Why You Need This: In this golf power lesson, you’ll learn how your right arm moves in the downswing.

You’ll get 2 simple drills to stop casting the club and to start adding power to your swing.

Here’s a summary of the drills that you’ll see in the video…

Drill #1: Elbow In

One of the more common swing faults I see is extending the right arm out and casting in the downswing.

This typically happens when players try to muscle the swing and hit the ball hard.

That’s why it’s a bit counterintuitive to keep your right elbow in towards the body and pointed down.

Imagine a laser beam coming out of your right elbow and the line points in front of your right hip.

That’ll help you keep your right elbow in.

Drill #2: Right Hand Extend Back

Squeeze your right fist as tight as you can.

If you’re doing that in the downswing, you can easily see why it’s tough to bend your right wrist back, or extend back.

You want your right wrist to lay back in the downswing to help shallow your club path.

Through contact, your right wrist should go back to a neutral position for a full release of the club.

Towards the end of the video, you’ll learn a few variability drills to help you ingrain the correct moves fast.

Watch this video now to discover how to work your right arm in this golf power lesson!

Golf Pros Featured:

Instructors Featured: Clay Ballard    

Video Duration: 5:53

Video Transcription:

All right guys, the right arm in the downswing. I know a lot of you guys out there are struggling, starting to feel like you’re casting the club in the downswing. The right arm starts to straighten out a little bit too early, and the right wrist flattens out a little bit too early.

I’m going to g over a couple simple drills, an easy way to think about this. Once we get the right idea and we practice these drills, it’s going to be very easy to get the right arm working perfectly, and to get the power in throughout the shot.

Let’s go ahead and get started.

All right guys, so it’s actually really simple once we feel the extremes of what the right wrist and the right elbow should be doing. It’s very to get into good position.

One of the things that I see players when they’re making their downswing that are struggling kind of casting that club, there’s a couple motions that end up happening. If we start to cast this club early, we’re losing some lag, we’re not getting that sharp angle here and then releasing down at the ball.

We’re burning up all our speed before we get to impact. Big time loss of speed, and it really gets familiar with getting the elbow in and then getting the wrist laid back. Which they’re not…they’re kind of counterintuitive to be honest.

The main thing that I see, is instead of the elbow tucking in, if you watch a lot of great players, Adam Scott, look at Tiger from the early 2000s, Ben Hogan, whoever you want to pick that’s a great ball striker.

One of the first moves they’re doing is they’re starting their downswing, is getting their right elbow to come in in front of their body.

Naturally, we think of I’m going to go ahead and hit this ball like I’m going to punch the ball with my right side of my body. When I do that, watch my elbow, it starts to come out away from my body.

If you imagine I had a laser, shooting right out of the tip of my elbow toward the camera right now. Well if I start to let my elbow come behind my body like that, then what’s going to happen is that laser will be shooting this direction, directly behind me.

What I want to do is imagine I have that laser shooting in front of my hip. So now it would be coming down in front of my right leg, or at least to the front side of my right hip.

Now I want those hips to be opening, I don’t want to keep my body back in just say I’m going to do this to get my elbow in front. I see a lot of players doing that when they try to get the elbow in front, they just stop their body and try to move their arms down.

That’s kind of like throwing across your body, it’s going to be very uncomfortable. We’re going to go ahead and let those hips continue to open, but at the same time we’re going to get that laser pointing in front of our right hip there.

The second piece is getting tight with the right hand. I want you to do this for me. Go ahead and make a fist as tight as you can. Squeeze your fist as tight as you can. It’s not going to be very easy to bend your wrist back this way.

When I squeeze my hand tight, when I make a fist on the golf club, this naturally flattens out. In the golf swing, what we like to have happen, is as we start that downswing not only is the elbow going in, but my right wrist is fully laid back at this point.

This would be neutral right wrist, this would be full extension, or fully laid back. As I’m starting down, I want to get that club fully laid back.

You’ll see that my left wrist is nice and flat as a result. My club is shallowing out as I’m doing that. Now I’m in a position from here, my club is really laid back, my arm is still bent, and then from there, I’m just letting everything go.

I’m going to let my right wrist go from laid back and my elbow in, to everything straightening out. This is what we talk about in the Top Speed Golf System as the Straight-Line Release.

We’re building all this energy early in the downswing. We don’t want to spend all this energy back here. We can’t get tight with that right hand because the wrist will go flat.

I’m going to store up that energy and then from there, bam, I’m letting it go. I’m releasing everything in front of the golf ball.

If you can imagine that I put a golf ball about three or four feet in front of the one that I’m hitting, I’m letting all the energy go toward that golf ball and my ball that I’m hitting is just getting in the way. Let’s go ahead and try that out.

What I want you to do is go through these reps. Number one, let’s try both extremes. Once you can feel the extremes with the elbow, it’s much easier to do.

So we’re going to come down, I want you to pause halfway down when your left arm’s about parallel to the ground. I want you to tuck that elbow in as far as you can go. That elbow would really be pointing in front of my body at that point.

Then I want you to do another rep where you tuck the elbow out as far as you can go, that would be like this, elbow is way out. Now I can start to feel those extremes, out and in, and I can get a feel for where being more tucked in is.

From this angle it looks like that, I come halfway down, there’s all the way in, there’s all the way out. So I’m starting to feel the difference in what that would feel like. I’m trying to get that tucked in as much as I can.

The second one is the right wrist. I’m going to go ahead and cast my wrist and get it to flex inward as much as possible, the wrong way. So now I’m casting the club way out here.

I can feel my right wrist pushing, and then I’m going to do another one where I flex it as much as I can, or excuse me, extend it. This is called wrist extension, as back as far as I can.

Again, looking from this way, here’s my first one. I’m casting the club, no good. Going to lose tons of speed. The second one, I’m coming down and extending the wrist back as far as I can.

So once we’ve done both of those, the reason that I’m doing this, there’s a technique when we’re talking about learning something really quickly, all the research out there shows variability training is the way to go.

If we can feel both extremes, we can immediately identify which is right and which is wrong much quicker. You’re going to save yourself hundreds if not thousands of reps to get this correctly.

So feel the extremes of the elbow, feel the extremes of the wrist, then we’re going to go ahead and put that together. Elbow in, wrist back, straight-line release.

Again, letting those hips open, going to let that body rotate on through there, and then once we’re there, let’s go ahead and do about 100 reps of those practice swings then we’ll take it out to the course and hit about 40 or 50 drives doing the exact same motion.

There we go guys. Work on that right wrist, get that to lag and then release, you’ll be ripping that driver.