Why You Need This: Today, you'll discover "How I Teach Golf - Clay Ballard & The Top Speed Golf System"

I always get asked, “Hey Clay, what’s your teaching philosophy?”

Well, what I believe will elevate your golf game––for players of all skill levels…

…is boiled down into the “big four.”

They’re the essence of what I teach in the Top Speed Golf System––and some other courses like the Ball Striking Masterclass.

By mastering these, you’ll enjoy more consistency and power.

And today, I’ll walk you through exactly what these “big four” are and what my philosophy is all about!

 

 

 

 

Golf Pros Featured:

Instructors Featured: Clay Ballard    

Video Duration: 24:21

Video Transcription:

Hey, it's great to have you here today. And a question I get all the time is what is my philosophy? What am I teaching with Top Speed Golf? What do I believe in? What do I believe it's going to take a recreational player and make them much much better at golf? Well, the first thing and the most important thing is actually something that every single instructor on the planet agrees on We may have different philosophies on how to get there, but this is what really matters.

Now, as I'm coming through impact, I need to be able to come down, hit the ball first, and then hit the turf in front. So if I put a little piece of tape here, I should be able to come down, hit this ball first every single time, and hit a nice solid strike. So it doesn't matter what your philosophy is, if you can't do this, you're really going to struggle to play great golf.

There we go. Nice straight shot. First swing of the day. seven iron hit that pretty solid 178 yards. Hey, I'm going to be really happy with that. Now, the second one is I have to be able to square up the face at impact. So if my face is open at impact, it's going to be a slice. If my face is closed at impact, it's going to be a hook.

And while I'm doing that, I have to be able to swing fairly straight through the golf ball. So if I'm swinging way over the top and across it, it's going to slice. No good. I'm swinging away inside to the inside out that I'm going to hook it. And I'm going to have a lot of trouble there too. Okay. So on that particular swing, my club path, which is the direction I'm, my club head is moving as it hits the ball is 0.

9 degrees left. That means less than one degree straight to the target. If I get anything outside of say three degrees, we start to have problems. If I looked at my face angle there, it is 0. 1 degrees left. It means my face is perfectly square to my path. So one minute on a clock is six degrees. Those were well less than one minute on a clock.

So I got to be able to hit the ball on the turf. I got to be able to swing straight with a straight face and I've got to be able to hit the center of the sweet spot or consistently around the sweet spot. I can't be hitting way off the toe or what way off the heel. Now that's what I call the big four and that's what I teach in the system and the top speed golf system.

That's what I teach in the ball striking masterclass. Everything is about hitting this club to move through impact efficiently. It doesn't matter what you're doing, what tips you're working on, where your elbow is. what the club does, if it shallows out or doesn't shallow out. If I have lag or I don't have lag, if my club isn't doing that through impact, we're going to struggle at golf.

And the final thing would be swing speed. We've got to move the club fast to make golf easy. Now I'll give you an example of this. Pros on average play courses that are about 7, 000 yards. They swing 114 miles an hour or so and average 290 yards off the tee. So if they hit a drive and a seven iron into the hole, they hit their drive 290.

They hit their seven iron, let's call it 180 yards. Well, if you add both those together, 290 plus 180 is 470. So if they're playing a 470 yard hole, they're hitting driver seven iron. If a recreational golfer, let's say they hit it to keep the math simple 150 yards with their seven iron and they drive it 220, well, they have to play a 370 yard hole.

So it's, if you want to really simplify the math, Pros have about a hundred yard advantage when hitting the same clubs on a par four or a hole Now if you multiply it out over 18 holes, that's 1, 800 yards Let's just keep it even simpler and say 2, 000 yards now Imagine for a second that you're playing your home course from 2, 000 yards shorter So if you're playing a normal 6, 300 yard course from a couple tees up Imagine you're playing that from 4, 300 yards.

That's that's way ahead of the ladies tees Well, I bet you'd be pretty daggone good. It'd get a lot easier. Or if you want to go the other way with it, imagine pros are playing a 9, 000 yard course. So now it's so long, they're hitting driver and long irons and three woods into the par fours. They can't reach the par fives.

Well, pros would shoot in the eighties, right? There's no way that somebody can play a 9, 000 yard course and shoot a 63. It's impossible, right? So if we don't have good swing speed, it's really tough to play great golf. It just makes golf incredibly challenging. So when you put those things together. The big four or moving the club through impact the right way and swing speed.

You're going to be a good golfer. That's all there is to it. Now, in my philosophy, what I like to look at, and this is from teaching thousands of hours, looking, studying all the pros. I have a database where I have all the major winners from the last 20 years or so. And I also have a database of recreational golfers, scratch golfers, 10 handicaps, 20 handicaps.

And what I like to do, what I believe in, um, As you look at what the pros are doing, look at what better players are doing. And then I compare that with what recreational golfers are doing. So for example, if I'm doing these techniques wrong, it is so daggone hard to get that club to move through impact.

Like we just talked about, it's going to be inconsistent on my ball and turf. I'm going to chunk it and thin it. I'm gonna have the face way open. I'm gonna have the face way closed. I'm gonna feel like I'm constantly manipulating the club to try to get it to square up. And it's just daggone hard. So when you look at the data, what you'll find is there's a few key movements that all good players do.

Scratch golfers, pro golfers, they all do these things the same. And I see golfers in their 60s and 70s that do these well, they're the best golfers at your club. Think about the best golfer at your club that's 65 years old. He's doing what I'm about to teach you to do. The worst golfer at your club is probably doing none of the things that I'm about to teach you to do.

So I'm not just trying to copy the pros. That's a little bit silly, because you could do, you could say things like, well, pros on average have this stance width, so I'm going to teach you that stance width. Well, a lot of recreational golfers have the same stance width and shoot 120. So that's not really something you should be copying.

What I should be copying, or what I should be working on to implement in my game, are things that good players do well, that players that aren't as good don't do well. And the reason they don't do them well is because it makes it really tough to control the club through impact and move at good club head speed.

Now let me teach you what those are. What's the technique. So if my technique is off, it is so daggone hard to play this game. If my technique's on, it makes it easy. The first one would be what I call the power turn. I'm gonna go over the five fundamentals of the top speed golf system. Now what this is, when I look at the pros, when I look at the best players, they're getting at least a 90 degree shoulder turn in the backswing.

Many pros go well past that. In fact, the range for the best players is 90 to 120 degrees. So meaning that If my golf ball is here, this is zero degrees of shoulder turn. I'm just basically setting up to the golf ball. If I rotate back until my shoulders are facing the golf ball, that's 90 degrees of turn.

If I go past that, that would be more than 90, so a hundred, 110, 120 degrees. Pros are in that 90 to 120 degree range. Now, the common misconception I have there is, yeah, that'd be great, clay. I'd love to get this 120 degree turn, but I'm just not nearly as flexible as a pro. Um, I'm 65 years old. I'm stiff as a board.

There's no way I'm going to be able to do that. Well, actually you can. If I don't rotate my hips at all, if I keep my belt buckle facing straight forward and I try to rotate in the backswing, I'm getting pretty tight by here. Trying to get to 90. Man, I'm really stretched out. Most people do not have the flexibility to get that big turn with restricted hips.

But if I go ahead and rotate my hips, look, it's easy to get 90 degrees. Every single player watching this video right now, stand up out of your chair. If you're watching this, you can easily turn just like you're talking to somebody to the right. Well, that's a 90 degree shoulder turn. I've turned my shoulders here.

That's just like me turning and talking to somebody. I've been over in my posture a little bit. That's a golf swing. So the key there is let your hips move if you're not as flexible and you have to get that bigger turn to be able to create club head speed. See if I don't load my body up, then I'm not going to be able to swing through there with any kind of speed at all.

You may hear lots of videos, you can probably scour the internet right now and find 5, 000 videos on YouTube that say don't turn your shoulders, don't worry about it, that's for the young guys. Well the reality is you're just not going to hit it very far doing that. Let me give you an example. I'm going to take this same swing, I'm going to make a little shoulder turn going back, so I'm only going to go back to here and then I'm going to come through and let's see what my swing speed does.

So the last one was 178 yards, this one All right, 88 yards. Now I thinned it a little bit. It wasn't a perfect swing, but maybe I could get 130, 140 yards out of the seven iron with a little tiny backswing. That doesn't mean, and I want to be really clear on this one, this fundamental, this power turn or rotating the body doesn't mean you couldn't play very consistent golf with less shoulder turn.

So if I want to hit the ball and then the turf, and I want to have a face, a square face and a square path, I can do that. I can hit the center of the sweet spot too. All big four that we just talked about. I can do that with a smaller turn. But again, I'm taking that 6, 300 yard course and making it play like a 7, 500 yard course, which is just impossible.

So we've got to learn to get these shoulders turning in this body turning. If we're going to be able to do that. Here's my number one tip for you to get this right now, as you're making your backswing, I want you to feel like your hips rotate quite a bit. and your arms don't fold early. So what I'm doing here is I'm just going about halfway in my back swing.

My shoulders have already turned a ton here and my hips have already turned and I haven't really lifted my arms very much and I haven't folded my arms up at all. So my arms are staying really straight. I'm wide and I'm forcing myself to turn very early. Now if I can turn early like this and I can already get a 70 degree shoulder turn by the time I'm here, it's really easy to get that extra 20 the rest of the way to the top of the back swing.

So that's the best thing to do if you want to get a lot of power. Now, 90 120 is the pro range. That's what I believe in. That's what I've found lots of players have done well with. We also have something called the 20 minute distance fix, which on average players are going to gain 13. 4 miles an hour in the three week course that they're going through this.

So if you're sitting there right now thinking, you know, struggle with my swing speed. I've heard all the tips. I'm still not swinging as fast as I can. If you go through that 20 minute distance fix, if you're a member of the top speed golf website. So you're going to pick up a lot of distance on average, about 35 yards, a little less than that 34 and a half on your best drives compared to when you start the course to three weeks later.

So that's what I teach. That's why I teach it. And that's a big part of the, the 20 minute distance fix is getting that turn. There's also some other tricks in there that really allow you to tap into a lot of your swing speed and bump that up. If you're struggling with distance, second top speed golf fundamental is what's called lag or top speed golf lag.

All this means is, when I'm in my downswing, when my left arm is parallel to the ground on the downswing, what's the angle of this shaft? If it's out here, perpendicular to the ground, that would be a 90 degree angle. If it was here, which nobody's wrists are flexible enough to do that, that would be 0 degrees.

The pros are 40 to 65 degrees. So what that means is, if you can imagine a 40 degree angle, 45 degree angle about like that, 60 degrees, 65 degrees would be out here somewhere. 40 would be in here somewhere, but we're going to have a good angle. Now, the reason of that is if I'm going to start with my lower body and get my weight shifting to the left, and I'm going to save up the energy for my club head so that my club head is trailing, my hands are leading the way, that's going to allow me to come down and hit the ball first with my hands in front, and then hit the turf in front of the golf ball.

Now, if you're hitting a driver, it's the exact same thing. Just imagine the ball is on your front foot now. As I make this lag in the downswing, my hands are leading the way I would have shaft lean here and I'd be releasing that to where my driver shaft straight up and down to impact. It's the same thing.

Whether you're hitting driver iron, I have to have this lag angle. And when you look at pro golfers or scratch golfers, better golfers at your club, they're going to have a good amount of lag. And when you look at a high handicap golfers, they're going to cast this out. So when I look in that database, when I study tons and tons of pro golfers and recreational golfers, You're going to see a significantly less angle of lag in recreational golfers.

Now, one thing that I like to do that's probably even more important, when I created the Top Speed Golf System, and a few years ago even, it wasn't that long ago, that down here, in the downswing, this club was a blur when filming from your camera phone, the phone, the camera on your phone. A good indicator of how good a quality of ball striker you are is when your hands are in front of your right leg, I want this club shaft parallel to the ground.

So if I have this 40 to 65 degree angle up here, I don't want to just throw that out. I want to still have my hands in front of my right leg, club shaft parallel to the ground as I'm coming through. I call that the power position. And again, what's the point of it? It's so you can hit ball and then turf every time.

It's so you can take all the hand manipulation out of there and you're not constantly feeling like you're manipulating the face. So great little drill for this is make a little practice swing where you pause Hands in front of your right leg, club shaft still parallel to the ground. And a big key here is I want this club head inside my hands.

See, pros typically have this club inside their hands. Recreational golfers tend to have it on their hands or even outside their hands. The reason that's so important is if I have this lag in my clubs from the inside, I can simply turn and the face squares up under its own momentum. If I have it outside my hands and I turn, the face wants to be open.

So if you constantly feel like the face is open and you're having to do a lot of work to square it up, that's a big piece of it. Work on your lag, work on that power position, getting the club from the inside. So I'm just gonna do a swing where I pause, I feel that power position, and then I try to move through that as I'm hitting a shot.

There you go, another nice straight shot, about 170 yards with a seven iron. And if you look at this swing that I'm bringing up on the screen, this driver swing. So this is an iron here. Let's also look at it with driver. Look at the top of my backswing, shoulders well past perpendicular to the ground. I'm probably getting close to that 120 degree range on the power turn or the shoulder turn.

Again, you don't have to get that much. Just rotate your hips, get at least to 90. And then you'll also see as I move down, left arm parallel on the downswing, I have quite a bit of lag there. And my hands, as I get in front of my right leg, are almost parallel to the ground. With a driver, it's okay. If your hands are in front of your right leg and the club is barely below parallel with the ground with an iron, as we get into shorter, shorter clubs, I want to see a sharper and sharper angle there as I'm coming through impact.

Now, the next one is what I call the straight line release. And this kind of ties in with what we just talked about. You don't want the club releasing at the golf ball. And this is something that drives me crazy because I see so many players struggle with this. We try to get this angle of lag. And then we think, and we've even been taught this, You want to get everything releasing at the golf ball.

We're hitting the golf ball. That's what you want to do. Well, what ends up happening is we lose that lag later in the downswing and our club shaft is straight up and down at impact. Well, the right way to do this and what you're seeing with the pros and the best players, and what you're not seeing with higher handicap golfers is that as I move into the downswing, my hands aren't releasing or my club shaft isn't releasing and splitting my hands until well after impact.

So there's impact and my club shaft isn't going to split my forearms Until out in front. I usually like to put a golf ball about six feet in front of the one i'm hitting And have that as the aiming point For where i'm releasing the club shaft So you see here if I made a slow motion swing Impact would be here And then my club would split my forearms out in front Now again when you look at this high speed driver swing I'm making here, you're going to see that my club splits my forearms about 37 degrees in front of the golf ball.

Now the pro range there is 28 to 50 degrees in front. This is one of the most common areas that I see. If you're going to play consistent golf, I'm going to get that club to passively be coming through, hit the ball, then turf, hit the center of the face, not have to manipulate with hands. A lot of higher handicap golfers that I see when I measure them in my database.

are letting the club split the forearms right at impact. When you do that, that's going to want to hit this tape behind it. That's going to make ground contact very inconsistent and it's going to make it feel like I have to constantly manipulate the club through impact to get clean solid strikes. So if you want to move the club through impact, well, we've got to get that straight line release much more out in front of the golf ball, put this golf ball six feet or so in front.

And what I like to have people work on here. Cause as you're making your downswing, feel like you're swinging to this golf ball out in the front. Now, I don't want to do this by holding the face open. Again, that's going to be an open face. When you look at pros again, they're going to be releasing the club.

So the toe of the club turns on over toward the target. So when I come to that straight line release, my toe of my club is almost facing the target out in front. So if I did this in slow motion here, I'll be coming through impact, I'm hitting this golf ball, and as I release to this straight line release, the toe of my club is now facing toward the target.

It's not open like this, it's releasing. I don't want to feel like I'm manipulating the club. I don't want to hold on to it. I don't want to guide it through impact. I want to let it go out in front, and that's going to square up the face on its own. You pair that up with what we just talked about in this power position, club lagging, club slightly inside, and I release it through there.

Now it's a very effortless way. To come through the golf ball, hit it nice and straight and not have to guide it through there, not have to steer it, not as feel like you're manipulating it with the hands. Now, to be able to do this again, when I see the pros do, and I see many, many recreational golfers struggle with.

So again, when I'm looking at the database, I'm not teaching just what the pros do. I'm teaching what good players do in general, that higher handicap players struggle with. And this shows up in the data is that my spine has to be tilted away from the ball slightly. On average, the pros are going to tilt away 19 to 25 degrees at impact.

All this means is that as I'm coming through impact, my body needs to be instead of straight up and down like this tilted away. Now that's really easy. If you do that correctly to put your body in a position to where you can get lag and releasing it out in front. If I'm doing that, if I'm here and I'm straight up and down, And my body isn't tilted away at all.

So if I'm straight up and down like this, my spine is this angle. It is really tough to get lag and not cast it out. It's really tough to not release it at the golf ball and release it in front of the golf ball like that. So when you get your body up and down, it basically makes it impossible to really do what the best players are doing.

and get that effortless movement of the golf club so the path is square, the face is square, you don't feel like you have to manipulate at all. I got to get my body tilted away. Now a great little feeling for this when I'm making a swing is in my downswing I want to shift my weight to the left so my belt buckle at impact gets in front of the golf ball on this side of the golf ball and my nose stays behind the golf ball.

Now when I do that here you can see that I'm away and I'm able to effortlessly move the club through the ball.

There we go. Loosen up a little bit. That was 178. And again, nice straight path and swing direction. So 1. 6 degrees to the right with a path, pretty daggone straight. Anything less than two is fantastic. I'd love that. Anything less than three is really what you're aiming for. Face angle, 0. 1 degrees to the left.

So basically my, my face was dead square to the direction I was swinging on that one. Now, finally, here is what I call the compression line. Now, If I'm doing all these things right, but I'm hanging on my back foot, my compression line is going to be way off. So if I drew a line from the center of my ankle to the center of my shoulder socket here, I want that to be tilted away about three to eight degrees at impact with the driver.

Now, when I did this database, when I measured pros and all different handicaps, I made sure that I took the same club. So I'm comparing a Pitching wedge from a pro and a driver from a recreational player or vice versa, it may be slightly different. I'd like you to measure these and look at these when you're hitting drivers so it's apples and apples.

We know exactly what we're looking at. And what I found there is that at impact, hitting a driver, so let's imagine this ball is teed up, lead ankle to center of the lead shoulder is going to be tilted away three to eight degrees. Now again, if we look at my swing in slow motion here, we're looking at that stable fluid spine, you'll see that I'm well tilted away.

I'm actually a little above that 19 to 25 degree range. I'm probably 27, eight degrees or so here. And my compression line, instead of being three to eight, it's on the higher end of that. It's probably around eight or nine degrees. Now, the only reason for that is on this particular drive, I was wanting to launch it really high and get a lot of distance.

So if I can stay a little more behind it, tilt away slightly more, it's easier to swing up on it and get that ball to launch really high and, you know, really hit long drives. Notice that when I'm doing this though, this is a big key. When I come to my finish, I'm stacked over my lead leg. That's very different than if we did this the wrong way, we'd be tilted away and staying on this back leg like this.

I'm going to be tilted away, but all my momentum is moving to the left, and I come right on through that shot. So those things, those five things, are what I call the five fundamentals of top speed golf system. And when you do those correctly, that helps you to move the club consistently through impact with a square face, a square path, hit the ball and then the turf and hit it on the center of the clubface.

The best players in the world and the best players at your club are already doing these things and I find them to be very consistent. The higher handicappers at your club and if you're struggling with your golf game are not doing these things. So we're not just cherry picking things that pros do, we're looking at the key fundamentals that pros do that recreational players struggle with.

Now, another question that I get is where should I start with this? So a lot of different things we talked about in this video. What's the first thing that you would work on? Well, I would work on stable fluid spine. And the reason is if my spine is tilted away, it's easy to get lagged. Like we talked about, it's easy to hit this power position.

It's easy to release the club out in front of the golf ball. It's Obviously my stable fluid spine is going to be better if I'm improving my spine angle, and it's also easy to get the compression line. So everything but the power turn is easier and better when we get our spine angle correct. So I recommend if you're a member of Top Speed Golf, going to the stable fluid spine section and start with the very first video there, start to ingrain that, and it'll get easier to hit all five of these pieces.

As you move into level two, it becomes more natural, but you still might have to think about it a little bit. As you move into level three of the top speed golf stable fluid spine system, then it's going to become completely natural. So that way, when you set up to a golf ball, you have a little spine tilt.

You don't even recognize that you're doing this. And then you just make a swing and go right on through. So again, today, the challenge is if you watch this video and you say, okay, this was great. I see why I want to learn the better player technique and how I may be struggling with some of the techniques of higher handicappers.

But then I turn this video off and I don't do anything with it, then we're going to have a lot of information, but we're not going to actually be hitting the ball better. Go to the stable foot spine right now, do the very first video and get working on improving your ball striking. Just do that one video and you'll be thanking me for it later.

I can't wait to see you there.