Why You Need This: In this video, you'll learn a great golf tip for forward shaft lean.

Why is that important?

You need to get more forward shaft lean in order to hit the ball solidly like the pros.

PGA Tour players are delofting their clubs.

For a pitching wedge with about 45 degrees of loft, at impact they're taking off around 15% of the loft.

This delofting of the club allows for more solid ball striking.

However, many amateur golfers are flipping the club and not hitting with any shaft lean.

You can make contact with the ball, but you're not going to get much compression on the ball.

Here's my tip that'll help you get more shaft lean at impact...

First, make sure your hips and shoulders are open at impact.

Your hips should be open by around 45 degrees...

And your shoulders by around 20 to 30 degrees.

Being open at impact makes it easier to hit with forward shaft lean.

If your hips and shoulders are closed, it's really difficult to get any forward shaft lean.

Practice this feeling by pausing your swing near impact and checking your hips and shoulders.

Also, make sure your left wrist is protracted out for forward shaft lean.

Do about 30 reps to ingrain this feeling.

Now you'll be in a good position to compress your shots.

Next, practice full swings.

Watch this video now for a brilliant golf tip for forward shaft lean...

And compress the heck out of your shots!

Golf Pros Featured:

Instructors Featured: Clay Ballard    

Video Duration: 4:24

Video Transcription:

All right guys, if you really want to compress that ball, hit it dead solid, PGA Tour players on average are delofting the club by about 30 percent at impact. So if we’re using a pitching wedge, got about 45° of loft on it.

At impact, they’re taking off 15° of loft. It’s only got about 30° of dynamic loft, or loft on the club face when you hit the ball. We need to be able to do this to hit that nice, crisp, clean, compressed golf shots.

A lot of times if you’re feeling like you’re flipping with your right hand, that’s not happening, our club shaft is straight up and down, or I even see players with the shaft leaning back, and now the ball is rolling up the face, it doesn’t have that good compression on it.

So I’ve got a great tip for you guys that have been working on this. One of the things that happens a lot of times whenever we’re working on stopping coming over the top, so almost everybody when they start out, you make a golf swing, you come over the top swinging right to left across this ball.

Your ball flies out there and it has a big slice on it. So we try to stay more and more closed with our body, keep our body behind the ball, and then come more from the inside.

So you can see how my hips and shoulders are closed, that’s a very common feeling when we’re trying to come more from the inside.

A lot of times what we do is we over do this. The proper impact, if I go ahead and show you a PGA Tour player, if we pause them at impact, their hips will be roughly 45° open at contact.

So my hips are about like this, if I’m looking from down the line, we’re going to be here, just like that. So my hips are going this way. If you look at my shoulders, my chest itself is actually going to be open.

The average for Tour is about somewhere between 20 and 30° open with the chest. So what this means is, my hips are 45° open, my shoulders appear to be square, but if I drop my left shoulder off and behind my back, you’ll see that my chest is actually out in front here.

It’s going to be opened up to this golf ball. That’s really crucial in making sure that I have the body positions to get that forward shaft lean and to be able to compress that golf ball.

If my chest is too closed, I can’t really work my arms up in front of the golf ball, I’ve got to get my chest a little bit open.

Now the reason it appears square is because our left arm is protracted when we’re hitting this golf ball. So if I go to contact position there, again, as I’m making contact, my left bicep is against my left pec here. My arm is pretty tight against my chest.

It’s not until after impact that that starts to fly away from my chest. So if we’re looking from down the line, again, as I go to contact, if I was to take my left arm off the club, now my chest is open and I’ve gotten a position where I can get this forward shaft lean on my club shaft, and I can deloft that club to compress the golf ball.

As my left arm is kind of protracted, and my left upper bicep is against my chest, now we’re seeing that it looks as though my shoulders are square even though my chest is open. So that’s very confusing a lot of times for players.

What I’d like for you guys to do, go ahead and do about 20 or 30 reps when you pause at impact and feel those key checkpoints. Number one, my shoulders or my hips should be about 45° open.

My chest, 20 or 30° open. My left arm is protracted to where now it’s tight against my upper chest, and then I’ve got a good 10 to 15° of forward shaft lean with a wedge, with longer irons it’s going to be a little bit less than that, obviously.

So I’m now in a good position where I can really compress that golf shot, compress that golf ball, really, really key to get your upper body lined up that way.

We’re going to do about 100 practice reps, just pausing in those positions. Then we’re going to go ahead and go into the full swing where now I’m getting a good turn going back. There’s my impact position. After impact I can go ahead and let this left arm fly away from the body.

As I finish, my left arm is going to be completely opened up away from my chest like that. That’s completely fine. So we’re not trying to pin and drag this club through impact, we’re letting it flow away from our body.

We’re letting all the momentum of the club go out away from my body, but for that split second at impact, that’s the position that we’re going to be in.

So another 100 repetitions going in slow motion. Once we tie this all together, we’re going to be able to get that nice forward shaft lean and really compress this golf ball.

There we go, guys. Go through those drills, do the pausing reps, and it’s really going to help your forward shaft lean.