Why You Need This: Today, you'll discover "How To Warm Up Before Playing Golf in Just 10 Minutes"

In today's lesson...

I'll take you through a quick, 10-minute warm-up that will have you playing your best golf...

...and will keep you from making changes to your swing that you don't need to make.

Not only will this save you time, but can help you avoid a lot of unnecessary headaches with your swing.

 

 

 

 

 

Golf Pros Featured:

Instructors Featured: Clay Ballard    

Video Duration: 12:20

Video Transcription:

All right, so here's the right way to warm up when you're playing golf, and it's very important that you do this the right way. The first thing we're gonna start with is alignment. And here's the reason why this is so important. Let's say you go out and you play an awesome round of golf, and you're hitting it fantastic, the best you have all year.

Then you come out the next time, and without even knowing it, you're lined up 10 yards to the right. Everything feels the same. You can't tell your lineup 10 yards to the right, and you're making that great swing, but everything's just blocking out to the right. So then you start to mess with your swinging.

You start making changes, you. Tweaking things you tweak, uh, moves in your swing. You tweak your grip. You go through a laundry list of things that you've heard on TV or from your buddies, and all of a sudden it's a big mess. Your swing is totally off the rails and you don't know what's going on. Well, if you would've kept your great swing that you had from a few days before and just taken it from being aligned here to being aligned where you normally would, you would've been hitting it great.

And you wouldn't had to do any of that . Right? So the first thing I like to do is I'm gonna put a club on the ground between my ball and my. and I'm gonna give myself some space here between this club and my feet. I'm gonna also give some space between the club and the ball that the only reason for that is, and typically I would start with the ball more toward the, the front end of this club.

That way as you hit more balls and you start to work further back, you don't ever have to move this club on the ground. Same thing with it on your feet. I'll see some people set it up right on their toes when now all of a sudden if they wanna move the ball just a half inch, that way, they gotta reset the club.

So anywhere between your ball and your the club. Your feet and the ball is perfect. Just give yourself some space to move around. Now I'm gonna start out here. I'm just gonna use a nine iron the whole time so I don't have to switch back and forth between clubs. But I normally start out with a sand wedge, and all I'm trying to do is just get a little weight shift to the right and then make sure my weight is shifting through the ball as I'm coming through there.

That's the first thing that I want to get down. So this is a great one because I'm super stiff right now. I started to work out a little bit again here. and I'm just feeling really tight. I'm not loose at all, and this will be a great way to show you how I do it, so I get my alignment correct and it probably looks a little weird on the screen.

This alignment does just because it's hard to visualize this club going out in the distance. So, so don't worry about this being right for this video. Just know I want to put this club on the ground, and if I'm looking down at like a, like a, a barrel of a rifle, it should be pointing right directly at the flag that I'm hitting.

Now, another thing to notice with this is I don't mind if you're a little open every time with your feet. I don't mind if you're a little closed with your feet. I just want you to be setting up the same way day in and day out. So if you normally like to do a trevino with a little bit open, I'm not trying to say, oh, don't do that.

Get your feet perfectly parallel with this club. I don't think that's right. For me personally, I'm a little bit open with my feet. That's the way I like to feel it. That's when I make my best swings. That's totally fine. I just wanna do the same thing day in and. Same thing with the toes. The worst mistake you can make is getting these toes directly facing toward the club, cuz it kinda locks off your hips and you can't rotate.

If I flare out my feet a little bit or open my toes up, now all of a sudden I can easily rotate more through the shot. So I'm gonna get my standard alignment. I'm gonna make some little 30, 40 yard shots with a a sandwich wedge and I'm just gonna get used to hitting the ball. And then the. So here all I'm really working on is getting my weight shift to my front foot, making sure that I have a nice clean strike on it.

And if I tend to be falling back, which is maybe a tendency I see a lot of people doing, you start to chunk it. This is where I'm just getting used to getting that ball first, contact my weight's on, my lead foot through contact, and then giving the divot in front. I'm not too worried about direction yet cuz I'm just trying to get loosened.

Figure out where the ground is, figure out where the ball is, and make a few good strikes. I wanna give myself a good lie that way that I don't have to really work super hard to be able to hit a decent shot here. So I'm just gonna go ahead, hit a few of those until I feel like, okay, starting to get a fairly loose, I'd work up into a full sandwich from there.

And as I'm doing that, I'd go through a specific kind of making sure the core pieces of the body are. And then I start to ramp up more speed and then I make sure that the, my hands, arms, and the club are correct. And the ball flight's. Correct. So if you don't do it in that order, um, you'll end up changing a lot of things in your swing that you don't need to change.

So I got my alignment, I got my weight shifting. Now let's get our body alignment. Correct. So this is our directional alignment. Let's get our body tilts and angles, right? Correct. So I'm gonna go ahead and do the number one fundamental in the golf swing, which is what I call the stable fluid. Where I'm just gonna bump my hips a little forward until the bottom of my club will be kinda on my knee.

The top of my club will be pointing back at the top of my shirt buttons, and I'm gonna be slightly angled away from the target. Now that's a stable fluided spine that gets me behind the golf ball. I'm still gonna have a weight shift to the left, but my, my nose and my upper body stays behind the ball.

That is incredibly important to being able to hit the ball well. and to be very consistent in the golf swing. And now I'm just gonna be rotating around my spine, so I gotta get that spine angle correct first before I go to anything else. Or I'm gonna be, again, changing a lot of things just cuz my overall body position is wrong.

Now, once I get that correct, I'm gonna go ahead and start to make bigger and bigger swings than what I call the power. So I'm starting out with little half swings here, kind of going left arm parallel, and then I'm making, I'm always making a full finish or a fairly full finish, but as I get looser and looser, I'm gonna go ahead and make bigger back swings and bigger follow throughs.

Now, most people think this means how far the club is going back. I don't care where this club goes, how far it goes back, it's how much I rotate my body again, my body is what's making all this. So I'm gonna start out with kind of left arm parallel, and you'll notice I don't quite have a full shoulder turn.

As I get looser and looser, I'm gonna let my knees start to rotate a little bit more, which loosens up my hips, which loosens up my shoulders. And then I'm gonna work into more of a full shoulder turn, getting all the way to 90 or even farther than that. And then as I come on through, I want this right shoulder facing the.

So I'm not quite loosened up here. I'll go ahead and make a full three quarter swing. So bigger shoulder, turn on the way back and get the right shoulder facing the target on the way through. There we go. And now I'm starting to really get into my full swing. Man. Kill that one. It's got nine iron here, that 1, 1 66 on a string.

That's about as good as I can do there. So I may be, I may be loosened up, right? So all I'm working on here and the reason the, the distance went up so quickly. I didn't try to swing a lot harder. I just made sure my body loaded up by using, letting my knees move. If you have your knees locked in and you're trying to rotate your shoulders, it ain't gonna happen.

You're gonna feel stiff as a board. A ball's gonna go nowhere. Let these knees move, let your shoulders turn. And then most importantly, as I come on through, get that right shoulder toward the target. That's the power turn. So I. line direction wise. Then I got my body angles. Then I started to make bigger and bigger turns called the power turn.

And finally, I would start to work on the other fundamentals of the swing, which would be lag, and the straight line release, and making sure my club is working properly through contact. So as I started to make some bigger swings, let's go ahead and make one what I would consider to be kind of a full swing here.

There we go. Hit that one. You're going far today. I got it juiced up somehow. It's a 1 74 with a nine iron. That's pretty long for me. And then as I get those full swings, then I'm gonna worry about having lag and release. So what I'm doing here is finally I'm gonna work on actually my pelvis. It sounds crazy enough, but when you start your down swinging, I want my pelvis to rotate down.

So if you go ahead and take your hands on your hips and imagine your belt. If I rotate my pelvis down, like I'm kind of arching my back, that's gonna allow me to kind of squat down and get a bunch of lag. I'll go over that here in a second as I tuck my pelvis under. That's the extension part. And if I do that too early, it's called early extension and I'm standing up, I'm tucking my pelvis under, and now I have to cast just to be able to reach the ball.

So what is happening there is if I tuck my pelvis under early, I stand. And now if I have lag, I can't reach the golf ball, so I have to flip to be able to reach at the golf ball. So what I wanna work on here is I'm gonna tuck my pelvis down and as I, my left arm is kind of parallel to the ground in the downswing, my belt buckles at the ground and I have some good lag.

Then from there, I'm gonna go ahead and release out in front. And this is the opposite. I'm letting my pelvis tuck under. I'm getting this nice, tall finish like you see with all the pro. , my chest is nice and high, my right shoulders to the target, and I've come all the way around. So that's that lag pelvis down to straight line release and full follow through where I'm nice and tall and high here.

Now that sounds like a lot, but it looks really simple. It just looks like this, right? That's all. The golf swing is letting my pelvis do that. So I'm gonna go ahead now and feel like I really get some lag. Get my hands in front here at contact. That way I can really compress this golf ball and get fully loosened up that way.

So let's go ahead and give that a whirl.

There you go. And that felt pretty good. And for me, if my pelvis starts to tuck early, I'm gonna stand up out of it. That's when I play my worst golf. So I'm just working on getting those, that pelvis down and then extending through it. And then I would just go ahead once I'm warmed up. I'd go sandwich, we middle iron and then out to the driver.

And I would just do a few with each one of those. I might even play the course in my mind, so visualize hole number one, hole number two, hole number three, and actually hit the real shots that I would hit there. So I would take my driver and hit one, and then a middle iron and hit one, or whatever the, the hole is gonna call for.

That way I feel like I'm already getting started with the round, and it isn't such a shock when I go to the number one. Now the piece that I think is most important in this or getting down in this loosening up and the piece that's the most difficult is getting this lag and this straight line release on out in front.

Now that's not what you're probably thinking it is. You see, a lot of times what ends up happening too, that goes directly in line with this is you'll be coming down steep and then that causes me, cuz I, if I, if I'm steep and I tuck my pelvis under and I have a bunch of lag, I'm gonna bury this club in the.

So if you have a steep club shaft, you have to stand up to get this club to shallow out and to keep the club from bearing in the ground actually hit some decent shots. So until you get this club shallowed out, it's tough to get the pelvis tucked like we just talked about. It's tough to get a bunch of this lag like we talked about.

In fact, if your club is steep, and I look at it from this camera angle, it doesn't look like any lag. If I shower this club out, all of a sudden it looks like a ton of lag. being able to get lag, have your pelvis moved correctly, have the straight line release like we just talked about. All that is reliant on Shallowing the club.

And I have the perfect video series for you on this. It's actually just a handful of videos and you can do all of it in just a single practice session. I call it the 20 minute Shallowing Fix. And that's what I want you to do next. So if you remember a top speed golf, go to the instruction tab, go to the top speed golf system, do the 20 minute Shallowing fix, that's gonna help get this club more from the.

I'm gonna teach you the natural wrist position and elbow position that kind of unlocks all this for you, and that will make everything we talked about here today, just really easy and simple to do. So, best of luck. Head on over to the the 20 minute showering Fix. I can't wait to see you there and show you the secrets of the natural wrist and elbow positions that make all this so much easier.

Let's go and get started.