Why You Need This: Today, you'll discover "How to Hit The Ball and Then the Turf With EVERY Club!"

Ever wonder why the pros make perfect divots no matter what club they use?

Today, I’ve got a drill that’ll show you how to hit down the perfect amount with every club…

…so you’ll understand exactly how to get that perfect divot, no matter what club you're using.

And I’ll show you what you might be doing with your hips that can make it impossible to swing from the inside (revealed around the 3:40 mark).

No more drop-kick shots or agonizing chunks!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Golf Pros Featured:

Instructors Featured: Clay Ballard    

Video Duration: 13:04

Video Transcription:

Now you know that you need to come down, hit the ball first, and then take a divot in front of the golf ball. You may have even heard that pros hit down different amounts based on the club. So a pitching wedge hits down more than a middle iron or a long iron, and that hits down more than, say, a three would.

Well, that's only halfway true. I'm going to give you one surefire fix to make it super simple to hit down the right amount with every single club and a drill to ensure that you're hitting down the right amount and knowing how to do this. So no more of those drop kick shots where you hit the divot behind the golf ball, the chunks.

The uppercut shots that blade across the, the green. We're going to get rid of all that in this one video. I'm even going to talk about here how hitting down on it isn't that tough. You probably know how to do this instinctively, but it's the result that you're getting that you don't like. We're going to talk about how the pros hit down on it the right, the right way to get a nice straight ball flight, uh, every single time.

So, let's start out by doing the drill. It's really going to help. We have to have feedback. If you're going to do this right, you need to know if you're doing the correct way. I'm going to take a grip width behind my golf ball that I'm going to hit. So I'm gonna hit this golf ball. I'm gonna take one grip width behind that.

I'm going to put a golf ball there and I should be able to miss this back golf ball, hit the front golf ball, and then make my divot in front if I'm hitting down the right amount with a wedge. So all your wedges. One grip width behind the ball you're hitting is the right amount to hit down. Now, I shouldn't be hitting giant, huge divots with this, but I'm going to show you the right way to figure out if you're doing this or not.

Now, I like to, and this gets to the root cause of the real problem here. Nobody has trouble hitting down. If I said, go ahead and make an over the top swing and slam this club in the ground, you'd be able to bury that thing in there and you'd have zero problem hitting it down in the golf ball. You could probably take a divot that's this long, right?

That's easy. The problem is when I do that, I get this big atrocious type slicing move. All right. So I swung really hard and I hit that pitching wedge 116 yards on the carry with 80 miles an hour clubhead speed. That's a lot of clubhead speed and not much carry. I'm going to do the same thing here again.

Same swing speed, roughly 80 miles an hour, but I'm going to do it the right way from the inside and hit a nice straight shot. There we go. So I swung a little bit faster at 90 miles an hour. So I'm coming from the inside, but I hit 150 yards, 149 yards carry with my pitching wedge. So we got to get it from the inside.

Now, one thing I like to do with this drill to give you that visual representation of that, I put the golf ball behind the ball I'm hitting. I also like to put it about a golf ball inside of the ball that I'm hitting. And I like to swing over top of this back golf ball on the way down, if I'm wanting to hit a draw.

So the sensation I'm going to swing, as I'm making little practice swings, is that I'm going to come from the inside like this and hit the front golf ball. There we go. Probably overdid the draw on that one. Really see that turning over 161 yards on that one. So pretty daggone good. Now nothing beats putting a physical object in the way so that you just can't swing over the top.

So one thing I like to do, the launch monitor probably won't read this golf ball this time, but I like to put an impact bag in the way. So like that. So now, and I'm going to put it about a club grip width behind it. So now with this impact bag in the way, if I start to take it back outside, chop down on the outside, like I said before, everybody can easily hit down on it if they're coming from the outside.

I've now got this in the way to feel like I'm going more from the inside. Now from here, a couple key body positions. It's going to be impossible to swing from the inside if your hips are back here. And my nose is in front of my belt buckle. I need to feel like my weight gets a little bit more to my lead side.

So basically I'm going to set up nice and neutral, straight up and down. I'm going to hinge forward in my posture. My nose should be over my belt buckle here. I'm going to shift my weight to the left until my belt buckle gets in front of the golf ball. And then I'm going to go ahead and tilt my nose back until my weight feels about 50 50 now.

And I'm tilted in a way that allows me to swing from the inside. So long story short, if you're going to hit from the inside, if you're going to shovel the club out, if you're going to hit it nice and square, your belt buckle goes a little forward as your head goes back, you're keeping your weight 50 50 as that's happening, and now I'm slotted to the inside where I have room to swing over this back golf ball.

So I'm going to go ahead and exaggerate one here and really hit a nice big draw,

and hit that pretty daggone good. Now, One thing you want to do here, as I start to swing more from the inside, this is the whole dilemma that we're getting at. As I start to swing more from the inside, it makes my low point want to be farther behind the golf ball. So I'll show you what I mean by this. If I start to swing way out to the right, so I'm swinging that way, I can do that easily if my divot is back here by my back foot.

Let's get that bag out of the way for a second. I can do that very easily if my divot is way back here. If I'm hitting the ground way behind what would be a normal setup position for a golf ball. If I swing way over the top, I can make a divot easily on this side of my foot. It would be very difficult to make one here because my body would be in the way.

It'd be very difficult to get a divot up here because my arms can't even reach if I'm leaning the opposite direction. So when you swing more out to the right or from the inside, It pulls your divot back. When you swing more over the top, it pulls your divot forward. So anybody can get a forward divot with an over the top move.

It's that inside move that's tougher. Here's what I want you to do to finally get that divot in front with the inside move. Now we've already got the golf ball there to give us the right amount of feedback. The golf ball from inside. Now I want you to go ahead, get that, get that impact bag back, or just put anything, a range bucket, whatever you want in the way, so that you have to come a little bit from the inside.

And then from there, what I'm gonna do is widen my stance a little bit, and I'm gonna feel like on my downswing, I swing from the inside here, but I'm getting my weight more into this lead foot. I'm feeling like I'm getting that divot a good five or six inches, or I'm visualizing if I want to move this golf ball out of the way, I want to miss this bag, but get that divot up here in front of the golf ball.

I want to feel like I'm getting weight over this lead side. My knees kind of turned out and I'm feeling like I'm hitting here and extending my arms all the way through the shot. That's going to allow me to get that divot in front, but still be a draw. Now once I get the feeling for that, I can go ahead, put this golf ball back here again.

I'm going to get that same feeling of that dividend front but still going out to the right and that's going to allow me to swing from the inside with a draw. There we go. So I exaggerated there. I started out to the right. You can see the tracer at the bottom, the black line. That ball is turning back. I overdid it there.

That's exactly what I want you to do. Get that ball starting too far to the right. Draw it back. If you feel like it's not drawing enough, just release the club a little bit more. Let the hands turn on over a little bit more, and that ball will come back. One little thing that most players don't know, when you look at slow motion of PGA Tour players, when they release the club, when their club is about almost waist high in the follow through, so the club head is almost back up to the waist, you're going to see this leading edge of the club actually square perpendicular to the ground like this, or even a little bit turning over like that.

If I look at most recreational players, they're trying to hold the face square and when they get to that point, the face is open like this. So go ahead and let that club come from the inside, but you gotta let that face release. Here we go.

There we go. Divot in front. Nice draw. You're not going to get it to move too much with a pitching wedge. That's a quite a bit of draw with a pitching wedge, 154 carry distance. Pretty daggone happy with that. Now I mentioned earlier. How, you don't really vary the hitting down very much as you switch to clubs.

And mostly that's true. If I take this setup again, I'm going to get it the same way we've been doing a ball one club head width behind. I'm going to grab two extra balls for long irons and woods. If I look at my ball position with a, with my wedges, basically going to be center of my stance. I'm going to scoot back here a little bit so I'm in line with the camera.

This will be easier to see. So my ball position is basically going to be center of my stance there. Now as I go into a middle iron, it's going to be slightly in front of that. And a three wood is going to be slightly in front of that. So if you think about it, I'm hitting down, and imagine the swing is like an arc.

So as my club head moves down, it's going down the arc. It levels out up here, and then it starts to come back up. So if I put my ball position farther forward, my low point of the arc is at the bottom of the divot. My bottom of my divot is going to be about 4 inches in front of the golf ball I'm hitting.

So, wedge, long iron, 3 wood. You can see how when I put that there, I'd be hitting down more on a wedge, less on a long iron, and even less than that on a 3 wood, but it's all ball position. So if I go ahead and set up my 3 wood stance,

that's about where I'd play my 3 wood, a little bit up in my stance. If I take my wedge now, it's going to be more in the middle of my stance. So all you have to do is change how much you play it in front of this back ball. A wedge, or any of your wedges, the back ball goes a grip width behind the ball you're hitting.

The rest of the clubs, three woods are going to be about another half of a grip width more than that. So a grip width and a half is where you put the back ball. Long irons is a grip width and a quarter, and wedges is just one grip width. So you're just adjusting how far you're putting that ball behind it to see the angle of attack change a little bit.

And again, you're not making different swings, you're just adjusting the ball position slightly. So. So the three wood ball position is about this much in four forward of where a wedge ball position would be. So that's going to solve all those issues with not really knowing how to, you know, hit down the right amount depending on the club.

All right. Now, if you're a member of Top Speed Golf, the easiest way to do this is by focusing on the straight line release. And really all of this is going to take care of itself if we get the straight line release correct. So if you're not a member, you're not familiar with this, what's happening here is we're getting lag in the downswing.

And then instead of releasing at the golf ball, that would be my standup kind of flip. My divot would be below the golf ball. I'd have to pick the golf ball cleaner. I'd be chunking it. It's not good, but I want to stay down, get this lag. I'm going to, instead of be releasing at the golf ball, I'm going to release in front of the golf ball.

So when I focus on my release point there, it automatically gets my weight to the left. It's everything moving out this way, and I'm almost like throwing the golf club in front of the golf ball. The golf ball is just getting in the way. Now that's one of the moves that every single PGA tour player is going to be making.

Every single great college player, every single great player at your country club, even the best players that are over 50, over 60, over 70, they're saying all of them are doing that same move, that straight line release out in front. If you're a great ball striker, you just kind of have to do that move. So.

If you remember Top Speed Golf, you need to ingrain that into your game, and you have to do that with a system. No matter how good the instruction is, if I give you the perfect feeling today, and you go out there and stripe every single shot, after a few days, you're going to forget the feeling, or it's going to change on you, and that's not really the answer.

The answer is going through a system where it ingrains it into your swing, where you never have to think about it again. So as you go through level one of the straight line release, you're going to have to think about it a little bit, but you're going to get that great feeling. You're going to start really compressing some shots.

Feeling like the ball is very solid. You feel like you can hit it from any lie as you get the level two, you still have to think about it a little bit. Sometimes you do, sometimes you don't, but again, you're going to be hitting the ball well, cause you're going to be doing these drills. As you get through level three, you don't have to think about it anymore.

It's baked into your swing. You've done enough reps to where it's innate and the feeling that you get from it, you don't want to lose that. So you keep on doing the drills because they're fun. So that's the only way to get it in your swing forever so that you can pick up a club, not think about anything and get that divot in front of the golf ball and hit it really clean.

So head on over the straight line release right now. Today, you just need to do a single drill from level one. And start your journey to getting through level three. Before you know it, you'll be done with level three and you'll be thanking me later, best of luck. I'll see you over in the straight line release.

Let's go and get started.