Why You Need This: I bet you would love to "Hit Solid Drives" on a regular basis.

Nothing beats a clean strike that goes soaring down the middle of the fairway.

The kind of shot that feels like you didn't hit that ball at all.

There is no twisting of the club face through impact that results in shots that spray all over the course.

No stinging feeling left in your hands after a mis-hit shot.

In this video, I am going to walk you through one trick to start hitting more solid drives, and the specific place on the club head to hit the ball if you want to add distance without swinging any harder.

Let's get started .....

Golf Pros Featured:

Instructors Featured: Clay Ballard    

Video Duration: 22:49

Video Transcription:

How would you like to have absolutely the most amount of distance that you can? How would you like to boom those drives way down the fairway 20 or 30 yards past your friends?

We’d all love to do that. That’s what’s this video is going to be about, getting the most what we call smash factor, and the most distance out of your drives.

We’re going to talk about how to speed up your swing speed which is one of the most important things of smash factor which I’ll get into here in a minute.

We’re also going to talk about how you get more ball speed or how you can maximize the amount of speed the ball comes off the face given whatever your swing speed is.

If we can swing faster and get the ball leaving the face faster, that’s going to give us a high smash factor and the absolute most distance that we can get.

We’re going over all that in this video and give you some great drills to incorporate that into your game.

Let’s go ahead and get started.

All right, so this video, this is a series you probably noticed a few videos I’ve been doing lately have gone over my FlightScope X3 radar.

We’re talking about what this machine can do. It’s a pretty high-tech piece of equipment. One of those will run you about $18,000, so it’s pretty high-tech there.

It’s going to shoot out what’s called electromagnetic waves, or basically a bunch of high-speed waves. It’s a radar machine.

It’s going to bounce through, whenever I’m swinging this club as I’m coming down to contact, it’s going to bounce all those waves off my head. It tracks how fast this club head’s moving, which direction it’s moving, how much loft I have on the face, and then when we hit the ball, it’s tracking how fast the ball is leaving the face, at what angle, how much spin, the direction, all that cool stuff that’s almost impossible to see with the naked eye.

Now we’re going to go over smash factor in this video, which is something that it calculates for you, which is how efficiently you transfer your swing speed to the ball and how fast that ball leaves.

We’re going to talk about a few factors that you can control to get the most out of that. So if I want to hit it the farthest, I need to do these things right, and that’s what I’m going to go over in this video here.

First let’s go over the three factors that come into smash factor, which would be your club head speed, your ball speed, and then the calculation itself comes from how well you contact. Club head speed, ball speed, and contact.

Now smash factor basically just means, it’s a perfect smash factor, so the perfect amount of energy transfer is 1.5 times your club head speed.

If I swing 100 miles an hour, my club head is moving 100 miles an hour, if I hit the ball absolutely dead solid, transfer as much energy into the ball as I can, my ball is going to leave 1.5 times faster than that, so 150 miles an hour on a 100 mile an hour swing speed.

Now if you only had 50 miles an hour, so if I swung this club really easy, and I transferred all the energy that I could into that ball, it’s going to leave again, at 1.5 times that.

So if I swing 50 miles an hour the fastest that ball can leave is 75 miles an hour. If you swing way faster than that, then it’s going to go up. So it’s a 1.5 times your swing speed would be idea.

There’s a few things that go into this. I’m going to show you what the machine spits out for me and how it tells me if I’m more efficient than this.

Now the number one thing this machine does is it shoots those waves out and bounces off this club face, and it actually tracks the dead center of my club. So inside the club head, it’s tracking how that’s moving.

This is important because we’ll get to this later how contact affects this, but if I’m looking at the heel of my club, as your club face releases through contact, as I’m hitting through contact, the toe of the club is releasing a little faster than the heel of the club.

If you measure this, on average the heel is moving about 10 to 14 miles an hour slower than the toe is moving as you’re hitting the ball.

If I’m swinging 100 miles an hour in the middle of the club head, if I hit way over here off the heel, I’m actually swinging quite a bit slower than that. I may be swinging 93 miles an hour over here on the heel, because the heel isn’t releasing as fast, or 107 out here on the toe.

Depending on where you hit on the face, it’s moving at different speeds. This is very important when we’re talking about where I want to contact the ball and why we want to contact more toward the toe side, which I’ll get to in a little bit.

If we look at that on this swing that I did earlier, we’ll see that on this particular swing I swung 114 miles an hour, 114.5. I hit this one right dead in the middle of the club head.

So I hit it this really, really nice and solid as you can see on the screen, I used some Dr. Scholl’s Odor X foot spray powder to spray on the face so you can see that I really hit that one nice and solid.

The ball left that with a ball speed of 166 miles an hour, and a smash factor, remember 1.5 is perfect, a smash factor was only 1.45, so not quite perfect.

But there’s a couple things that go into this. So we talked about the club head speed, what else determines the ball speed?

Obviously the faster I swing, the more ball speed I get, the higher ball speed I can get and the better smash factor.

The ball itself is going to determine some of this too. If I’m using a range ball, here we have a Pinnacle practice ball, or just a regular labeled practice ball.

I have tested these range balls, all kinds of different range balls over the years, and I found even if you hit these dead solid perfect, they’re not going to ever get to that 1.5 smash factor.

The reason is these balls aren’t as hot or as live as a top brand of premium golf ball. Even if you hit it perfect, that ball isn’t going to compress as well and jump off the face as hot. Why does this matter?

Well if I’m at the driving range, and I’m hitting to a 150-ayrd marker, and I have my club that I normally hit 150, and I’m using a range ball, it’s not going to go 150.

Don’t be worried if it’s only going 140, don’t worry about your distances you’re hitting on the range. Mostly you’re worried about how solid you’re hitting the ball and if it’s going nice and straight, the direction that you want to, but you’re never going to get a range ball to go as far as a premium golf ball.

So if you’re on the range, don’t worry as much about your distance as you are about how solid you’re hitting the golf ball.

We talked about the ball speed. If I want to get the most ball speed possible, obviously my club head speed has to go up higher, but I’ll also want hit either in the dead center of the club face, or what’s going to go even faster than that.

Remember I talked about the toe moving a little faster, is a little bit off to the right of that. So slightly off the right of the toe, of the club head, maybe a quarter inch off the toe toward the toe side, and a little bit higher on the face is going to help it to launch higher and to get a little bit less spin on there.

Those are the three factors. Basically, if I boil it down and make it as simple as possible, I want to swing as fact as I can, I want to create as much ball speed as I can.

I’m going to do that by hitting either in the center of the club face which is OK, or if you really want to get the most out of this, hit a little bit off the toe and a little bit higher.

So swing as fast as I can, hit a little bit high off the toe, and that’s going to make everything really easy when we’re doing this.

Now, let me go ahead and hit a couple shots here. I want to talk about what happens when you hit off the heel and the toe, and how to fix that, and also how to get the most swing speeds so that you really get the most distance for yourself.

All right, so let’s get to it. How are we going to increase our club head speed? One of the most important things I see players doing is decelerating as they’re coming through the shot, not getting that club to really speed up as they’re hitting the golf ball.

I think a lot of this comes from trying to hit the golf ball itself instead of trying to release through the golf ball and to come to our good, full finish.

Now I have a great drill I’m going to walk you through, showing you the maximum amount of club head speed we can get doing this drill.

Now if you look at my original video, or my original FlightScope numbers, I was swinging about 114. I’m going to do a few reps of this, and let’s see if I can get above that 114 at all.

If you may only be swinging 70 or 80 miles an hour, that’s completely fine. These same drills, these same principles are going to help you to build your swing speed up to the high 70s or the high 80s.

It doesn’t matter if you’re swinging fairly slow or really, really fast. These same principles are going to apply to everybody.

Here’s what I want you to do. Again, we’re trying to tackle that deceleration. The first thing I find is if we visualize releasing this club, or what I call the Straight-Line Release, this is the angle between the forearms and this club shaft.

The first time that club splits my forearms like it is here, would be what I call the full release. So as this club is lagging behind, now we can see the club head’s, the handle’s in front of my forearms.

As I release this club and it’s splitting my forearms, that’s the point when I would say OK, your club is fully released from there.

Now if I’m swinging at this golf ball, I want that release to be out in front. That’s what we call the Straight-Line release in the Top Speed Golf System.

If I can visualize that being out in front, now I have a point to where I can release everything toward. If I’m trying to release everything toward the golf ball, a lot of times I’m going to be slowing down.

If you’re trying to hit at the golf ball, most times I’ll see players go really far back, start to cast from the top, and then the club is decelerating as you’re coming through here.

One of the best drills that I’ve ever done for this, and I find works almost every single time, is what I call a 9:00 backswing to a full finish.

If I can look at the logo of my left glove or my left glove here, I don’t want that to go past 9:00 on the backswing if we’re looking at a clock face.

So if the ball is 6:00, this would be 9:00, 12:00 would be above my head. I don’t want to go back 9:00.

Then from there, I’m going to swing as hard as I can through this, maximum club head speed, and let’s see how fast I can get with a few of these.

I want you to do one practice swing between every shot, and then if you have a device to measure your swing speed, that’s fantastic. So I started at 114, I’m going to go ahead and do halfway back. Another tip here, feel like you stop your backswing right here, you’re going to find that when you look at that on camera, or what you actually do, the swing is back there. Again, speed out to my Straight-Line Release point, speed out in front instead of at the golf ball.

So we’ll see a little half backswing, full follow through, as much speed as I can get. All right, so not the best shot, I probably even went a little farther back than 9:00 if I’m realistic with myself.

Let’s see what my club head speed was here. So on that one, I’m obviously going to get less club head speed with a half backswing, I got 105 miles an hour.

Now it seems like you’d be saying well, Clay, that doesn’t sound like it’s going in the right direction. We started at 114, we’re at 105. But this actually is helping your club head speed because what it’s forcing me to do is accelerate through the golf ball with this little short swing.

It also, what I found helps you to do, is when you have the shorter swing, now it makes a lot more sense to get that club to lag behind, and then really whip it through there to get the speed, rather than casting. You simply just don’t have time to cast the club with this little short backswing.

Let’s go one more, and I’m going to see if I can swing a little faster than 105. No matter how good you do this drill, it’s going to be slower than your normal swing speed, but when you take it back to the full backswing, that’s when you’re going to see the results.

Let’s go one more, I’m going to try to break that 105. Again, I’m feeling like I’m just going back to right there and coming through as fast as I can.

All right, I feel like I’m really putting a lot of energy into it. I can tell the ball’s not going very far because it’s cold today, but I bet that’s probably around that 105. Yeah, 101.7, so about 102 on that one.

So the goal of this is a few things, get your body, and club, and arms, your full body to accelerate through the ball. That’s number one.

Number two, it’s going to make it a lot more comfortable for you to get lag because there’s really just no time to cast this club.

Number three, which you’ll notice is that your legs get a lot more engaged. As I start to make these swings, I’m really letting my legs bend and rotating on through there hard. That’s the only way I feel like I can get club head speed when I’m doing these little short swings.

Now let’s take it all the way back to the full backswing again, and I think we’ll be pretty happy with what the club head speed does.

So here, I’m really going to feel like I load way up. I’m going to let my hips, my shoulders, my arms get way back here, really loosen those up, let them go far back and I’m going to feel like I really turn on the power late in the downswing.

So I’m going to get all the way down here, and then turn on the power. Once I add this full backswing, my speed should go up a little bit.

Let’s see if I can break that 114 mark and what kind of distance we can get. There we go. Now I absolutely killed that ball.

A couple things here, why you’re going to see my club head speed be lower in general today, or my distance be lower in general today.

We talked about one piece was the range ball. Whenever you’re hitting a range bill, that’s going to be 5 miles an hour or so slower on your ball speed, to 10 to 15 miles an hour slower, just depends on how bad the range ball is.

I’m going to lose a little bit of speed there. Number two, it’s cold here today. No matter how good I do on these drills, or no matter how good you do, when it’s cold out, it’s about 40° to 50° today, when it’s cold out, you’re never going to be able to swing as fast or drive as far as when it’s warm.

That’s going to limit the amount the ball compresses also. Number three, the wind is in my face a little bit. Earlier when I hit that shot, the wind wasn’t quite in my face.

When I swung 114 and it went 265, now I’ve hit that ball pretty dag-gone good, 1.43 smash, probably a little too far off the toe, 116 club head speed, so my club head speed went farther, but I’m losing about 50 yards on my total drive today.

Now that can be confusing to some guys, they’ll come out on a cold-weather day hitting range balls and they’ll say man, I’m usually hitting it way farther than this. I must be doing something wrong in my swing.

It’s actually not the case. Cut yourself some slack on cold days. You’re going to be a minimum 30 to 40 yards shorter on a cold day, probably closer to 50 yards shorter on a really cold day if there’s a little bit of wind in your face like that.

So you have to take those into account whenever you’re hitting golf balls. I’m swinging really good, 116, that’s about as good as I’m going to be able to do today. That’s pretty dag-gone fast, faster than PGA Tour average.

But it’s still not going to be as fast if I would have done this on a hot day, I would have been 121, 122. So that’s something to really keep in mind when you’re out there practicing on your own.

That one was a little bit off the toe, so let’s go on to now, that’s a great swing speed drill, let’s talk about what happens when we hit on different parts of the face and give you some drills for that.

So what I’ll do is I’ll just spray up my club face here with this Dr. Scholl’s Odor X, you can get this on Amazon, it’s four or five bucks a can. That’s going to mark up my face really white here. Now, let’s talk about what to do if you’re hitting off the toe or the heel.

Now when you’re typically hitting it off the toe, the most common thing that I see are guys falling back in their swing.

As they make their swing they kind of lean to the left, and then fall back to the right, and then they’re kind of not really being able to reach the golf ball, and just the toe of the club is barely being able to get to the golf ball. That’s probably the most common thing that I see.

Now here’s the important part of that, and what you probably heard time and time again, is I’ve got to get my weight to my left. If you want to keep from falling back, you have to get your weight left.

It’s actually the opposite of that. You have to get your weight to the right and then get your weight to the left.

Think about a Major League pitcher, you watch him up there on the mound. When he’s throwing a pitch, those guys have no trouble getting to their left side. They’re going down that hill, when they release the pitch, they’re all the way down on their left foot.

Where do they start, though? When he winds up, he’s completely on his right foot. As he brings his left leg back, 100 percent of his weight’s on his right foot. Then he’s transferring that to the left foot, and then coming all the way up 100 percent of his weight on his left foot.

Now we don’t go that extreme in golf, but if you want t have some power and you want to hit the ball solid, the same thing should be happening.

If I try to keep my weight left the whole time, what ends up happening is I end up falling left on my backswing, my body subconsciously knows like OK, I’m too far left, I’ve got to do something here, and you tend to go back the other way on your backswing.

So an improper weight transfer would be left on the backswing, right on the downswing, you fall back, you hit on the toe, you loose some smash factor.

The proper weight shift would be weight to my right in the backswing, shift weight like a baseball pitcher to the left on the downswing, and then I’m going to follow through all the way nice and balanced on my left leg.

A great drill for this is a little baseball step drill. I’m going to start with my normal stance, I’m going to scoot back away from this ball, and I’m going to pick up my foot on the backswing to transfer my weight right. As I step forward, I’m going to come all the way through onto my front foot.

Now as I finish, I want to make sure I’m in balance. I’ll have my left foot stay planted. I’m balanced over that, I should be able to pick up my right foot.

My chest is nice and high. My shoulders are turned all the way around, and I could just kind of hold it here, and pause, and watch the ball fly down the fairway.

What I don’t want to see is me getting completely off balance. The first time you do this drill, you might find yourself kind of falling around and going all over the place. Get a little bit more in control.

Take that little step and then work on completely being in balance in your follow through. Do a good 5 or 10 of these to get used to that weight transfer to the left.

You’re going to find your shots stop going as much on the toe and get more toward the center of the club.

Let’s go ahead and hit one here, and see what I can do to get a good weight shift. There you go, pretty centered on that one, I’m guessing. Maybe a little bit low, just a hair on the toe.

Now on this one, we’ll show a close up of this in a picture, but on this one, ball slightly, slightly off the toe. That’s pretty dag-gone good if you’re wanting to get the most ball speed out of it, the best smash factor.

So I haven’t seen here, remember 1.45 is about as good as I’m going to do with these range balls. I’m guessing it’s pretty close to that. Actually had one a little bit better, or maybe I got a hot range ball, I got a 1.46 on that one.

So on that swing, 115 miles an hour of club head speed. I hit the ball absolutely as solid as I could hit it. I’ve got a perfect, a little better than a perfect smash factor, 1.46, and my carry distance was 250. Almost 50 yards shorter than that would be on a normal, warm day.

So again, I can’t reiterate that enough, if it’s cold outside, you’re hitting a range ball, it's just not going to go that far. Let’s talk about the second piece on here where what if I’m hitting off the toe, or the heel. Excuse me.

Our guys are coming up out of their posture. So when they start to make their downswing, their hips come up, their shoulders level out, and because my hips are getting closer to the ball, that pushes my arms out away from my body and I end up hitting more toward the heel side of this club.

What you want to do, and what you’re most commonly told to do when you’re solving this, is to say OK, well keep your hips back. I think that’s really tough to do.

The hips moving back, a lot of times when I see guys try to do that, they try to move the hips back, and then they just stand up and do the same thing over and over again.

What I found to work a lot better, is to keep the shoulders tilted. So as I’m making this backswing, if I can imagine a target line or the direction I’m hitting this golf ball, a line on the ground going toward my target in the distance.

As I make my backswing, I want to stay in my posture here and have the club across my shoulders pointing down to that target line.

As I rotate on through, I want to have my club kind of feeling like it stays pointing down the target line as I’m coming on through.

We don’t have to get all the way that extreme, the shoulders could turn a little more level than that. If we have that idea, that’s really going to help me a lot to stay in my posture.

If I can stay in my posture with my shoulders, notice how my hips naturally stay back. What I found is if we can rotate in this posture, that solves the issue of my hips wanting to come this way.

When our hips are moving toward the ball, what’s happening here is I make my backswing and then my hips move and my shoulders level out.

So if I do the lose the posture, my shoulders level out and I’m turning level with the ground that way. It’s almost impossible to stop hitting off the heel because that club just keeps on moving out there.

Again, 10 to 15 drills, or practice swings, letting that club stay in your posture. Do that a good 10 to 15 times, makes some practice swings doing that.

Then spray your face up with some Dr. Scholl’s, let’s see if we can get to keep that ball coming from the heel, hit it nice and solid, and stay in my posture while I’m doing that.

There we go. Another one. Tell you what, I need to go play today, I’m hitting about as good as I can hit it. That one was right dead center on the middle of the club face.

Couldn’t be much more centered than that. That’s got to be close to a 1.45, also, within the ballpark. That was a 1.45, 114.8 miles an hour, 256 total distance, and again, wind in our face, cold, range balls, that’s about as good as I’m going to do. That’s a normal 300-yard drive for me.

So to recap on this. Smash factor, the ideal smash factor is 1.5 times your club head speed. We want to maximize our club head speed, use that acceleration drill to get your swing speed up.

The more you do that, you’re going to pick up a mile an hour, and a few days later, you’re going to pick up another mile an hour, it’s really going to help you to build speed over time. Then we go into contact.

I have to contact the ball on the correct part of the face. If I’m hitting off the toe, I’m probably falling back away from it. Work on those drills that I got you to transfer your weight to the left.

If I’m hitting off the heel, I’m probably standing up and losing my posture. Make sure you do those posture drills.

You guys are going to be getting the best smash factor, you’re going to be cranking it out there past your playing partners. Best of luck to you. Smash that golf ball.

Now we don’t want to stop right here. In this acceleration drill, remember the number one thing to hit the ball farther is how fast I can get the club head to move.

We touched briefly in the acceleration drill how when we make these shorter swings it helps us to get more lag. We can’t rely just on this one video to help build our lag.

It’s a great drill to do that, but if you want to ensure that you’re absolutely going to get the most lag you can, you want to work through the Top Speed Golf System and the Top Speed Lag.

Work through level 1. Start to get those drills. Get in the reps so that it becomes more and more comfortable. Then move to level 2 and level 3, it’s going to become completely natural for you as you start to work through those drills and those reps.

You’re going to have that lag, you’re going to pair that up with the acceleration drills that we did here today, and man, golf is going to get a lot easier when you’re driving it 20 or 30 yards farther.

So, best of luck. I’ll see you in The Lag section. Let’s go ahead and get started.