with the hips, and I’m going to see if I can hit it farther than I have any of those shots so far.

All right, that one’s going to be right beside my other one, let’s see if it lands any farther. Probably going to be about the same distance, I’m guessing. Pretty well hit. It landed about three or four yards farther.

So what was the speed and the numbers on that one, Q?

Quentin: Club head speed was 122 miles per hour, and total distance was 307.2.

Clay: OK, so it carried a pretty good distance there. Now finally, let’s talk about this lag in the golf swing.

Me and Q were talking about this, what would you recommend for a player to smooth out that transition and really feel like they get as much lag and as much power as they can in the golf swing?

Quentin: I think we all understand one big reason, everyone talks about why you want to get lag, you want to be able to store that energy and then release that as hard as you can.

But there’s actually another big added benefit to lag as well, and it comes down to something called MOI, or moment of inertia.

So without getting super science-y with it, basically what it means is your resistance to twisting. I’m going to have you do something here to help you kind of feel exactly what that is.

So Clay right now, I want you to get into a point in the downswing where the club’s about parallel to the ground, you’re casting as much as possible. So you’re casting that.

I want you to kind of get into this position right here and now I just want you to feel like you’re pulling that as much as you can. You feeling that, like right here in your side? That’s the kind of feeling I’m talking about.

Now if you go to that same position with your hands at the top, but then get some lag, now get that twist a little bit again, now that’s got to feel a lot easier, did that feel a lot easier Clay to be able to twist when you’re doing that?

Clay: When I get that club way over there it’s a lot to overcome that to get my body moving forward.

Quentin: It’s just like a figure skater, right? If you watch the Olympics, the figure skater they’re twirling around, they’re spinning, they’ve got their arms out and they start getting much faster when they start bringing their arms in.

Now we don’t want to bring our arms in in the golf swing, that’s going to slow us down. But we want to get that club narrowed up in the downswing so we can lower our resistance to twisting in the downswing.

That’s all great. We all understand MOI, great, cool lesson Q. But how do we actually do that? So one thing that I think is a really great feeling to help you get lag is if you go at the top of the swing, I like to feel like this club is coming down.

If we’re looking from down the line here, this club is coming down hitting you right in the tricep. This is super extreme, but this is the feeling that you want to have.

Look at this crazy sharp angle of lag here that you’re getting when you’re getting that feeling. Now in reality, you’re not going to be hitting your tricep with the club, but it’s a really great feeling to help you get loaded up.

Now from here, now you’re going to feel like you’re going as hard at is as you can to the ball, and that’s going to allow you to get all that stored energy and release it hard at the golf ball.

So Clay, how about you try one where you get that kind of casting feeling in there. You get a high MOI kind of swing, and then we’ll do one…

Clay: Let’s do the one now where I’m casting, I cannot get there. I’ll tell you what, I have a hard time doing this. Somebody that’s worked a lot to increase club head speed, such a big part of that is getting a lot of lag.

It is tough for me to cast it, but I’ll do my best here and let’s see what we can do. Yeah, for me it feels like once that club gets thrown out, I am working hard just to get my body to open up at all, to get through that shot.

It almost feels like it’s throwing the brakes on my swing and I’m just trying to fight through it. I bet on camera it doesn’t even look like I’m casting it that much, you know?

But I can really feel a difference in swing speed. What were the numbers there, Q?

Quentin: 94.4 miles per hour and then 242.5 on the total distance.

Clay: Yeah, so even though that may not seem crazy slow, maybe that’s what you’re struggling with right now.

Maybe you’re working hard, but your club is out here and you feel like you’re powering through it, and you’re getting that when you hit one solid, that 240-ish.

Maybe you have 280, 290 inside of your body, you’ve just to get the right technique to let that come out.

So the big thing like Q was talking about, the big differentiator here is I want to narrow up the club, I don’t want to narrow up my arms.

So a lot of times players will mistake this as me saying or us saying narrow up your arms like this, get them tight to your body, and get this big angle of lag. I don’t want that to happen.

I want this left arm to stay straight in the downswing, it’s the club that’s narrowing up in the downswing. Feel like it’s going to whack your arm here in the back of your tricep right here.

If you do that, again, never going to happen, my wrists won’t even bend that much. This is the most my wrist will bend, they’ll get nowhere near that.

But having that feeling, man, it really helps you to exaggerate it and get the result that you want to have. So here, my left arm stays straight. I’m going to lag and really let that rip, though.

So if I’m that figure skater, I’m opening and then I’m just letting it all go out in front. That’s when I’m going to hammer on it. Let’s go ahead and give it a whirl. There we go.

Not going to do much better than that one, that may b one of the better ones of today. Really feel like I got a ton of lag on that one, what were the stats on that one, Q?

Quentin: 121.5 miles per hour, and total distance was 314.2 yards.

Clay: Now one of the big themes in this entire video was making that big, powerful turn. We don’t want to set the club early and get rid of all of our body turn.

We don’t want to restrict, restrict, restrict, and get rid of our body turn. We have to load the body up if you want to hit it out of your shadow. There’s no doubt about it.

If you want to hit it far, you’re going to have to turn in the backswing. Well the problem for a lot of players is, maybe I’m getting a little bit up in age, I’m not as flexible as I was. Or maybe I’m just not comfortable making that longer swing.

Well that’s where the Power Turn section in the Top Speed Golf System can help you ingrain this forever. So go to the Instruction tab on the TSG System, on the website, click on the TSG System, and then go to the Power Turn.

Once you start to work through level one, you’re going to get a little bit better feeling with it. You’re going to see your swing speed start to pick up, and you’re going to get a little bit more comfortable.

You go to level two and level three, you’re really going to see your swing speed solidifying in those higher numbers and it’s going to feel like a comfortable swing to you.

So you just show up to the golf course and you’re automatically making that great turn like you’ve always wanted to. The only way to get that is to work through the Power Turn system.

Work through those three levels, it’ll pay dividends the rest of your life when you’re playing golf. Best of luck, and I’ll see you in the Power Turn.