Why You Need This: Today you'll discover, "Has Your Driver Swing Left You?  How to Get It Back"

If you're like most, you've had those days where YOU show up to the golf course...

...but your SWING does not.

Fortunately, I've got the perfect drill that takes you step by step to find your swing on those frustrating days.

It all begins by figuring out what your club face is naturally doing that day...

...and knowing what to do to correct it (including a trail wrist trick to get into the correct position at the 1:08 mark).

Before you know it, you'll be back to blasting the ball and controlling the club face better than ever!

 

 

Golf Pros Featured:

Instructors Featured: Clay Ballard    Quentin Patterson    

Video Duration: 9:04

Video Transcription:

G113. Has Your Driver Swing Left You? How to Get It Back

Clay Ballard: Do you ever have a round where you just completely can’t hit the driver? You can’t get it on the face, it’s curving all over the place, and you don’t have any power on top of that?

Well, I have a sure-fire drill. We’re going to start slow with nice, solid contact. Then we’re going to gradually build getting the ball straighter and straighter. Then finally, we’re going to add some swing speed so you start hitting your farthest, best drives.

Q is going to read some of the FlightScope numbers for me, talk about a lot of the details. Let’s go ahead and jump in.

All right, so here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to start out slow, and we’re going to gradually build up from there. Every time you hit a couple good shots that are both straight and solid, then you build the speed a little bit.

So let’s start out with the driver here. We’re going to make some really smooth, easy swings and we’re only going to hit it about, maybe 150 yards, somewhere around in there. That would be the intent.

Here, I’m just going to try to hit just barely over the water here. When we’re doing this, you’re going to make a little shorter swing. I want you to really focus in on when you’re starting your downswing, get that weight moving to the left and get this club kind of lagging behind.

So my body’s opening up, but my club is staying from the inside here. Now the way I’m going to do this, is I’m going to feel like my right wrist is angled back like this.

I don’t want my wrist to be flat, I want my right wrist to be angled back almost like the palm of my hand is facing out kind of behind the golf ball, when my hand is in front of my right thigh.

It’s going to look like that. My right elbow is going to be tucked in. That kind of gets me in a great position to where now the club’s lagging behind.

Because my wrist isn’t toward the sky, it’s turned down, the face is squaring up early and I’m really just kind of locked in here to where I can deliver that club into the ball really nice and square.

Let’s start out here. Again, a little easy swing, and I’m going to try to hit it straight, getting in that position.

There we go, little bit to the right on that one. That ball sliced just a little tiny bit, but I’m going to try to keep it at that distance until I get one going dead straight.

It was nice and solid, be nice and smooth to make sure that you make good contact, but I’m going to keep on working at this distance until I get a dead straight one.

How far, Q, did that one go in the air?

Quentin Patterson: That one went 208 in the air, and the club head speed was about 90 miles per hour.

Clay: OK, so I took a nice, easy swing. 90 miles an hour. I’m going to keep it at that 200 range. The only difference is, here just like if you’re having a bad round, maybe that ball sliced a little bit, I’m going to adjust to get that ball flying straight.

Here’s how I’m going to do that. When I’m slicing, I’m coming in and the face is just too open, I’m not releasing the club enough.

I want you to go ahead and release the club, pause here when the club is parallel with the ground in the follow through, and I want that face releasing a little bit more.

If I slice, the face is too much this way. If I hook, the face is too much that way. So for that one, I felt like I’m about here. I’m going to feel like I turn it on over a little bit more.

This face is releasing a little bit more to get that ball to draw a little bit. So I’m going to make another swing, nice and easy, get the face to turn on over a little bit more as I come through the shot. That should straighten it out. Let’s give it a whirl.

There we go, dead straight. On a string, ball didn’t curve at all. Basically, right toward my target and I think it was about 200 yards. Similar to that?

Quentin: Yep, so it was 185 total distance. That one went a little bit lower. Club head speed was about the same, 90.3 miles per hour.

Clay: OK, so I had a nice straight one there. I’m ready to build a little bit of speed onto it. So I’m going to go a little bit faster on this one, and again, I’m going to try to have the same feeling of me rolling the face over a little bit more to straighten this shot out. Let’s give this one a try.

All right, so on that one, again, another little bit of a slice. These are shots that you’re going to be hitting here, so I’m going to feel like I release the face a little bit more. I turn it on over.

Now, that’s a great example of what’s really going to happen. You’re not going to get up in this drill and start just hitting lasers down the middle of the fairway if you’re having a bad day.

You’re going to do what I did in the example there. You’re going to start slicing some. Then maybe on the next one, you turn it over a little bit more and you actually begin to over hook it.

It’s going to feel a little wild here at first. You have to find that middle zone. So if I start to hook one, so I do the same thing, I swing a little bit faster, and all of a sudden a duck hook one to the left.

That’s me really rolling the hands way too fast and now the face is getting too turned over this way. I’ve overdone the compensation that I talked about earlier.

So what we’re trying to feel here, is what all great players do through impact. They all control the club face very well coming through impact.

The first key to that is getting in this position to where now the club’s lagging behind, your body’s opening up. I’m in a spot where I can’t hit good shots.

The second thing is feeling the momentum of the club releasing more or releasing less to get that ball straighter. One misconception that people have and what I don’t want you to do, is I don’t want you to steer the club.

To feel like you’re using your hands and arms to push the club in this position or more in this position to straighten out, or to get it to draw more or less. I want you to change the momentum of the club head.

The momentum of how much that club head wants to turn over and release or the momentum of how that club head wants to stay a little bit more square.

You shouldn’t feel like you’re manipulating at all, you should feel like you’re just letting the club turn over more, or letting the club stay a little bit more open.

So let’s go ahead and give another one a whirl here, and I’m going to swing a little bit faster. Now here’s the key. So we’ve worked on the tempo, we’ve got in a good position to hit it solid.

Then we we’ve worked on straightening the ball out and started to add a little bit more speed. Now we’re hitting some straight shots, but they’re just not going very far.

How do I really crank up the speed to where I’m hitting some really good solid long ones? The big key here now, is turning more and more. So I can only put speed into the club right here at the handle.

The farther I can make this handle move, the more power, the more speed I’m going to be able to have. If I’m making these little short swings, handle’s only going back to here.

I’ve only got from here to there to accelerate this club, this very short amount of time. As I get longer and longer, now I have more space and more time to accelerate this handle and get more club head speed.

Here’s the key to that. I want you to think about the back. If there’s a belt loop in the back of your pants, when you’re at the top of the swing, I want that belt loop facing the target.

That can be a little scary, especially if you’ve been hitting the driver wild. That’s why we want to slow it down first, get it going straight. But after you get a little straighter, I want you to feel like you’re really rotating.

Let this left leg loosen up, let the back of your pants be facing the target. Let your shoulders turn all the way away to where the back of your left shoulder’s pointing the ball.

Now I’m really loaded up here and I can get a lot more speed. So let’s go ahead and see what that looks like when I really wind up and I give it everything I’ve got.

That may be as good as any shot I’ve ever hit in my life, that was killed. That’s as good as I’m going to do there.

So I really focused on winding up, I gave it a good aggressive acceleration through the ball, and I felt like I used the momentum of the club to release it and square up the face. So, what did that one say, Q?

Quentin: Club head speed went up to about 121 miles per hour, total distance 317.

Clay: Yeah, so that was really nice and solid. The only way I could get there, though, is by a stair-stepping approach. I don’t go up a stair step, a little bit more distance, a little more speed, until I hit it straight first.

Now one thing that many people might kind of gloss over, is that turn. A lot of people don’t realize just how important that is. There’s some secrets to doing this the right way.

A PGA Tour player on average is going to rotate their shoulders about 120° in the backswing. So if at the ball is 90°, they’re going to be 120° actually past the ball.

Now if you’re like most people, you’re probably thinking already, I don’t think I can turn 120°. I don’t think that’s probably possible.

But there’s actually some tricks to making this work correctly to where even if you’re not very flexible, you can still get that big turn and start hitting your drives 20 or 30 yards farther. You get to loosen the left leg.

We have to do some specific things with the way we turn our shoulders, but I go over all that in the Power Turn section.

So if you go to the Instruction tab at the top of your page, click on the Top Speed Golf System, click on the Power Turn, and as you follow through that, and you do the drills that I prescribe in there, you’re going to find yourself without even having to think about it, making a bigger and bigger turn.

Having more club head speed, having more power, being able to get to the par 5 that you can never get to, usually. Having an iron into the par 4s instead of trying to hope that a wood gets to those long par 4s in two.

It just makes golf a whole heck of a lot more fun when you can crank the ball. So, go to the Power Turn section, start on level one, and really ingrain this.

You’re going to have a blast doing it, and you’re going to have a lot more fun when you’re 20 and 30 yards in front of your buddies. Let’s go and get started.