Why You Need This: Today, you'll discover "Can Your Iron Swing Really Be That Easy When You Do This Drill?"

In today's lesson...

Discover the huge difference that research revealed between the trail elbow of the pros...

...and that of the majority of recreational golfers...

...that will eliminate your cast and add tons of lag to your swing!

This drill is perfect for getting your trail elbow to match that of the pros.

 

 

 

 

 

Golf Pros Featured:

Instructors Featured: Clay Ballard    

Video Duration: 13:04

Video Transcription:

Alright, so if you follow what I do, you know that I study tons of pro swings, not only from now, but throughout history. And one thing that I found in common with the right elbow, I'll get to a little bit later in this video that I found the right elbow at Impact is in a much different position than what most all recreational golfers right elbow is in.

And that's part of what's gonna help you to get rid of this casting motion, to get more lag, to really compress that golf ball at impact and really just be much more solid and consistent. How do we get into that position? The right elbow's gonna be a huge key. Before we get to that, let's get to the reason why that is, and I've set up a little, uh, training system here.

You can do the same thing at home, which is great. So this is just a, a piece of wood that I had laying around. It's a, it's an old shelf, and if we had this straight up and down, obviously that'd be 90 degrees. We're gonna lean this forward to mimic the same amount of shaft lean that you're gonna have with your irons at impact.

So here I have a pitching wedge. And you'll see if I come into contact my shaft as I hit this golf ball should be matching up with the angle of this piece of wood that's about 15 degrees leaning forward. Now, another great little benefit of this is if you have a piece of wood like this or a piece of cardboard or whatever you have laying around, I can also check the face angle if this angle is matching the angle to my target or perpendicular to that.

As I come to contact, I can look at the leaning edge of my club and see if it's perfectly square with that piece of wood. And now I know that's the position that I should be in. Now you can get really specific with this if you want to, but you don't have to get that crazy. This is just gonna get you the general idea.

Now, pro players are taking about 30% of the loft off their club at Impact. What basically that means if you have a three iron that has 21 degrees, 30% of that is seven degrees. You're gonna be leaning that down to 14 degrees of loft and impact. If you have a pitching wedge like this, which is, let's say 45 degrees to make the, the math pretty simple and most pitching wedges these days are right around there, 30% of that is 15 degrees, meaning that this piece of wood would be leaning forward 15 degrees and I would now have 30 degrees of lofted impact.

So if this club normally has 45 degrees of loft, that's with the shaft straight up and down. Now when I lean that forward to match this 15 degree piece of wood with a square face. Now the club head only has 30 degrees loft on it, so this is gonna teach you exactly what it should feel like to hit a great iron shot.

Set this up about 15 degrees leaning forward. Take out your pitching wedge right now and let's start making some swings with just the right arm only. Now what you're gonna notice happens right away is you're gonna have to open your hips and get this right knee starting to kick forward. Maybe even get the right heel to lift up slightly off the ground in order to get that shaft to feel comfortable, or this club to feel comfortable in your body.

Like you could do this as you're moving and get that much shaft lane. If my right knee is back, my heel is down, my weight is maybe too much on my right side, I'm not getting that shift to the left, it's gonna feel almost impossible to get this across my body that much. I can't even reach over there. So my body has to open up to allow me to get the amount of shuffling that I really need.

Now if we take it up the chain, my hips are also gonna open. Pro players at impact, their hips are 30 to 45 degrees open. So if this is straight toward the the ball, we're gonna go 30 to 45 degrees. This way, I'm even gonna feel like my right shoulder starts to go a little farther forward. And a cool trick to this is if you don't want to be over the top, if I take my right shoulder and put it forward this way, And this is my shoulders swinging level with the ground.

That'll really open my shoulders up, so I'm gonna do that. You'll notice how my shoulders are now really open. If I let my shoulders move in more this angle, like a Ferris wheel or up and down, you can easily just take a club, put it across your shoulders. I feel like that right shoulder goes forward, but the left shoulder goes up.

You'll notice how now my shoulders really aren't that much open. So yes, they're slightly open. Pros. On average, their rib cage is about 15 degrees open at impact, but it's not 45 like this. I'm not turning level with the ground, I'm at that tilt. So a good little cheat for that. Put the club across your shoulders.

The club, the butt into the club sticking outta your right shoulder. Should be working down toward the golf ball and not working level with the ground if you're doing this correctly. So you'll see when I do this, have the, the board in my middle of my stance where the ball position would be. Letting the right knee and the right heel kick forward, my hips open up, my right shoulder comes forward slightly.

And if I do this correctly, when I add my left arm to it, my left arm almost feels like it's coming across my body. It should feel nice and connected here like you have some control over this. And now I'm in this great impact position matching that iron to this board. Now when you look at it from down the line, it looks as though my shoulders are square now because this left arm reaching across.

That's how you know you're doing it right, and that's why so many times. You know, people get confused. They think, well, how am I gonna open up my body and then still have my shoulders square? It just all gets very confusing. Well, in reality, your whole body is opening up. You're on this angle as you're doing it, but your whole body is opening up when you do it with your right arm.

My body looks very open in this position, but when I add my left arm to it, that's what gives it the look. You see 'em with all those pros where there's shoulders are square, or appear to be square, even though the rest of the body is opening up. Now, if you're like most people, as soon as you do this and you get this feeling, you're gonna see your club face.

Do this. It's gonna open, wide open. What I mean by that is here, straight up and down the club face, the leading edge is square. And as you get into this opening up position, that face is gonna be wide open like that. So if I did that, here again, here's my club, straight up and down. Most people as they get into this position, will have their face like that.

You'll notice how the leading edge is kind of off this board. And I would have to close that until, this is really cool part, the bottom groove of my club should now be square with this board. If I have square contact now I like to do this drill. Being a right-handed person, you feel things a lot better using your right hand.

So what I like to do for this is I like to take a, a dowel, a stick, an old club that you don't care about beating up whatever it is. And you can actually hit this board. Now it's gonna be loud. But ideally what I'm gonna try to do here is I'm gonna try to recreate that impact position, and I'm gonna hit this stick on the entire board at once.

If I'm trying of dragging it through there, that would be leaning it forward too much, kind of spinning my body open. That's not good. The club, it would just hit the top of the, the board right here. If I'm flipping it, which is way more common, then I'm starting to throw it and just the tip of the stick hits it.

I'm trying to get used to feeling like what would I need to do to move my body? What would I need to do to hit this with the entire stick at once and I can just go ahead and do a couple practice swings, and I felt like right away, again, you can't tell as much on camera, but I felt like, okay, I gave that one a little nudge and purposely try to hit off the tip.

I could feel that just the tip of it hit this time, I'm gonna try to feel like more like the whole stick is on there, like my hands farther in front and give it another whack in that time. Really loud. I could tell that the entire stick hit it at the same time. So it's a cool little way. Although it might be loud, your wife may get kind of mad at you, or whoever your neighbors are might get mad at you.

But it's a cool way to feel, how would I have to move to really deliver that solid strike with the whole right side of my body? Now, that's where the pro trick comes in there. What I found is if you're gonna do this, you have to have this elbow pit facing forward like that. So as soon as my elbow pit goes out, look how that stick wants to go this way.

As my elbow pit gets in and my, the pit of my elbow is facing more toward the camera. That way, as that gets in, instead of this throwing motion with the elbow in, it turns like this, and now I can get that shuffling. So that's a big key. Now, when I measured pro players and I looked at dozens and dozens of pro players, what you'll actually see is when you put a golf ball down, imagining this is their golf ball as they come to contact here.

Their right elbow is in line with this ball, or even slightly in front of it. But if you look at recreational golfers, their throwing and their right elbow is way behind this golf ball when they make contact. So you wanna feel like your elbow is actually leading the way. And if you can get your right elbow in front of this golf ball at contact, you're gonna be a heck of a lot more consistent.

All right, so let's go ahead and give it a try with a real club now. Alright, so I've got my pitching wedge back out. We're gonna do a few reps on this. Number one, we're gonna practice knee, hip, shoulder, body, this entire club matching up this board. And I'm looking down to make sure my face is square with this board and not open like most people have it.

So I'm just doing right arm only. And I'm waiting until as I pause at impact, it's pretty much matching it up perfectly in my practice swings before I'm ready to move on. Once I can do that, I'm checking to make sure another 10, 15 reps, I'm getting my elbow as far in front of the golf ball as I can, or the the club head as I can at impact, and another 10 or 15 reps.

Once you're comfortable with that, let's put both arms on there and let's try to recreate that same feeling. So 10, 15 reps. I'm really getting that down. Now, once I've done those 10 or 15 reps, I've felt that now I'm gonna make a normal swing and I'm just gonna try to recreate that same feeling and impact.

All I'm doing differently is swinging a little bit fuller back, same exact feeling and impact, and then finishing my swing. And I've got one tip for you here at the end that's so important to making sure that you make a great swing as you're actually doing this. Let's go ahead and give it a whirl here.

Now I'm gonna try to recreate those same exact feelings. First swing of the day. So if I blow it, you'll know this drill is no good. Let's give it a whirl. There we go. Nice and solid. Nice tight little draw. And again, 148 yards with a pitching wedge. Not gonna do a whole heck of a lot better than that. So that felt really good.

Now, one thing I like about this too, is I feel very connected with my entire body. So this all feels connected when this elbow gets forward. This feels nice and tight and connected. Feels like I have a lot of control of the club face. And then from there, remember we're doing the whole right side of our body.

Only thing you wanna do to the finish is go ahead and finish all the way around. So I'm gonna take that knee toward the target. My hip, right hip toward the target, my right shoulder, all the way toward the target, and I'm gonna finish balanced over my left leg. If I can do that, then I'm gonna hit a nice solid shot and I'm gonna be able to finish that swing.

So it should be just like this knee, hip, shoulder, everything. Going more toward the target in the follow through is the only thing I need to do to finish this off. All right, let's go ahead and hit one more. That one felt pretty daggone. Good.

There we go. Dead solid on that one. Again, a nice little tight draw, 156 yards with a pitching wedge. That's about as good as I got. Now, this is a very important piece of the top speed golf system, and you see one of the things that we always talk about, one of the five real fundamentals. The only things that really matter in golf, one of those is what's called the straight line release, meaning that this club very first splits your forearms when it's about 45, pointing 45 degrees in front of where you just hit the golf ball.

You see if I get that right elbow back and I'm throwing this club my elbow's behind what would be the golf ball at impact, and I can't do that straight line release. So my elbow's back here instead of tucked in like those pros, getting the elbow in front of the golf ball and I can't release the club properly.

When you do it the right way, you have that elbow tucked, some shaf lane and then your club naturally releases on out in front. Now the key is we got it started in this video, and if you just do this video and you go out to the range and you start hitting it, great, then you wanna keep that around. You don't want that to have, have that happen for a week and then go right back to the same old stuff.

I want you to get this down for the rest of your life, and that's exactly what the straight line release is. In order to do that, you need a system. So if you remember a top speed golf, go to the instruction tab, click on the top speed golf system, and then from there, work on level one of that straight line release that's gonna build on what we talked about here today.

I wanna give you some even easier key to think of to build this into your swing forever. It's gonna feel pretty good after level one, level two, it's gonna feel pretty daggone ingrained, and by level three, you won't even have to think about it. It's part of your swing to where you can just roll up out of the car.

Walk to the range and your very first swing looks like that if you haven't even been thinking about it. Yes, today we can do it. Thinking about it, I want you to not have to think about it. I want you to be able to go up to the golf course and play great golf without even having to really worry about what you're doing with your technique.

That's exactly what the system can give you. So I challenge you to do very well. Just one video from level one in the straight line release right now, and you'll be well on your way. Let's go and get started.