Why You Need This: In this video, "How to Stop Casting and Start Getting Lag"...

I'll address a major problem all amateur golfers struggle with at one point or another...

Casting.

It's one of the most frustrating things in golf...

Burning up your club head speed and causing terrible inconsistency.

I'm sure you've heard the typical instruction to just "hold your lag" later into the swing...

But if it were that simple, you wouldn't be doing it anymore, right??!!

Well, in this video you're going to find out the 2 things I see in every student that casts...

And then get step-by-step drills for fixing them.

Watch this video now to stop casting and start getting lag today!

Golf Pros Featured:

Instructors Featured: Clay Ballard    

Video Duration: 9:13

Video Transcription:

Casting the golf club in the downswing is one of the most frustrating things you can do in golf. It burns up your club head speed, and we’ve all heard the common instruction to try to build lag, or retain your lag as you’re coming down, to release the club later in the swing.

But if it was that simple, wouldn’t we all have stopped casting? I’m actually going to get into two things that I see every single person that comes to be for in-person lessons that are struggling with when they cast the golf club, I’m going to show you how to get rid of that cast once and for all.

Let’s go ahead and get started.

When we’re casting, we’re coming down, we’re losing a lot of speed, we’re losing all the angles between our forearms and our club, and what’s happening is our club is accelerating too quickly as we’re starting in the downswing.

As we’re halfway down, if you’re looking at a professional golfer, the club is only moving about 30 or 40 miles an hour, and then accelerates with a driver all the way up to about 120 miles an hour at impact.

With someone who’s casting, the club head is actually moving a lot faster back here, maybe 50-60 miles an hour, it’s burned up a lot of the speed, already released that, and then the club is decelerating as it’s coming into the ball, or just not accelerating as quickly.

That’s kind of the part that we all know. We all know how casting is bad and why we don’t want to be doing that, it also tends to add a lot of loft to the club head.

So now when we flip the club and our hands over top of the ball, we’re adding instead of having forward shaft lean, we’re back here and we’re adding more loft to the face which means the ball’ going to go up a little bit higher.

Now let’s talk about the real root cause of this. If we could just change this, I think we would all do that immediately and start hitting the ball better. What’s the underlying cause that’s making it difficult for you to get rid of the cast?

There’s two things, the first thing that I always see everybody that casts, because we tend to flip a little bit, the ball goes higher, well the natural tendency now is to put the ball farther back in the stance.

If you look here the ball’s almost off the inside of my back foot. Some people will put it just behind center if they start to cast.

Now, it’s easier for me to get forward shaft lean and to hit down into this ball more, and that’s going to get me that lower, more penetrating ball flight, but it causes me to actually keep on casting to hit a good shot.

If I had this ball slightly back in my stance, and we can imagine now if I just let this come swing on its natural arc and make a circle, the low point of this arc is going to be kind of on the inside of my left shoulder.

As I’ coming through, if I had forward shat lean, and I did this, I would hit the top of the ball, and it would go dribbling down the fairway. We’re obviously not going to do that, we subconsciously realize well that’s just not going to work.

We go ahead and we start to cast, and release that club face so that we can reach the ball and hit the ball and the ground at the same amount of time.

What’s happening there is we have this steep, vertical, very steep angle of attack and more of a circular swing, and as we’re doing that, the club is moving down into the ground, big heavy divot.

So we scoop to shallow that up and the bottom of our swing arc looks kind of like a circle like this. That’s very difficult to be consistent when we’re doing that. The first thing that we have to do is we have to get that ball farther forward in the stance.

For those of you who cast, you know exactly what happens when you put it forward in your stance. You start hitting it way higher, and you lose a bunch of yardage.

That’s what brings us to the second piece that we have to change every time we cast, and that is getting a flat spot with forward shat lean as we’re coming through the ball.

As we come in properly, we talked about the first time, the incorrect one was coming down steep and having a very circular angle of attack, and a circular path coming through contact. If you can imagine my forearm is the ground, we want to have forward shaft lean with this club.

As we’re getting close to contact, we’re actually going to be coming in level and that club is going to stay level with the ground a good six or eight inches there.

When we have forward shaft lean and a level angle of attack just like the pros, pros are only coming in a couple of degrees, somewhere between two and five degrees down into the ball, which if you can imagine a clock face, that’s less than one minute.

One minute hand, that little wedge there, so they’re coming in very, very shallow, that’s because they’re getting the flat spot. Let’s go ahead and move that ball up in the stance, and I’m going to show you how to do this correctly.

All right, so what we want to do is as we’re coming into contact, if I pause just prior to contact, just before my club reaches the ground, you’re going to see that I have a lot of forward shaft lean here, and my club is almost coming into contact with the ground.

Now from here, what’s actually happening is my handle, the butt end of the club if you can imagine there’s a line sticking out of this, it’s actually raisin vertically. It’s coming back up.

That’s because my hands and arms are naturally working back up, my shoulder is working in a circle, and working back up vertically this way.

As my club comes up, my club head, my handle comes up, the club head is actually still releasing down, and the results there with really good players is they have this six to eight-inch zone where their club is almost level with the ground.

That allows you to consistently hit that golf ball time and time again, with forward shaft lean. So if every time you get forward shaft lean we have the ball back and we start chopping down into the ground like that, we’re never going to be able to be consistent because it’s too small of a margin for error.

We’ve got to widen out that flat spot at the bottom of the swing, give us that good three to four-inch area that we can contact the ball anywhere in there, and that’s going to allow us to be consistent, to get forward shaft lean, and to get rid of that cast once and for all.

Now let’s go ahead and go over some drills. I’ve got some great step by-step progressions that are going to help you to actually take this course, start hitting the ball better.

Now the first thing we’re going to work on here, we’re going to do about 100 repetitions working on this flat spot and getting the club to glide through contact so we have that nice, even compression as we’re coming through the ball.

What I’m going to do is I’m going to go ahead and pause just prior to impact. I’m going to pause just prior to the golf ball, my club should be slightly off the ground at this point, and I’m probably two or three inches behind the ball.

Now I’m going to go ahead and move this ball out of the way so I can get this club to glide across the turf. I want to focus on putting pressure on the inside of my left heel, and I’m actually driving up with my left ankle.

My hands are naturally coming up a little bit, my left shoulder is naturally, because it’s working on a circle it’s going to work back up a little bit. I’m not trying to pull out of it, I’m just letting that happen.

As I do that, I’m going from big time forward shaft lean here, into where I’m releasing that forward shaft lean a little bit. You can see my club start to stand up, and this entire time, I’m just letting that club work through the zone.

You can see just how shallow my angle o attack is as I’m coming into this ball, and my club is gliding across the turf for a good six to eight inches. That’s what’s going to allow you to get the consistency.

Look at pro’s divots. It looks like they took a razor blade and just sliced off a couple millimeters of turf, and you can just see the roots underneath. That’s the kind of divot we want to have. We’re going to do 100 repetitions, focusing on those things I just mentioned.

Now the second thing that we’re going to do, once we have that forward shaft lean, we’ve got to make sure that we keep the club face square. The tendency that we see when you start to lean the shaft forward, my hands go forward and look at the club face now, it’s wide open.

I want to make sure that as I lean the shaft forward, you’re going to be getting more forward shaft lean than you’re used to, I want to make sure this face is dead square.

I’m going to do that by turning my right hand down, you can see how there’s an angle between my palm and the back of my forearm here, and the palm of my hand is now going to be turned down more toward the ground. We have to do that as we get more forward shaft lean.

So we’re going to check to make sure that face is square all the way as we’re coming through contact. Another 100 repetitions getting that face to be square, we’re getting the club to glide, and we’re just doing that over and over again.

The third piece as we start to speed this up, we’ve got to make sure that we release the club. We don’t ever want to hold on to this. Remember we’re going from lag to releasing that club.

I don’t ever want to hold on to this like this as we’re coming through contact, because I’m never releasing this angle, I’m never getting the speed from the club. So I’m going to pause, just like we talk about in our straight line release on the Top Speed Golf System.

I’m going to pause about three feet in front, or four feet in front of the ball. My hips, my shoulders, my club, everything is in a 45° angle going forward, and now you can see how I’ve released all these angles with my golf club.

So now I’m going to make some bigger swings, and I’m just going to pause as I’m coming through there, making sure that I go from forward shaft lean and then I release this club out in front.

Another 100 repetitions doing that, so these are just little mini swings, kind of half back and half through. Once you’re comfortable with that, we’re going to tie it all in together.

We’re going to make some full practice swings all the way back, all the way through, really feeling that club gliding through the turf. Then we’re going to go ahead and hit some full shots.

Work on these drills, tie it all together, go out of the range, and you guys are going to hit some of the best shots of your life.

There we go, that was dead solid, and you can see how my divot just kind of scraped off the top layer of grass, didn’t dig down into the turf, and I hit that one nice and clean. Good luck to you guys, I’ll see you all soon.