Why You Need This: Today, you'll discover "Compress The Ball Like a Pro - Awesome Student Before & After"

In today's lesson, Professor Q shows the awesome progress that Scott, one of his online students, made working on forward shaft lean and compressing the ball.

You'll see a before and after of Scott's swing and hear a breakdown from Q on what they worked on and how he got Scott to the same degree of shaft lean that the pros typically have with their irons.

And... what you can try too.

 

 

 

 

 

Golf Pros Featured:

Instructors Featured: Quentin Patterson    

Video Duration: 8:22

Video Transcription:

Q: Hey, Quinton Patterson here, and I'm really excited to share with you the awesome progress that Scott, an online student of mine, has made with his swing. So Scott came to me struggling to get some shaft lean, really wanted to learn how to compress the ball, and this is his before swing here on the left.

So if we watch as he comes into impact. You're going to see how his hands are more in the middle of his body. Now, I know the shaft is really blurry, which is why I drew this red line in here. I drew that red line from the middle of his hands down to the back of the ball. And you can see that's a 96 degree angle, which means he has about 6 degrees of shaft length.

Now, if we look on the right hand side here, this is going to be his after swing. If I draw that same line on there, you can see he has 104 degrees, which means he has 14 degrees of shaft lean, and that's around where we're going to see the pros when they're hitting their irons. Now, when you have an impact position like the one you see here on the left, you're going to tend to struggle with weak shots because you're adding loft, right?

You're also going to tend to struggle with thin shots. Um, you're gonna struggle with taking divots. Um, and if you do take a divot, you're gonna tend to have a toe down divot. You're not gonna have that nice dollar bill square divot. So, just to also put this in a little bit more perspective, you know, Scott went from six degrees of shuffling to 14 degrees of shuffling.

That's an eight degree difference. So if you think about it, there's about three to four degrees of loft differences between clubs. So essentially he's taking a pitching wedge. And turning it into an eight iron on the right hand side swing. So you can imagine how much more compressed, um, and well hit that shot is.

You're just going to be more consistent. And more powerful when you're hitting the ball this way. So first let's talk about the adjustments that we made. And then I'll talk about the drill that we did, um, starting out to get, to get to this point. So we made some adjustments in his setup. Number one, what we did is we got more, um, spine angle, right?

So you can see on the left hand side, he's kind of straight up and down with the spine and on the, um, the right hand side here, you can see he's more angled away. The reason why that's important is when you come into contact. You want to be more angled away. And if you're kind of straight up and down at address, you're going to tend to stay that way throughout the swing.

So you can see here at impact, Scott is definitely more angled away. That's going to make it a lot easier to release that club out in front. Another thing that we did is we strengthen the grip. So if we look at his left hand side here, what I look at is this crease that's between the thumb and the hand.

And we can see that that's pointing kind of straight up more toward the chin area. That's going to be a weaker grip. And if we look on the right hand side, now we've got that crease pointing. You know, more toward the middle of that shoulder. That's going to be a stronger grip. Why is this important? Uh, well, the reason is that part of the reason that we released the club early is releasing the club is a way to get the club face from open to square.

It's a closing mechanism, right? So if we use a stronger grip. The face is already a little bit more closed versus a weaker grip, and it just makes it a lot easier to release that club out in front. The last thing that we did is we just got a little bit wider with the stance. Um, the reason why we did that is that if we get a little bit wider with the stance, then it makes it a little bit easier to rotate through the shot.

That's one thing that we need to be doing when we're trying to get that club to release out in front, is to rotate through the shot. If you don't rotate through the shot and your body stalls, The club is just going to want to release because of the forces that are acting on it So now what i'm going to do is i'm going to go over the drill The first stage that we did to get him started on this journey All right.

So let's talk about the drill that scott did to help him get all that shaftling This is stage one of that drill all you're going to need is an alignment stick for this You can get these alignment sticks at about any home improvement store I think I got this at home depot for a couple bucks. So you're gonna take this alignment stick You're gonna put half of it down the shaft.

You're going to put the other half out the butt end. When I hold this, I like to hold it in my fingers. I think that's the most comfortable place to hold it. Right? So what we're going to do is we're just going to start out with some practice swings first, and we're going to get in our setup position here.

You're going to notice that your hands are probably going to need to be a little bit more ahead for this. This is totally fine. In fact, they have found that people who, who have their hands more forward to address, tend to have their hands more forward at impact. Doesn't mean you necessarily will, just means that they tend to have them more forward at impact.

It's also more conducive to have your hands forward if you have a stronger grip. So if you use a stronger grip, like the adjustment that Scott made in our, in our lessons, that may be better for you to have the hands more forward as well. So we're going to get in our setup here. And what I want you to do is I just want you to bring this club back.

to where it's parallel with your chest now. And when I do that, what's going to happen is I'm going to bend back my trail wrist, and I'm going to bend my trail arm a little bit. I can't tuck my arm into my body here. The other thing that I want to look out for is the clubface. I want to make sure that this clubface.

is angled down toward the ground a little bit. I don't want it angled up toward the sky at all. Remember what I mentioned earlier is that part of the reason why we released the club early is it's a way to get the club face closed, right? So if I have that face open right there, I'm just going to want to release this club early to get it back to close.

So I want to angle down a little bit. So that way it's already in a really good position. And all I have to do is turn my body through, right? So again, I'm going to go back to that position here. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to rock this club back to about a half swing, and I'm going to turn through.

And my goal here is to keep this club in this alignment stick parallel to my chest. I really want to feel like I'm turning my chest through, and I'm going to feel my lead arm is really pinned to my chest. I'm going to feel like my trail arm. is bent back. I'm not, I'm not doing any throwing action here.

That's a big thing that I see in people who flip the club is they really straighten out the arm like this, right? We're going to keep this structure with the trail arm. We're going to turn that body through. So that's going to look like this. I'm even going to be like that in my finish. Right? So again, I'm going to rock this back to where the club's parallel to my chest and I'm going to rock it back about half swing and then turn through like this.

So That was slow motion there, but if I do a normal rep it would look like this. You can see in my finished position here, how the club is still parallel to my chest here. Now, you may notice that I have this, uh, wadded up piece of paper here. Now, this is something that I highly recommend for golfers because I think a lot of golfers think that they have to have a ton of time to work on their golf game and work on their swing.

You can work on things from home. You just have to be a little bit creative. So this is just a wadded up piece of paper and I use this basically as a golf ball. Um, it, it, it helps me to be able to have something to hit at and I'm not going to damage anything. I don't have to have a big simulator set up or a net and a mat and everything else.

Now I'm just hitting this off my carpet here in my office. I don't really care that much about this carpet. Uh, but if you have really nice carpet in your house or something like that, you may want to, Use an old mat from a dollar store or maybe you have an old floor mat hanging around that you could use and you could hit off of that and it would, it would work just fine.

So what I would do is I just put in lots of reps, getting, getting used to this motion. Right. And that would be stage one of this drill. Now, Scott had a huge advantage, uh, being able to work through this drill, um, and work through the next stages with feedback from an instructor. Now, if you're watching this video on the day that we release it, that means that I'm opening up spots, um, right now.

So if you'd like to work with me, work on this, work on getting some more shaft lean, or we could work on anything in your game, um, Um, I love working on putting and shipping and all that as well. Maybe you struggle with chunk shots, um, maybe your shots are, uh, slicing or whatever it might be. I'd love to help you with whatever it is.

So if, like I said, if you're watching this video on the day that it's being released, it means I've opened up some spots below this video somewhere. You should be able to find a spot where you can click and grab your spot. Now I do have a limited number of people that I can work with. So if you happen to see that the spots are full, no worries.

Just click the link to join the waiting list. So that way, whenever I open up spots in the future, you can sign up at that time. Right? So hope you're playing great. Hope this drill helps and I'll talk to you next time.