Why You Need This: Today you'll answer the question, "Have You Been Hitting Your Irons Wrong Your Whole Life?"

If you've ever wondered how the pros can get so much more distance from their irons than you...

...then you're going to love the drill in today's video.

You'll discover the 2 keys to getting the most distance from your irons...

...and the common mistake made that destroys most of the power in your swing...

 

Golf Pros Featured:

Instructors Featured: Clay Ballard    Quentin Patterson    

Video Duration: 11:25

Video Transcription:

Clay Ballard: All right, I have my pitching wedge out here, we’re at the 150-yard marker. I’m going to talk about one of the most powerful drills that you can do to get the most distance out of your irons.

It’s actually really counterintuitive. I’m going to feel like I slam my club into the ground kind of where this orange stick is going.

Then I’ going to rotate through just like the pros are doing, and I can get some crazy distance. I can’t wait to share it with you because I know it’s going to be one of the best iron drills that you’ll see.

Let’s go ahead and give it a whirl.

There we go, hit that one good. Q’s got my FlightScope X3 radar out, what do we see with the distance there?

Quentin Patterson: 157.5.

Clay: So 157 yards with the pitching wedge. I can’t wait to show you how to get that same kind of power in your swing.

So let’s talk about one of the things that I see that just kills everybody’s swing speed with their irons. What happens here is we turn off our body, we don’t get a lot of rotation through the shot.

I see almost all players doing this. Then the hands and arms have to take over and kind of flip and push the club past their body.

Ideally what we’d have, is tons of lag, really load the angle of this club up and then rotate on through the ball as fast as we can. And as that lag releases, it’s going to be releasing in front of the golf ball.

That gets the whip of the lag release, that lag releasing through the shot. That gets that club to kind of whip through contact and also gets you all the power from your body rotating through.

Let me go ahead and walk you through kind of a counterintuitive drill that’s actually going to get you these correct feelings.

I promise you, probably never seen this before and it’s definitely not something that you would have come up with on your own. It was always surprising when I first saw this drill.

So this is a drill from Harry Vardon, way back I don’t know what it’d be, late 1800s, early 1900s when Vardon kind of came on the scene.

The drill from a couple of his books, I’ve seen this drill mentioned a few times online but it’s a really cool drill.

Basically what you would do is set up with your golf ball, normal stance, normal ball position, and then I would put kind of a club going down the target line toward where I’m hitting the golf ball, through the center of my feet.

That’s going to be kind of where the center of this would be. Then I’m going to put another stick kind of pointing toward the golf ball.

Now the angle of this stick doesn’t matter that much, it could be this angle, it could be that angle, it’s just kind of a general idea of what you want to be doing when you’re making this swing.

Now what I’m going to be feeling here, is I’m going to feel like as I make my downswing, my body’s going to rotate open, I’m letting my body whip on through, but I feel like I’m slamming my club and arms down kind of lined up with this orange stick.

So I’m slamming my arms down, and I’m rotating through, and that’s what squares it up. Now a great way to feel this, if you have an impact bag, you can see just how powerful this is.

If I set this impact bag kind of on the intersection of that, and now when I set up to do this drill, again, I’m going to feel like my hands and arms as I swing are just slamming this club down into the ground as hard as I can.

I actually put, don’t put the zipper up on your impact bag, you might actually bust through your impact bag because that’s just how powerful your arms are.

Think this is how you chop wood. You’d have crazy club head speed if you just slammed this club down as fast as you can, but that’s the sensation we’re going to have.

Here going to the top, and then I am trying to line that club up with that orange stick on the ground, and I am just slamming it as hard as I can down in the ground.

I guarantee I could swing way faster than I ever could in a golf swing when I’m doing that.

Now once I’ve done that say 10-15 times, and you get familiar with that, I mean you can hear the pop on that. It’s got some real power when you’re moving that way.

Why can’t we do that in the golf swing? Well, we can. The only difference in that drill and the golf swing is the rotation of the body.

As I start to slam my hands and arms down, at the same time, I open my body up. As my body opens up, now that brings the club face square through the target.

So here, if I was to keep my body closed like I talked about is a big problem with most golfers, I slam that club in the ground, I’m going to be whacking the stick back here.

But as I open my body up, look how that brings the club forward, it brings it on plane, and now I can hit shots toward the middle of the green.

So again, I’m just going to slam this into the ground, and rotate as hard as I can as I’m doing this. There we go, another good shot. Just a little left-center.

Hit that one a little slightly off the toe but not bad. It’s going to be over 140 yards, probably. With a pitching wedge, that’s not bad for a slight mis-hit.

Let’s talk about a couple of the keys here that are really important when you’re doing this drill. Number one, when you’re throwing the club, feel like you have a good amount of lag.

So what I mean by this is, when I’m throwing this club down like this, I want to feel that sharp angle, just like if I was going to chop a piece of wood with an ax.

Same motion, I’m letting that head lag behind, and I just let it fly at the bottom of the swing. So I’m not doing this, and to be honest, I wouldn’t see anybody doing that if they just naturally let themselves try to hit this stick.

But it really gets you this feeling of tons of lag. It makes it really easy to where I just swing freely, and that ball is going to have a lot of speed just because my club is lagging so much.

It feels really, really tight, tons and tons of lag when I do this drill. So there as you can see on camera, very sharp angle with the hands and arms. Again, those are pretty hard-hit pitching wedges.

Number two, once you start to add the opening, the rotating on through there, this is a big key for almost every golfer I see because when you start to rotate open what happens with most people?

Well, the club comes outside. I’m chopping this way into the ball, I’m coming down too steep. I’m coming over the top.

As soon as I open up my body, I’m steep and over the top. That’s where this inside swing comes from. The more I get inside, the more I can rotate open.

Now as you rotate open when you’re feeling like this, feel like your left arm is kind of cinched across your chest.

If my hips, my shoulders, my body stops and I’m pushing through there, look how I get the chicken wing, my arm flies off my body.

I don’t want to do that. That’s me stopping my body and feeling like I’m pushing with my hands and arms, big separation here.

If I do this the right way, as I open my body, I feel like if I stuck my hand between my armpit and my bicep of my left arm and my pec of my left, into my armpit.

So my finger’s in my armpit, it would be so tight, so connected that I couldn’t even get my hand out of there. It should feel really cinched in there to where now you’re super connected.

That’s going to help you to hit a lot straighter when you’re doing this also. So again, you see how my arm doesn’t fly off my body, I don’t get a chicken wing when I’m doing this.

There we go, and you see how I rotate all the way on through the shot. That’s a lot of that because I’m coming through the ball. I’m opening up.

I don’t have to worry, I can open up as much as I want because the club is inside, now it’s tracking right down the line.

Now number three, what happens if I hit too far behind the golf ball? So a lot of times, let’s go ahead and get rid of these sticks, you get the idea of the drill.

A lot of times when you start to go more from the inside, that gets you wanting to hit behind this golf ball. The piece we just talked about is going to help with that.

If I hit this tight and I rotate everything open, that’s going to again see me grounding out back here, that carries the club forward and that carries my divot in front of the golf ball every single time.

If I was to close my eyes, I would still be able to hit that divot in front without even looking at the golf ball. It’s just the natural momentum of my body is carrying it out in front.

Number two, I want to feel like I get a little bit of a weight shift as I’m doing that. So now as I open up, everything’s going to be in front of the golf ball. My divot is going to be in front of the golf ball.

So as you’re doing this, weight to the left, and again, focus on pinching that arm as you rotate. That’s going to bring your divot out in front of this golf ball every single time.

Feel like as you start your transition, even though you’re throwing back here, your body is opening and getting up here.

So it’s two kind of polar opposites. One, your arms are throwing this way and your body’s opening that way. When you put both those together, that’s what gets that sling shot approach to this drill.

Let’s go ahead and hit one more and notice how the divot is going to be in front of the golf ball. There we go, and that one was really long, maybe one of the longer ones that I’ve hit because it was nice and solid.

That one went all the way to the back of the green. What was the distance on that one, Q?

Quentin: 161.2.

Clay: Yeah, so the longest one on there. So I’m telling you, if you do this drill, maybe you won’t hit 160-yard pitching wedges, but I’ll be you hit them 10, maybe 15 yards farther than you are now.

Now one sneak peak into something I didn’t hit on very much here, but I think is a really cool side effect of this. Whenever you open up your body, so if I get my body rotating open, notice how that gets my hands farther in front of this golf ball.

When I rotate my body open like that, my hands are going to be leading and I’m actually taking a little bit of loft off this club. That’s going to get my higher ball speeds and that’s going to get me more distance.

I’m going to even exaggerate that here, and you’ll see how my hands are leading the way coming through contact.

There we go, and I see I hit that one really hard, but I took some loft off of it, and again, that one’s going to be toward the back of the green, probably mid 150s on the Flight there.

But it wasn’t because I was flipping, I had this secret kind of opening up and that got my hands leading in front.

So follow that key, and I guarantee you’re going to hit some of your farthest iron shots ever.

Now as I mentioned with this video, as I open up that’s going to get my hands leading in front of this golf ball. That’s a big key to being consistent.

If you’ve been following us in the Top Speed Golf System, you’re familiar with the Top Speed Golf System, you’ll realize that’s the Straight-Line Release.

I want to get my body opening up first, my club lagging behind so that my hands are leading and then my club doesn’t catch up and release, fully release, until out here in front.

Now you can take that exact same idea we did with this drill, open the body, get the club to lag in behind, and then change your intention to in front of the golf ball.

What’s going to happen is the ball’s just going to get in the way. So if you add the Straight-Line Release to what we did in this video, it’s going to kind of tie the whole thing in together.

But if you really want to ingrain that, you need to follow that step-by-step. So go to the Instruction tab at the top of the Top Speed Golf’s website.

Click on the Top Speed Golf System, and then go to the Straight-Line Release section. Once you work through level one, level two, level three, you get familiar with those drills, it’s just going to become completely natural.

You’re going to be surprised when you look at yourself on camera, your hands are not going to be behind the golf ball when you hit it. Your hands are going to be leaning in front really compressing that golf ball as you go through those drills.

So I can’t wait to share them with you, it’s going to be a ton of fun. I can’t wait to work with you through the Straight-Line Release. Let’s go ahead and jump over there now and get started in level one.

I’ll see you there.