Why You Need This: Today, you'll discover "Driver Basics For Consistently Straight Shots"

Did you know that hitting the ball off your driver’s sweet spot might not be your ticket to long, straight drives?

In today’s video, I’ll dispel some pretty common myths about the driver…

…and I’ll dive into the mechanics of a perfect drive…

…and how to properly control the club face, so you can hit those coveted long, straight drives that’ll make your golfing buddies jealous!

Your best drive is just a click away!

 

 

 

 

 

Golf Pros Featured:

Instructors Featured: Clay Ballard    

Video Duration: 12:33

Video Transcription:

Clay: All right, so if you want to hit the driver really daggone straight, far, hit a lot of fairways and have a blast playing golf, this is the perfect video. I got some simple trip tips for you, and I'm going to knock out a lot of misconceptions. One of those is that you don't actually want to line up straight toward the target necessarily to hit a straight shot.

You also don't want to try to keep your face square to the target all the way through impact. if you want to hit it straight. And finally, you don't want to hit the center of the sweet spot necessarily to get the straightest longest shots. We're going to dive into all those. So first let's talk about your alignment.

Now the golf swing is happening on a bit of an arc. So if I'm looking from down the line, again, my hands are swinging on this plane. The club head is swinging on a plane like this also. Now the bottom of that arc, where you contact the golf ball is not a straight line. Then it's curved. And if you imagine this, like an alignment stick being bent as this is the bottom of that arc.

So this would be a straight up and down arc or a swing that would be straight up and down. This would be straight around my body. Well, this is at an angle like this. So the bottom of the swing looks a lot more curved like that. Now in the golf swing, we want to hit up on the driver. It helps it to launch a little bit higher.

It reduces spin, which increases your distance. just a lot easier to hit it farther and hit it better if you're hitting slightly up on it. That's one of the reasons that you play the ball position with the driver off the inside of the front foot. And it's also a reason that you want to see it up fairly high, which we'll get to here in a second.

Now, given that, if you imagine the bottom of this hoop or this arc is the bottom of the swing, well, we're going to be hitting the driver. in front of the bottom of the swing. And if we're looking at that from the down the line view, that means that it's going back up to the left a little bit. So if you imagine it, I'm gonna exaggerate here a little bit.

I'm putting the low point of the swing behind the golf ball. And if you look at it from the down the line view, you'll see how that club is starting to come in slightly to the left. Now, Hogan had it right. He talked about how as you put the ball back in your stance, Your stance will get narrower and your, uh, your foot alignment would get more, um, open to where when you put it with a driver, your stance will get wider and your alignment would get more to the right.

So essentially what we're doing here, since this is on this arc, if I'm a low point, if this arc is square to the target, my club's going to be moving back up to the left. That's a little bit of a fade type swing. So if you want to make it easier on yourself, most players struggle to hit a fade or too much of a fade already.

Let's not make it any harder than it has to be. Let's tilt this until the point of our arc where we'd be hitting the golf ball is square up here and not the bottom of the arc. So basically, the bottom of our arc is going to be a little bit out to the right. Or feel like our feet are lined up slightly to the right.

Our body's lined up slightly to the right. That makes it easier to get a square path as you actually hit the golf ball. So long story short. We made that a lot more complicated than it had to be. All you need to do is line up about 5 or 10 yards to the right of the center of the fairway. I've found that helps most players to get a little bit more inside out path.

Just makes it a lot easier that way. I've also found that if you line up kind of down the right center or even right edge of the fairway, it's going to force you to hit more of a draw type swing. which is what we're going to get into next. So let's go ahead and hit one here. I'll try to hit that nice little draw, get lined up a little bit more to the right.

Let's see what happens.

There we go. I started that one out, what would be the right center of the fairway and started to draw it back in. Now that brings me to the second piece. I don't want to have the face square at contact to hit straight shots. Now this is one that took me years to figure out. I actually wasn't, I didn't really figure this out until I was on the mini tours and I always watched the players that were better than me.

Back then, I didn't know nearly as much as I do about the swing now. I was always trying to figure out what was going on and I noticed that the players that were really good, most of the ones that were better than me, I always set up with a little bit of a shut clubface. I mean that my clubface is a little bit closed like this at address.

So I always felt like I had to work a little bit to get the ball to draw and I like to play a little bit of a draw and I have this clubface closed and I tried to hold that face square through contact. Now, at that point, I felt like my swing was held together with duct tape and shoestrings. Like it was just going to fall apart at any moment, and I could never get complete control of the face.

When I looked at those better players, instead of their face being a little closed like this, I started to notice their faces were open. Heck, one of the guys that was the best player, one of the best players on this tour, won a boatload of money, seemed like he won everything. His face was like 15 degrees open, and he's hitting the ball dead straight.

And I'm thinking to myself, if my clubface was 15 degrees open and had a dress, I ain't going to be able to keep this daggone thing on the planet. It feels like it's going to slice off, off, you know, 30 yards, 40 yards to the right. Well, I tried it out. And what I realized is I was trying to control the clubface too much.

I started to switch to a feeling of letting the face open in the backswing, almost like a door hinge. So here's my square door hand, this is the club face here, I want to hit the ball square. I want that face to open in the backswing. I'm going to go ahead and let that open up, and in the downswing, I'm going to let it close.

If I had the face a little bit more open, then intuitively, because your brain is smart, it realizes, well, if my club face is a little open at address, and I feel like it opens and closes, the momentum of my club is actually closing through contact. You see, if I close the club face, And I hood it down like this, which is a lot of players do this to try to fix their slice.

They close it, thinking it'll make it easier. Well, your brain's not, it's not dumb. It knows what has to happen. That ball's gonna go dead left if I do that. So your momentum of your club head is opening to hit a good shot. If I start with it slightly open, if I let it open even more in the downswing, in the downswing, where's the momentum of my club, is releasing.

It's turning over, it's squaring up. And when the momentum of the club is going that way, I don't have to manipulate it so much. The ball wants to draw all under its own power. So here I'm going to open up the face a little bit extra. And again, I'm going to try to hit a nice draw with a slightly inside out path.

There we go. Hit that one low and hard. Nice, nice, solid shot. 275 on the carry, which is pretty good considering it was a fairly low shot. 317 So definitely happy with that. If you're struggling to hit it straight again, let the face open, let the momentum of it close down as you're coming through the shot.

So the next thing I want to go over is you don't always want to hit the dead center of the sweet spot to have the straightest longest drive. So I'm going to take some Dr. Scholl's Odorex odor fighting spray powder with sweat match technology. Everybody always asks me which one this is. The yellow can shows up the best on these clubs.

They make one that's just made for spraying your golf club. And it's not as good as this, to be honest with you. Spray that on there. Now, if I hit the dead center of the sweet spot, yes, it will be straight. But for most players, what I've seen, they struggle to fade the ball a little bit too much, or it's inconsistent.

One of them fades, one of them snap hooks. And lots of distance is killed by getting too much on the heel. When I see players that are playing their worst, it's almost always a heel shot. That adds spin to it, it kills your distance, and it really just makes it much more inconsistent. The reason is, whenever you hit off the heel, the clubhead is actually moving slower than when you hit off the toe.

So again, the clubhead is closing like I was talking about, everybody's clubhead is closing to some degree as they're hitting. The heel is moving anywhere from 8 to 12 miles an hour slower than the toe, which means the sweet spot is moving, you know, 4, 5, 6 miles an hour slower, uh, faster than the heel. So if I hit one off the heel here...

I'm going to try to intentionally hit one off the heel and you'll see that last one, like I said, 317. Let me go ahead and give it a good shot swing here. I'll try to hit it off the heel, do my best and see what it does to my distance.

There we go. So again, usually it's a little bit of a fade, but like I said, it can be inconsistent. The club head just twist around. I went from 317 to 276. Now maybe your normal drive goes 220. Doesn't matter the distance. Your normal is 220. The heel shot goes 180. So there, as you can see, much, much, much lower on the face, much more on the heel.

That's going to kill your consistency. I want you to spray this face. And what I want you to do is a, it's called interleaving drill. It's been proven to help you speed up your improvement by up to 11 times faster. I want you to draw a vertical line with your finger on the sweet spot like this. It doesn't have to be anything fancy.

Just draw it like that right on the sweet spot. And then I want you to alternate six shots. I want you to get one on the toe. One on the heel, one on the toe, one on the heel. And you keep trying to hit one on the toe until you can successfully do it. As soon as you hit a successful one on the toe side, you move back to the heel.

The only rule here, just the center of that mark has to be on the toe side. You don't have to put the whole mark over here. I don't want you to, you know, knocking it way off the toe and the heel and going all over the face. A millimeter off the toe is perfectly fine. That counts as a toe shot. Then you go a millimeter off the heel.

So anywhere from all the way over on the very end of the toe to one millimeter on the toe, any of that's fine. I just want you to gain an awareness of where you're hitting on the clubface. So again, if I go ahead in here and swing again, if I want to hit a high one and a hard one, I'm going to hit it slightly on the toe and a little bit higher on the face.

That's going to get me the most distance. And nothing beats, if you don't have this Odorex powder, you know, you're not spraying your club. You're just leaving a lot in the bag. You could be hitting your driver so much better with just a little bit of feedback like that. Let's go ahead and give it a whirl.

There we go. Hit that one pretty hard. Back up to 307 again, and you'll see a little bit on the toe on that one. So when you're hitting off the heel, inconsistency, 20 or 30 yards really, really easily there. Now, None of this is going to matter, really matter. We're not going to play our best if we can't get some easy distance.

So this is teaching us how to square up the club path. It's teaching us how to hit a little bit more up on it with our ball position, with our alignment. Teach us how to get the most out of it where they strike the face. And all that's going to make you hit it a lot more consistent and a lot more solid.

But if you don't have the speed, if you don't have an effortless speed, what you're going to tend to do is try to swing harder. to get the speed and all that's going to go down the drain. You have to be able to get speed in a way that doesn't feel like you're putting out tons and tons of effort where you're going to arm it and muscle it and you're going to lose feel for this club head again.

So, biggest piece of that is what I call a power turn, one of the five fundamentals of the system, top speed golf system. And we have to make that good shoulder turn, but we don't want to feel restricted when we're doing that. And I want to walk you through a series of drills that are going to help you to make that shoulder turn but not feel incredibly tight while you're doing it.

And it's going to be built into your swings that you don't have to think about anymore. To be honest, swing tips and one single video can only do so much. They're going to help in the short term. They're going to help get you on the right track. But unless we ingrain that to where we don't have to think about it, it doesn't do us a ton of good down the road.

So what I want you to do is head on over to the power turn. If you remember top speed golf, click on the instruction tab, go to the top speed golf system, the power turn. As you work through level one, you're going to start to get the hang of it. As you work through level two. All of a sudden, you're not going to have to think about it very much.

You're just getting reminded of it with the drills, and all your shots are going farther and farther. You don't feel like you're having to muscle it. As you get to level 3, you're loading up really well. You feel very fluid. And the best part about it, you don't even realize you're doing it. So, I used to struggle a little bit with a turn when I swung a lot slower than I do now.

And when I videotaped my swing, it was a lot of work to try to get my shoulders to turn more. It felt like I couldn't do it. Well, I learned some things with my lower body that freed up my upper body, which I'm going to train you in the power turn. Now, also, once I did it enough, and once I ingrained it with the drills that I'm going to show you, I turned around two years later, three years later.

I haven't even thought about the power turn in forever because I naturally do it. And when I look at the video, I have this great turn. This big shoulder turn really loaded up and I hit it a whole heck of a lot farther. So I want to show you how to do that. Head on over to the power turn right now. Let's go and get started.