Why You Need This: In this video, you'll discover how to build a consistent golf swing.

And we'll take a look at Top Speed Golf member Mark's swing.

He's a really good player...

A 2 handicap...

And he's averaging around 270 yards for his drives.

But one of the things Mark struggles with is that he occasionally hits some weak cuts off the heel...

And his hip line may be a bit off.

So this video will show you how to fix this...

And we'll also take a look at Mark's swing to see what you should incorporate into your own swing.

Let's start with what he's doing well...

His spine angle at address is perfect...

And he does a great job keeping the spine angle throughout his swing.

This is crucial for consistency!

Mark also does a great job with his power turn...

He allows his hips to rotate back in the back swing...

And his shoulder turn is past 90 degrees (which is what most pros do).

Mark gets a good amount of lag and he releases it really well with nearly a straight line release.

Overall, he's got a good swing.

Now let's take a look at what he could do better.

In the down the line view, you'll notice that his hips tend to spring forward too much...

And his hips aren't opening nearly enough as he swings through contact.

This causes him to get jammed up a bit, restricting his hands and arms.

Not to mention...

This is also causing him to occasionally hit off the heel of the club...

...which is hurting his distance.

So make sure you open your hips in the downswing to get more club head speed.

In the video, I'll discuss how to fix this issue...

So check this video out now to see a cool student review of Top Speed Golf member Mark...

And learn how to squeeze out more distance with your drives!

Golf Pros Featured:

Instructors Featured: Clay Ballard    

Video Duration: 9:52

Video Transcription:

Hi guys, and welcome back to Top Speed Golf. Today we’re going to take a look at a website member Mark’s golf swing. Really good player, a 2 handicap, average driving distance is about 270 yards.

One of the things that he struggles with is that he says he hits kind of some weaker cut shots off the heel, he feels like he’s losing his tush line, his hip line, so his hips are moving toward the ball as he’s making the downswing.

We’re going to talk about how to fix this, and also some great things that you can incorporate in your swing that Mark does really, really well. Let’s go ahead and get started.

All right, so to get started, let’s run through some of the things that Mark does well through the Top Speed Golf. So if we go ahead and we mark the stable fluid spine, we mark it from the belt buckle up to the center of the chest.

There’s his address position, this is just absolutely perfect. If we’re going to an angle in this, we’d like to see somewhere around 6° to 9°, something like that. There’s 0°, let’s go ahead and mark his, and he’s right at about 8°, so perfect as far as his spine tilt at address.

Let’s go ahead and see as he goes to the top how h keeps his spine tilt, we can see just how consistent he is. So here his spine angle is overall very, very similar to what it was at address.

You’ll also notice that he’s turned his hips about 45°, maybe just slightly more than that, that’s fine, perfectly good. This is what we talk about in the power turn, and he’s gotten a good shoulder rotation.

Not only has he kept his spine tilt, he’s also got a good, full power turn as he goes back, and then you’ll see as h comes down to contact, he’s kept about the right amount of spine tilt coming through contact.

It’s going to increase a little bit and shift to the left slightly as you go closer and closer to the ball.

He’s in a pretty good position there, and then as he comes all the way on through for the power turn, we’re going to see two things here that I want you to check if you guys are struggling with distance.

Number one, get your belt buckle facing to the target, and then number two, make sure that your chest is kind of facing over to the left. So for the right-handed players, your chest will be facing slightly in to the left rough as you come through the follow through.

I also like how, just see how tall he is here? How from the left ankle, left hip, and then to the center of the spine, he’s slightly leaning back. The chest is nice and high, up toward the sky. Nose and head looking nice and high down the fairway.

Those are really good checkpoints when you’re making the power turn, when you’re making a good full finish to make sure that you’re doing those correctly.

So his stable, fluid spine, very, very good. Power turn is very good, let’s go ahead and see how he does on his lag. You’ll notice as he goes to the top of his swing, doesn’t fully set the wrist going back, so he doesn’t have the sharpest angle going back.

He waits until the downswing and actually tightens that up a little bit. We can see that this angle is actually increasing very, very slightly as he starts down, and he has a good angle of lag late in the downswing.

So as he’s about halfway down, he’s really built this up which is a great thing to do. Then as he comes through to release, he’s getting pretty dag-gone close to nailing the straight line release where his chest is about 45° in front, and then club would be splitting the forearms at this point.

So really, really good there. Nailing the lag, straight line release is really good. Although we can’t see the club shaft perfectly, we get that overall, it’s going to be pretty nice.

He does look a little jammed up here, and we’ll get to that from the down the line view, but again, lag and the straight line release are also looking good. Let’s go ahead and take the fifth fundamental here and see how he does on the compression line.

We’re going to see from the left ankle, the left hip, and the left shoulder are in a great position with the driver. He could be tilted just slightly more back if we wanted to get nit-picky, and this hip right here, we’ll go over this, the one piece of the Top Speed Golf System, the five keys that he could be doing a little bit better.

This hip is tending to slide a little bit forward as he’s coming into the shot. He wants to keep that hip back a little bit more.

So four out of the five pieces are looking fantastic. The compression line is actually looking pretty good, it’s not very far off at all, but that’s what we’ll get into to really get that down. We’re looking at a 2-handicap golfer here, obviously a very good golfer.

For those of you who are maybe higher handicap golfers that want to get better, we can see how the better golfers are completing the five keys very, very well, and that’s what gives you the consistency and the driving distance and the overall distance in the game to be able to do this.

Let’s go ahead and take it over to the down the line view, we’ll talk about a couple things that he could improve on to get even better.

All right, so here from the down the line view, let’s take a look at his golf swing, and we’ll take a look at the line you could draw at the back of his hips.

What’s going to tend to happen, I’ll go ahead and go over this before we get into the details of this, you’ll notice how his hips tend to move forward and then his arms are going to feel like they’re kind of jammed into his chest.

Pay attention to both these things, pay attention to the hips as we go through the swing, and also look at the hands and arms as we’re coming through here, and we’ll see how those lay out.

In the backswing, looking pretty good. As he starts down now you can see the hips start to come off of that line. You can see how they’re moving this way, and you can see how at contact his hips aren’t very open.

For those of you who are familiar with the system, the Top Speed Golf System, we talk about how at the compression line that we went over, we said his hips were a little too far forward, we want those hips to be about 45° open, also.

We can see that he’s not quite open enough. So when you don’t open the hips enough, what’s going to tend to happen is they slide forward to the ball, and now the hands and arms feel kind of jammed up.

We can definitely see that coming over in his swing. That causes a couple of issues. As your body slides farther this way, that moves the hands farther this way, that’s going to move the club a little farther this way, and that’s one of the reasons that he tends to hit a little bit of a weak shot off the heel.

Any time you hit off the heel, the ball’s going to tend to cut, and he gets what he calls a weak kind of cut that takes probably 15-20 yards off the drives when I’s not going very good.

What we have to do is to get this hip coming back this way, so that it can stay on this hip line as he’s going back. There’s two things you can do for that. Number one, the hips have to open more, and number two, you feel like you have to use the ground to get the hips going back in that direction.

So at the top of the backswing, he’s looking pretty good. I like this position a lot. As he starts down, the main thing he’s going to have to focus on doing is not trying to rotate the hips fast, but to get them more open.

If he had a rope tied to, let’s imagine the left pant pocket. We’re going to pretend we can see through his hips, and let’s imagine that you had this rope and you’re going to yank on this rope back toward the camera like that. That’s going to clear that left hip back out of the way.

As he’s doing this, what he’s going to want to feel like is that he pushes down into the ground, and kind of out in this direction. So if you can see – let’s actually get rid of that – if this is the golf ball here, imagine right here at the edge of this concrete pad, we put a little dot right there.

He’s going to push down and into the ground and toward that dot. What that’s going to do, is that’s going to move this hip back out of the way so that it can rotate much more.

He’s going to go ahead and allow this foot to come up off the ground, he’s going to really feel like he’s getting his hips cleared out of the way, and that’s going to get him to rotate the hips more and to also give himself some more room so that his hands and arms don’t get closer to the ball.

Now the second piece of that when we were looking from face on, we saw that he slid a little too close to the ball. Let me go back to the face on video real quick.

So here we are in the face on video, what we want to have happen is we want to keep this hip behind that line, or on that line as you’re coming through contact. So we can see how the hip is slid up in front of our compression line here.

As he opens his hips he’s also going to feel like this hip is moving back this way to allow it to get more open. We don’t want to feel like the shoulder goes back that way. The shoulder’s going to stay right here on this line where it is, it’s just the hip that’s going to be clearing back out of the way.

Then he’s going to swing all the way on through. That’s going to allow him to open his hips much more as he comes on through the shot, and give him a lot more room to get some space away from that ball.

So good luck to you guys, work hard on those. If you feel like you’re losing space, that’s what you need to feel like. You need to feel like you’re pushing down into the ground to get the hip to move back.

You’re also going to feel like you’re getting that hip to move away from the target as you’re doing that.

So work hard, good luck with your ball striking, and I’ll see you all soon.

All right, so for those of you that are members of the website, I’ve got two videos that I want you to watch. One of things that he’s doing really, really well is he’s getting a good amount of lag as he starts the downswing, and then releasing that lag properly.

So I want you to watch video 1.2 which is the stick behind the ball drill. If we pause Mark’s swing as he’s coming into the downswing, notice how this club would be pointing behind the golf ball.

Excuse me, sorry about that. This club would be pointing behind the golf ball as he’s making his downswing. He’s going to feel like he keeps that club pointing behind the golf ball for as late as he can until he lets that club turn on up and releases that lag.

In video 1.2 I’m going to give you a great drill that’s going to help you to walk through that, kind of step-by-step.

Now in video 3.2, so that’s level 3, video 2 in the lag section. We’re going to talk about one of the things he does really well which is setting the wrists at a sharper angle at the top. So as he starts the downswing, we’re going to see how that angle actually tightens up.

Now we can see from the way back to the way down, he actually increased the stretch in his wrist and tightened up that angle, then he’s going to go ahead and make the downswing and release that lag.

I’ve got a great set of drills that’s going to help you to get that same motion, in your swing, and deal with the stretch shortening cycle which is the real key to distance, and that’s video 3.2.

Be sure to check those videos out, good luck to you guys, work hard, and I’ll see you all very soon.