Why You Need This: Today you'll learn "The Most Important Aspect of Indoor Practice - Contact (Part 2)"

Anytime you're training at home, whether you are working on swing technique, swing speed, or basically anything related to improving your golf swing...

...there's a key aspect that must be paired with your training or you risk damaging your timing, tempo and sequencing.

Discover this key aspect and why it's so important in making your indoor training transfer seamlessly to the course.

 

Golf Pros Featured:

Instructors Featured: Clay Ballard    

Video Duration: 5:54

Video Transcription:

Clay Ballard: Now this is an incredibly important video. In this one, you’re going to hear me talk about this a lot, but there’s one thing that can completely destroy your indoor game if you do it the wrong way, and if you do it the right way it’s going to help you to improve incredibly fast.

Here’s what that is. It’s playing position swing indoors, versus golf swing, or being able to hit golf shots.

Now when you’re outside, you’re hitting a golf ball. You get that feedback of seeing the ball fly when you’re on the driving range. You get the feel of hitting a real golf ball.

Maybe if you have a simulator or you’re able to hit real golf balls when you’re practicing indoors, that’s completely fine, but it’s still just not quite the same as being out on the course or out on the range.

So when you lose that feedback of seeing the ball fly, when you lose that feedback of hearing the sound of a shot hit off real grass, and seeing how that reacts with the club face, there’s a couple things that we have to modify.

What we don’t want to do, very quickly with this, is lose track all together of contact. This would be playing kind of golf swing position, right?

If I’m so focused on what my club is doing and hitting a perfect angle here, or maybe I’m looking at my golf club and I want to see exactly where this club is there and I’m doing a lot of slow repetitions, not really making full golf swings, not training my speed, not thinking about ground contact.

All I’m focused on is this one angle of my club or this one position in the swing, it can wreak havoc on my timing, my tempo, and my sequencing.

So even if that position does look better, you’ll find that you’ll go back out to the golf course, your contact will be atrocious, your sequencing and your body movements will be terrible.

You’ll actually lose – I’ve seen players lose up to 40 or 50 yards off the tee by just being obsessed and working for a month or two months indoors, just trying to hit certain positions and never really making a swing hitting golf balls, or having limited swings hitting golf balls outside.

So we can’t play swing position where things can go off the rails in a heartbeat, and it can be really, really bad.

But there is a way to improve your technique and improve indoors with very limited products, very limited equipment.

You need a rolled-up piece of carpet, you need a club, and you need something to aim at. That’s all that you have to have. Anything above that is just bonus, right?

So when I’m working on something, I may be working on getting that good position. Maybe I’m too steep, or I’m casting, or I have a reverse pivot, or whatever it is I’m working on technique-wise.

I need to now focus on coming through contact and making a good, crisp, clean contact when I’m making this change.

For example, maybe I’m working on my weight shift and I want to get a nice weight shift to the right, and then swing through this golf ball. Really nice and balanced on my front foot in the follow-through.

Maybe that’s a piece of technique that I’m working on, or an angle, whatever it is. I want to pair that up with the ground contact.

What I would do, I would set, even if you don’t have a golf ball, just set something to mark where you’re swinging, and I’m going to try to hit the ground beside this foam golf ball, and I’m going to try to have that nice, crisp, clean divot sound?

You know those ones where you feel like you hit the mat really nicely, you’re not slamming down into it, you’re not missing the mat all together, you have that nice, crisp, clean, you know, kind of brushing, that woosh through the mat.

So let’s go ahead and try that out. I’m going to work on good weight shift and I’m going to try to brush this mat. Let’s give this a whirl.

There, now that felt pretty good. I was looking at the mat, I saw my divot hit at the right spot. So if you focus on this, you can see the mat brush a little bit, or the bristles of the mat brush up a little bit.

That’s tell me that I’m hitting the ground at the right spot. But to be honest, it was kind of a thud. Kind of smacked down into the mat a little bit more than I wanted to.

So on this next one, I’m still going to work on my technique piece, whatever that may be, but I want to try to hit the mat a little bit cleaner, not quite hitting down into the mat as much.

There we go, a little bit better, maybe still fractionally a little bit too much down. That’s the kind of feedback that you have to have when you’re working indoors.

If you don’t focus on that feedback, your game can go to hell in a handbasket, I’ll tell you. It can really go off the rails here. So let’s figure out the key pieces to this.

That was one of them, and I call that ground contact. So how am I coming down and contacting the ground?

Obviously, that’s extremely important because if I can contact the ground the same way every time, I’m going to hit my golf ball first every single time.

I’m getting rid of those chunks. I’m getting rid of those thin shots. So that’s the key difference there.

If you’re working on swing mechanics and swing position only, and you’re not thinking about ground contact or how your club would be moving through the golf ball through contact, you’re putting a big risk for getting a lot worse.

If you’re working on mechanics and you’re working on technique but you’re also pairing that up with nice, clean, solid contact fundamentals, then you’re going to have tremendous success and you’re going to gain a lot of awareness.

You see, doing drills like I just did there, I’m actually going to get a great feel of how to control my low point, to have that club hitting the ground exactly the same time like a robot over and over again.

I’m going to give you some of the real secrets on how you’re going to go about doing that in this video.

So let’s jump into it. That’s the main thing. Don’t ever work on technique indoors alone unless it’s also getting some feedback for contact. That’s what this whole program is going to be about.

I’m going to show you exactly how to do it and exactly what to look for, and we’re going to have a lot of fun doing it to.

Let’s jump in with the first piece of ground contact, I’m going to explain what it is and then later we’re going to get into some drills on how you go about actually practicing these and improving these which we’re going to have a lot of fun and success doing.

So best of luck, I’ll see you in the net video.