Why You Need This: In this video, you'll learn how to hit into the wind.

Imagine you step up to the tee box...

And the wind is gusting straight into your face.

What do you do?

Do you hit your shot as you would normally and hope the wind doesn't beat it down?

Or, do you bunt your 4 iron and hope that you can salvage a bogey?

Well, there's a better way...

Today you'll discover how to hit shots that penetrate through the wind...

...to make sure you get to the green every time.

Your goal should be to hit it low and with less backspin.

The higher you launch the golf ball, the more the wind will catch it.

And the more backspin you put on the ball, the more friction the ball has as it travels.

So, keep it low and with little spin!

How to hit the ball with a lower trajectory...

First, grab a longer club.

This will help you hit it lower due to the lower loft.

However, depending on how strong the wind is, this club may be too much.

If that's the case, then take off a little distance by choking down on the club.

Second, take an easy swing.

It's tempting to tighten up your grip and swing as hard as you can.

Avoid this as your mechanics will likely break down and create more problems.

Third, hit the ball a little higher up the clubface.

This introduces the gear effect, which puts less backspin on the ball.

Summary of how to hit penetrating shots...

• grab a longer club (choke down if neccessary)
• swing nice and easy
• hit the ball a little higher up the clubface

Watch this video now to find out how to hit into the wind...

And never come up short ever again!

Golf Pros Featured:

Instructors Featured: Clay Ballard    

Video Duration: 4:41

Video Transcription:

We all struggle with those really tricky shots, whether it’s a hard-pan lie, it’s a side hill, it’s into the wind, those are really tough. This is what this section is all about, the specialty shots.

I’m going to lead you through a step-by-step system on how to hit the best shots off the toughest situations. Let’s go ahead and get started.

Hey guys, I’ve got a great video for you today. One of the most frustrating shots out there, you’re into the wind, we’ve got a nice 15-20 mile an hour wind in our face. It’s already making us a little bit intimidated, we’re not sure if we can get there.

We really grip hard on the club, we’re really going to take this big, aggressive swing. Ugh, we swing as hard as we can, the ball goes straight up in the air, the wind beats it up, and it falls down 20 yards short of the green.

It happens to all of us. In this video I’m going to talk about how you can get hat ball to penetrate through the wind, to make sure that you get to the green every time. I’ve got some good tricks for you, they’re going to help you out right away. Let’s go ahead and get started.

All right, so today I’ve got my FlightScope out, it’s going to register some of the spin rates, the distances for me. I’m going to start out with an 8 iron here, and let’s pretend -- I’m just sitting down the fairway right now -- let’s pretend that I’m going into the green and I’ve got this 20 mile and hour wind in my face.

So the one thing I want to have happen, is I want to keep that ball fairly low, and I want to keep the backspin off the ball. As this ball starts to get a lot of backspin, so you imagine as this ball starts spinning this way, as it’s coming into the wind, beating up against the wind, the bottom of the ball gets a lot of friction.

The more spin you have the more rise that creates, and the more the ball goes up and down instead of penetrating through the wind. Also the higher we launch the golf ball, the more that wind is going to beat it up. So we want to keep the ball nice and low, and we want to take as much spin off of it as possible.

So now I’m going to try that hard-hit 8 iron. I’m going to go take a good, aggressive swing at this one, and let’s see how much spin we get and what the carry distance is. There we go. So swing nice and aggressive at that one.

Pretty straight shot, let’s see what the FlightScope picks up. We had 7.767 backspin. So 7,700 RPMs of backspin, 160 yards carry distance, and that was the 8 iron.

The first thing we’re going to want to do, is we want to get that ball to launch lower like I talked about. So I’m going to get rid of the 8 iron and I’m going to go to my 7 iron. Now the 7 iron is going to go a little bit too far, that may be OK if we’re into the wind, we may have a little bit extra club and that will be fine.

But assuming that this is going to be a little bit too much club, what we’re going to do is we’re actually going to choke down on it about a half inch or three-quarters of an inch, whatever makes it comfortable to choke down. So that’s going to take a little bit of that distance off there.

So I have a little too much club, if I hit it nice and solid, it penetrates through the wind it’s going to go over the green, so I need to choke down to shorten the distance of this club.

A good example of how that works is your driver has a very long distance. As you swing that, it creates a lot of club head speed. Your pitching wedge is much shorter, five or six inches shorter, as you swing that it’s not going to create as much club head speed.

That’s why we want to choke down, to take a little bit of speed off of this. Number two, I want to go ahead and be nice and soft, I don’t ever want to rush this shot, I want to be nice and smooth as I’m coming back and through. I don’t want to try to accelerate very quickly or I may start hitting down into the ball too much.

Then number three, I want to hit a little bit off the top of the club. That’s actually going to create what’s called a gear effect. So as you hit this golf ball, if it goes off the top of the club, the club actually opens up a little bit and puts what seems like topspin on there.

It actually grabs onto the ball, puts a little bit more – it’s not really topspin, it’s just less back spin.

So I’m going to choke down on the club. I’m going to take one extra club. Nice, easy swing, I’m not going to rush it, I’m not going to try to kill the ball.

If I try to kill it I’m going to end up hitting down too much, getting too aggressive and getting too much spin on there. Then number three, I’m going to hit it a little bit high on the face to help take some spin off there. Let’s go ahead and try one out.

There we go, so I actually hit it a little thinner than I wanted too. I wanted to hit t a little bit higher on the face, so it’s probably not going to have quite as low of spin as we could. Took a nice, easy swing. Let’s see how that did around the distance.

So I actually kept it exactly the same distance. The first one was 160, nice full swing. I took the 7 iron out and I hit it 161 yards, so exact same distance. My spin rate went down to 6,800 RPMs of backspin. So that really got the ball to penetrate through the wind.

If I had hit a little higher on the face like I wanted to, then that would have allowed me to really keep that ball low because the spin would have been even lower than that.

The important thing here, is if you look at the two shots, the second one had a vertical launch of 13 degrees, so it stayed nice and low. The first shot had a launch of 19.9 degrees, almost 20 degrees. So I actually got the ball a lot lower in its trajectory.

Part of that was due to the club, and part of that was because I was coming nice and easy, swinging through it, and I choked down on the club a little bit.

So take those three tips out there. One extra club, choke down, swing nice and easy, hit a little bit higher on the face.