Why You Need This: In this video, you'll learn how to have a great golf swing.

My student Scott was nice enough to send some video of his swing and man... he's doing really well.

In fact, he's a 2 handicap!

So, in this analysis, you'll get a close look at what makes Scott's swing so good.

You'll see how he nails the 5 fundamentals that I teach in the Top Speed Golf System.

Those fundamentals are...

• The Stable & Fluid Spine,
• The Power Turn,
• Top Speed Lag,
• Compression Line, and
• Straight-line Release

As a bonus, you'll get tips to avoid any hip pain that you may have...

And you'll learn a quick fix if you're getting "stuck" in the downswing and struggling with hitting blocks and nasty hooks.

Watch this video now to get a great analysis of the 5 fundamentals that are essential for a great swing!

Golf Pros Featured:

Instructors Featured: Clay Ballard    

Video Duration: 19:39

Video Transcription:

Hi guys, and welcome back to Top Speed Golf. Today I have a great review for you guys, really good player, Scott has been nice enough to send in his video for me to review and share with you guys.

We’re going to go over the five keys of the Top Speed Golf System and how you can incorporate those to play really good golf.

The idea is that once you get these five keys down, you’re going to be a low single-digit handicapper, or you’re going to be a scratch golfer. That’s exactly what Scott is here, so has the five keys down really, really well.

We’re going to go over those. I’m going to share some really key insights so you guys can incorporate those into your own game and have a good model of what the five principles of the Top Speed Golf System look like.

Then we’re going to get into a little bit more advanced instruction, and talk about why Scott is sometimes struggling with blocks to the right and hooks.

So great golfer here, 2 handicap, really nailing the five pieces. Let’s go ahead and get started so you can incorporate these in your game too.

All right, so the first principle that we’ll talk about is consistency and being able to work your body in the correct way so that you can stay really stable throughout the entire swing.

So if you take a look t Scott’s head here, you’ll see how stable it is, how centered it is throughout the swing. Not a lot of extra movement there, and it’s very, very consistent all the way throughout the swing.

He’s really not using any extra movement or any wasted movement throughout the swing. That allows you to be really consistent.

One of the keys to this, and one of the keys to being able to release the golf club properly, is to get the upper body tilted away from the target as you’re coming into contact.

Most good players, you’re going to see this somewhere in the ballpark, it doesn’t have to be an exact number, but somewhere in the ballpark of 18° to 20° tilted away.

We’re going to see him being right around in that same ballpark. You can go as much as 25°, depending on the club and depending on the situation. But anywhere in that range is going to be great.

We’re looking at 19° here, right in the line of where you need to be. So 20°, 25°, anywhere in there is going to be fantastic to being able to deliver the golf club with some forward shaft lean and releasing the golf club in front.

If you think about it, if my body is tilted away, that’s going to allow me to release the club more out in front of my body. That means that naturally, I’m going to get some forward shaft lean which is exactly what he’s doing here.

We can see that his hands are already over the top of the ball, and this is with the driver. He’s leading the way with the hands and then releasing the club out in front.

So really, really good. We see he’s got a good amount of lag as he’s doing that and then releasing the club very, very nicely.

The key to this, if we know that’s the position that we want to be in as the result, how do we make this as consistent as possible? That’s what we call the Stable, Fluid Spine.

At address, what I’d like for you to do is to get tilted away from the target very slightly here. Usually around 8° or so as a good number to shoot for.

We’re going to maintain that all the way to the top of the swing. This is what we go over in the Stable, Fluid Spine section of the website.

I talk about how we can do this, and a great tip for you guys who are just getting started is to think about having your nose behind your belt buckle at address and at the top of the swing.

If we go back to address, you see his nose behind the belt buckle. As we go to the top of the swing, nose behind the belt buckle.

Look how stable the spine is from address all the way to the top. So really good stuff there. Then as we just saw, now he’s in a position where he can just shift a little bit to the left.

He’s going to be in a great position as he transfers a little bit more weight to the left to get in a good alignment with his upper body to deliver that club coming through contact very, very well.

So really great as far as the Stable, Fluid Spine all the way back and through, that’s what leads to a big part of his consistency and allows him to have a low handicap, super-low handicap.

Now the second piece is we’ve got to get a little bit of club head speed. There’s no way you’re going to be able to be a scratch golfer if we’re hitting it very, very short off the tee.

We’ve got to have some club head speed, and a big piece of this is getting a good turn as you’re back. This is a beautiful turn going back.

Let’s see his hips are rotated about 45°, and the shoulders are rotated a little bit past 90°. So this is really crucial.

One of the keys that I would recommend for you guys maybe that are struggling with this, is let’s imagine the shirt buttons and the center of your shirt are going to be turning and facing away from the target as you go to the top of the backswing.

So you’re really taking your chest and turning it away from the target, and then away from the golf ball.

This can feel as though it’s a little bit dangerous, or like you may not be able to get back and hit the ball, but if you look at all great players, they’re going to get that big turn, and that allows them to create momentum in the downswing.

So now he’s got his body rotating on through, the hips and the shoulders are creating momentum, and that allows him to add to that momentum with the hands, arms, and club and get even more speed.

We’ll see as he comes on through, another great finish here with the belt buckle facing the target and his shoulders have rotated all the way through.

That’s a great Power Turn, both back and through, really nice. Like I mentioned there, if we’re going to create a lot of club head speed we have to create momentum with the body first, and get that momentum turning toward the target.

But then we’re going to add to that. That’s only a small amount of your club head speed, let’s say to keep the numbers nice and simple here, let’s say that’s about 50 percent of your club head speed is created from momentum of your body.

The rest of the club head speed is going to come from lag, which he does a great job of here, and then releasing that lag out in front.

So that’s our second, our next two fundamentals in the Top Speed Golf System, is that we have to create lag first and we’ll see how he’s not setting the club here early, that’s great.

So he’s doing very little wrist set as he goes back, and what’s going to happen is if you set the club very little going back, as you start down, the momentum of the club head moving back is now going to allow the wrist to set very naturally.

We can see how much sharper of an angle he’s created with the club and the forearms as he’s starting down due to that very little wrist set.

If you’re struggling with getting lag, that’s probably the most important thing that you can do is actually set the club less as you’re going back.

Less wrist set as you’re doing the takeaway, and that’s what we can see him doing here. Then as he goes into the downswing, he’s setting the club more to get the club coming down with a lot of lag in it.

Now from there we’re going to release, what we call the Straight-Line release. That goes from this lag position, creating this big, massive angle here to be able to get speed, we’re going to release that to maximum that speed.

We kind of missed the frame of the Straight-Line Release, but ideally what we’re having happen here, we’ll go ahead and pretend this is one frame earlier. The camera just isn’t quite fast enough on this one.

The club will be splitting the forearms about 45° in front of contact. So we’re in this general direction here out in front, that’s where we’re going to be releasing the golf club.

So we went from this big lever as he started the downswing, having great amount of lag – whoops, sorry about that.

This big lever here to now being able to release that out in front. If you can pair those two things up, if you can release out in front, forward shaft lean is naturally going to happen.

Again, because of body angles and because of the lag and release, the way he’s doing that. That really helps us to get forward shaft lean without even having to try that.

That’s another part of the beauty of the System is that with these five keys, you do these correctly, and a lot of other things are going to happen naturally as a result.

Now finally, his last fundamental here, the last fundamental that we’ll talk about with the Top Speed Gof System, is getting into what I call the Compression Line.

This is the ability to align your body in a position, again to be able to get a solid strike, and to release down and through in a very consistent manner.

If we take the front ankle, the center of that ankle, and we look at the left hip socket and we look at the left shoulder socket, and we draw a line through all three of these, we’re wanting to look and see that those are nice and in a straight line.

We don’t want the hip way up here bumping out in front, and we definitely don’t want the hip back here like this.

If you’re having some hip pain, maybe you’re having a little bit of soreness in the left hip, most likely what’s happening is your hip is bumping up in front and that angle would look something more like this, instead of being in a straight line.

So he’s doing a fantastic job of having the ankle, hip, and shoulder aligned in a way that he’s going to be able to compress the golf ball. You’ll notice that that’s tilted slightly away from the target.

That’s what you’re going to see with all the great players, whether you’re looking at Adam Scott, or Jason Day, you know, Tiger Woods. Any of the players that really hit the ball well when they’re playing great, they have this slight tilt away and a nice straight line in these angles.

So really, really good work there. That’s looking beautiful. Great Top Speed Golf five fundamentals, now we need to get a little bit more advanced.

He’s already basically a scratch golfer, we need to get a little bit more advanced and talk about how can we continue to improve even once we’re playing some fantastic golf?

One of the things that he struggles with is getting a little bit under the plane and hitting some blocks to the right, and having a few hooks that go to the left which are really the same thing.

If we draw our swing plane line, so we go from the hosel of the golf club and we’re going to shoot that up through the elbow.

That’s going to give us basically the plane that the club needs to swing on whether we’re talking about a driver or a wedge, because your setup will be slightly different.

That’s going to give us a really good basis for where the swing plane should be. We’re going to look at this in the downswing and talk about the path of the club and how this can give certain results.

The first thing we’ll talk about is the camera setup, it’s slightly off. I’m guessing the target is basically here, it looks like a dog-leg left.

We’d like to be shooting down the toes toward the target, and we can see how this camera angle is set up a little bit more between the toes and the club head.

Ideally, we’d like to have the camera set up a little bit different. That’s going to skew our plane line a little bit, but I think we can still get a pretty good idea of what’s going on, and we can see this pretty well, even with the camera angle slightly being off.

In the future, Scott, when you’re shooting down the line, make sure you go down the toes, that way you can measure your swing plane a little bit better.

Here, as he’s going back, again, really nicely on plane. We can that as he’s halfway back, again, the camera angle’s a little bit off.

Basically, the club shaft is pointing right in the direction, appears to be very close to the direction that he’s going to be hitting this shot.

Now as we continue to the top, we’re seeing he’s got a very good top of the backswing position. It appears that his club is pointing a little bit to the right, but that’s mostly camera angle here in this position.

So he’s maybe a little bit getting the hands a little bit far in behind his body, but not too bad there. This is definitely within a great range of where he can play some fantastic golf from.

I think if this camera was a little bit more to the inside, we’d actually see this club pointing more toward the target in the distance, which again, I want to assume is about right here.

Now as he continues down, this is where we start to get a slight issue with the blocks to the right, and as he’s coming into contact what we’d like to see is this club just barely tracing down the inside of this plane line.

So almost coming down the plane line, then what’s going to happen from there is it’s going to release square through the ball.

We’re going to be coming down from the inside, square, and then back to the inside as we’re making the downswing.

We can see that his club is pointing a little bit too far to the right, or a little bit too far underneath that plane. This is what’s called being stuck or slightly under the plane.

Again, not bad, great player here. This is a really good swing, but if we want to eliminate some of those errant shots, this is probably the best place to do that, or definitely the best place to do that, because the rest is very solid.

If we were to look at this club shaft, what we’re going to see is that it’s pointing a little bit to the right here. It’s pointing out toward right field if you’re playing baseball, and we’d like to have that pointing a little bit more down the target line.

A good key for that is what we’re doing with the elbows and the forearms. Actually, before I get into that, let me explain how this is going to cause the block to the right, or the hook to the left, slightly.

So from here, there’s three options. Number one, is that my club’s coming from the inside, it’s in a path that has momentum swinging and kicking it out to the right.

We can see how that’s kind of an inside out, how he’s going from under the plane to over, from inside to outside the plane.

So basically that club is swinging down from contact here on the inside, and it’s swinging a little bit out to the right. I’m exaggerating here.

But it’s swinging out toward right field, and the momentum is kicking it out toward right field. If he continues down that and the face is square, and he continues to let the momentum of the club kick out to the right, he’s going to get a shot that flies out here into the right rough.

Now, the second option, that’s the first option and that’s what most good golfers do if they get a little bit under the plane, which is pretty common for good golfers.

If we continue to let that momentum kick out to the right, that ball’s going to fly out to the right, and that’s going to be your block.

If we’re a little bit to the inside now and we redirect back in, or sorry, we continue to swing out to the right but we redirect the club face to where now the club face is pointing a little more to the left.

So the path is going to the right, the club is swinging out to the right, but the face is pointing over to the left, what that’s going to do is that’s going to be your hook.

The first one was a block, the second one we closed the face and now we’re going to hook left.

Both of those are caused from the same issue, which is swinging the club, getting the club a little bit too much under plane and swinging out to the right.

One of them was just a square face to the right, and the other one was just a closed face to the left. It’s really the same shot, and that’s the two things that he said he was struggling with to fix.

The third result here, is that we’re going to kind of redirect the club to get it back on plane. It looks like what he did pretty well here, and we get a nice, straight shot.

You can play good golf coming from a little bit too far to the inside, and that’s why a lot of good players do that, they redirect the club to get it more on this plane as they’re coming down, which is basically what he’s done here, and then we get a good shot.

So it’s a bit of a luck of the draw, or how well you time up the hit from there, being too far from the inside. We can hit a block, we can hook, or we can hit a straight shot. Depending on how good your rhythm is that day, is what the result’s going to be.

Let’s talk about how to fix this and get it a little bit more on plane. Ideally what we’d like to have is instead of the club head coming down here, we want it a little bit more outside the hands and arms.

The easiest way to control this, is to imagine that the golf club and the handle here is a little mini steering wheel.

Right now, that steering wheel is turned quite a bit to the right. If you looked at the top of the steering wheel, again we’re talking figuratively, it’s turned back in to the inside.

If you look at the right elbow, it’s really tucked back in to the inside, and the left elbow is kind of flared out, or kind of pointing out this direction.

Again, if you guys are watching this at home, you struggle with these same issues, blocks and hooks, imagine a little tiny steering wheel, and go ahead and turn that wheel to the right as far as you can go.

You’re going to see your elbow’s going to pop out a little bit like that, and this elbow’s really going to be tucked in in that direction.

So the idea that he wants to have here is we’re going to rotate that as we’re starting down, rotate that steering wheel a little bit more what would be counterclockwise as he’s starting down.

As you go back the steering wheel rotates clockwise, or turning that steering wheel to the right. As we’re coming down, he’s keeping that steering wheel turned to the right very long into the downswing.

I want to have that steering wheel turned a little more to the left, so that club traces down the plane line.

If you’re filming this again, Scott, as you go back out. Shoot from the toes down to the target line, and as you’re coming into the downswing, if you pause about halfway down and we’re looking at this golf club, I want to have the shaft, again from adjusting the elbows, getting those a little bit more lined up.

I want to have the shaft pointing more down the fairway, and I want to take this club head and have it just barely inside of this line versus a good eight inches or up to a foot inside the line.

You’ll also see when you’re pausing and doing this, if you do this correctly, you’re going to clear up a little bit of this gap between your forearms.

As you have that idea of kind of turning the steering wheel back in, that’s going to close up that gap. The right elbow’s not going to be as tucked in to your side, and the left elbow’s going to be a little bit closer to your left side.

That’s going to get you clear up this gap a little bit to where now, your club is tracing back down more on plane to deliver a good shot. That’s going to help to clear up a lot of those errant shots.

The momentum of the club head at this time is enormous. We’re having over a hundred pounds of force in the momentum of the club head here, and if it’s swinging out a little bit to the right this way, because it’s gotten a little too far to the inside.

There’s a lot that has to happen to be able to time that up and redirect that momentum. If we can get the momentum more lined up with the square shot by getting this club more on plane.

That’s going to get you a lot more consistent strikes and I think that’s what’s going to take you down to getting a little bit better than a scratch handicap, is being able to eliminate a few of those misses.

So work on that, focus on that club being a little bit more outside as you start down, going to feel like it’s more in front of your body as you’re doing this. That should straighten out your ball flight.

You may even slightly start to see if you do this a little too much, to get a little bit of a cut on the ball, and it’s shaping left to right. That may let you know that you’re overdoing this very, very slightly.

You’ve got to find that sweet spot, that sweet zone where the ball flight is very, very straight as you’re doing that.

Hopefully this makes a lot of sense to you. Take a little bit more of that steering wheel, turn it slightly to the left as you’re starting down.

Get that club head slightly more in front of the body as it’s coming down, and you’re going to feel like you’re swinging a little bit more to the left across the ball.

You may see a slight fade if you overdo this. Ideally, it’s going to be almost dead straight or just slightly a little bit of a draw.

One last thing I’ll leave you with here that I think is really going to help with this, is feel like as you’re doing this, that someone’s taking – if you had a string tied to your left pant pocket, and they’re going to pull it back this way just slightly to help you clear the hips out of the way.

That’s going to get you a little bit more room to get this club in front of the body. The more the hips go this way and kind of block your downswing path, the more the club wants to fall in behind the body.

So feel like those hips clear out of the way a little bit more, and that’s going to help you to get that club out in front.

Overall, great golf swing, really nice fundamentals. The results are showing, 2 handicap. If you want to take it to the next level, get that club a little bit more on plane. I think you’re going to be playing some absolutely fantastic golf.

So good luck, work hard, and I’ll talk to you soon.