Why You Need This: Today you get a work along video about "Rotation and Speed - Indoor Work Along #2"

And today you're going to build upon your hard work from last week's first work along video...

...as the second video of this series is being released into the Indoor Vault today!

Again, this series is designed to take the guesswork out of what you need to do to improve your game...

...you just pick up a club and work right along with me as I take you through a series of drills that will make you a better golfer.

Today I'm going to start incorporating some speed work to pair up with last week's ground contact work (including a great tip with your lead leg to build momentum in your swing)...

...as the two skills combined are going to make you tough to handle on the golf course.

So grab a club (and some wireless earphones if you have them) and follow along with me as I make you a better golfer (indoors or outdoors)...

 

Golf Pros Featured:

Instructors Featured: Clay Ballard    

Video Duration: 36:57

Video Transcription:

All right, so welcome back. It’s another work-along session, it’s going to be a ton of fun.

In the beginning of this video I’m going to talk about what we’re trying to accomplish with this video, and in the second half it will be just all drills. Me and you working through it together.

I’m going to be talking in your ear as you’re making these swings, these motions. I just want you to get into a rhythm, but your phone or your iPad down by the mat that you’re practicing with.

If you’re out on the range that’s fine. If you’re in your living room that’s fine, if you’re outdoors it’s fine, in your backyard, anywhere you can practice.

Anywhere that you have, you have to have any kind of mat to hit or any kind of surface that you can hit. So this isn’t going to work if you’re just swinging over a tile floor making practice swings without actually hitting the ground.

You have to have a rolled-up piece of carpet, I nice mat like this Real Feel mat, you know, anything that you can use.

So if you’re outdoors swinging in your yard, that’s perfect, because you’re going to be able to come down and brush that grass and that’s going to give you great feedback.

If you’re at the driving range hitting balls, I wouldn’t hit a ton of balls as you’re working through this. It’s probably best done at your house, but you can definitely work through it at the driving range.

So let’s jump right in here. This is going to be, we’re going to add a little speed. Last time we really worked on tons of weight shift so right side, left side. We’re going to go ahead and hit on that again in the first part of this video.

That’s going to give me that consistent low point so I can make this club come down and hit this golf ball and the golf ball first, hit the golf ball and the ground at the same time, and then have this nice clean, even divot in front of that golf ball.

If I’m too far back, obviously it’s going to be chunks and thins. If I’m too far forward, it’s going to be all thins.

If I’m obviously hitting the ground and the ball at the same time, it’s going to be perfectly flush golf shot.

We also worked a little bit on raising and lowering that so that you’re not chopping down into the ground, you’re not missing the ground.

We want it to be that nice, even brush of the turf every single time. I’ll be honest with you, nothing does that better than a mat.

Because if you really pay attention, I can hear every single time I swing on this mat, I can hear that sound. Was that too heavy? Was that too thin?

I can see where the first little bits of fabric started to, these little strings that make up the mat started to move, so I know where my divot started and I can also get a good feel for how hard I was hitting down or up into the mat.

It’s really, really easy to tell with a mat. With a piece of carpet? It’s perfect. Most carpet has those little strands sticking up out of it.

You brush it one way, as you hit, the strands kind of pop up and you can see exactly where you first hit the carpet. You brush it back, you hit it again.

I wouldn’t recommend doing that with real carpet that’s installed in your house, or you’re eventually going to put a hole in it.

Grab an old rolled-up piece, whatever kind of mat you got will be completely fine with that.

So now let’s add some speed to that. Speed’s like potential. If I have this great weight shift, I’m taking these beautiful divots, dollar-bill sized, nice and flush just one after another.

Hitting the golf ball first every single time, that’s going to be great. I’ll play some really good golf. But if I’m not very long, if I don’t have the speed to go with that, it’s going to be a struggle.

If you take two players that are equally matched talent-wise, one of them swings 10 miles an hour faster than the other player.

If they’re equally matched skillset-wise, the 10 mile and hour faster guy is going to beat the pants off the 10 mile an hour slower guy.

That’s just the way it is. If you’re going to be the slower person, you have to have far exceeding the skills of the person that you’re going to beat.

So ideally what we’d like to have, is the skills like ground contact, and weight shift, and those technique pieces that allow us to hit the ground better than the other guy, and also swing faster than the other guy that we’re playing against.

He’s going to have virtually no chance of beating us unless we play terrible and he plays fantastic, which just isn’t going to happen all that often, right?

Let’s add some speed to it in this drill, let me go over the drills from last time, and then I’m going to talk about a couple things that we’re going to add to it to really ramp up our swing speed.

So let’s start off by let’s get loosened up here first. Again, weight shift. Let me recap. Weight shift goes to the right foot a little bit early.

As soon as I start my backswing, again, I’m just swinging with my arms here, no club. As I go to the top, my weight is going to feel like it gets to the inside of my right foot kind of halfway back.

My nose is going to be slightly behind the golf ball, a little bit inside by right foot here, so I don’t want to be doing this. I definitely don’t want to be doing that and getting my weight way over here.

It’s just a very slight shift with my nose, and then as I start down, I’m getting that weight to go to the left.

The momentum of my body is starting to shift to the left, and then that coincides with the hit of the golf ball.

Then I get to a nice full finish here in the end where my hips, my shoulders, my head, everything is stacked over that left foot.

Nice and balanced. My right foot is up in the air and I’m really feeling like I could hold this position here for a long time. I’ve rotated my body all the way through the shot.

We talk about, hopefully we don’t get rained out here, but we talked about if I was going to punch somebody, I would load up – watch my right shoulder.

Momentum of my right shoulder goes through the person, rotates this way, and then I would punch on top of that. So the body rotation along with the swing of the arm is what allows somebody to really punch hard.

Same thing in the golf swing. The body rotation along with the swing of the club is what allows you to really swing with tons of speed.

Now if we take a little device like my PRGR Black Launch Monitor, you don’t have to have this one, anything that measures your swing speed.

This is one of the only ones that measures it without a golf ball, so if you don’t have a golf ball to hit, you’re indoors and you don’t have a simulator or a net, you’re going to really want something like this to measure your swing speed without a ball.

But if you do have an ability to hit a golf ball, you don’t have to have this particular one. Anything that measures your speed is going to be fine.

So I’m going to set this down here, and I’m going to start out by making some swings. Let’s do this where, we may actually get rained out here, I think we’ll get a pretty good practice session in before I have to stop, though.

Let’s do this where I’m swinging my driver, and I’m going to start out working on those weight shifts, right and left, just like normal.

So shift to the right, shift to the left, and I’m going to go ahead and get warmed up here. Nice balanced finish at the end swinging through the shot.

Right foot’s coming off the ground, feeling like my right shoulder goes all the way to the target. I’m going to feel like in my backswing I get a little shift to the inside of my right foot.

Then everything moves through it just like we did last time. Let’s get warmed up. Let me go ahead and try to make a, what I would say is an aggressive swing to get kind of a max speed number on this.

Let’s do that again. There we go, that felt pretty hard. You can kind of warm up to that if you’re not warm yet. Keep on doing those drills back and forth through it as I’m talking here.

But then as you get a little farther along, get to what you would say is your fastest swing speed. Now I’m not going to go through the entire 20-Minute Distance Fix program in this video.

If you really want to ramp up the speed, I recommend you go through that 20-Minute Distance Fix program firsts.

Start with the quick start video, players usually gain five to six miles an hour, somewhere around that, just in the first 20-minute practice session.

Then you do three practice sessions a week over the next three weeks. They only take 20 minutes a piece. You can do them indoors if you need to. If you have access to the driving range, it’s even better.

You have to have some type of device to measure your swing speed. If you don’t have a device, you’ll still get gains, but it just won’t be quite as good as if you had some kind of measurement device there.

Go to the Instruction tab, go to the 20-Minute Distance Fix, and then work through those videos. That’s where you’re really going to ramp up your speed.

The drills I’m doing here aren’t going to give you as much speed, I’m just kind of hitting on some of the highlights so that we can add ground contact and speed together.

So as you’ve been swinging as I’ve been yapping, now you can go ahead and start to make some more aggressive swings. Let’s get kind of a max number here, really aggressive swing.

There we go, swung hard through that one. 119 on that one, pretty good swing speed on that considering that I’m really not trying. I haven’t made too many swings going hard at it.

I like to see, I like to hit somewhere near my max number every practice session. I’d really like to see if you normally swing let’s say 90 miles an hour, average swing speed for an adult male is 92, 93 miles an hour.

So let’s say that’s where you’re at right now. Let’s say you go through the 20-Minute Distance Fix and you’re starting to hit some hundreds, 103, 104, 105s.

I’m going to pick out a number that I want to hit every single practice session that is realistic, that I can achieve, but that’s keeping my swing speed up nice and high.

For me, that number’s 125. For you, that number may be 95, 100, 105, 110, 115, doesn’t matter the number. These same ideas apply to everything.

As I’m making these swings, I’m working on my weight shift getting all the way through. Now I want to add some speed to it. Here’s the big one for this.

As I go to the right and I get that weight shift going to the inside of my right foot, I’m going to lift my left heel.

So my heel goes up, and that allows me to rotate my body more. So let’s say if I keep my heel down, this is as far as I can go comfortably.

As I start to lift that heel up, now I can go a little farther and farther back. If I’m really trying to go swing speed specific, I would even go past parallel. I would really wind this thing up to where I’m going way past parallel here.

Now that’s not how I’m going to swing when I’m on the course, but that’s how I’m going to swing when I’m training my speed. I have to get my body firing faster when that’s happening.

So in this first swing now, same weight shift, but I’m going to let my heel lift in the backswing, my left heel, you’ll see how that’s coming up a little bit.

Then I’m going to feel like when I’m in the downswing, as I plant my heel, that’s that momentum moving in the left side of my body and then I’m going to swing through to that good, full finish.

Let me go ahead and see if I can break that 119 as I make a few swings here. I’m going to do a few warm-ups where I’m just feeling the momentum. Heel lift, momentum moving through the ball.

I’m not swinging hard yet, just getting the momentum of my swing. Weight to the right, all the way through it. Now I’m going to go for a hard one. I’ll try to break that 119.

Big heel lift, big turn. There we go, that had to be faster. 127 on that one, yikes, I probably set the bar a little too high. I’m going to be going slower the rest of the round here. But for me, that’s a great swing speed.

I’m going to feel like I keep on doing that a few more times here to see if I can get any faster. So again, a couple more, nice and easy, keep moving with me to feel like you get this motion down.

I’m not swinging hard when I’m getting the timing and the motion down. The reason I’m keeping moving is because I want you to start to build and ingrain that idea of a golf swing is right to left, right to left.

Now I’m not doing this, swing with my head all over the place, I’m fairly centered, just a little right, and then over the left foot. A little right, stacked over the left foot.

I’m not doing here and then way forward like that. I’m not doing there and then falling back, it’s just a little to the right with my head, a little to the left over my left foot with my head.

So keep feeling that, just as you’re working along with me, that good momentum shift. Now we want more speed, add that heel lift.

That gets more rotation with the hips, more rotation with the shoulders, more rotation with the arms. Just that little heel lift can do that.

Let’s go ahead and do another one for max speed again, I’m really going to try to crank it here. I don’t know if I’m going to do better than that one, 127 again. Can’t complain with that, I’m happy with that.

So now what I want to do is I’m going to go ahead and I’m going to make a bigger swing and I’m going to focus on that hip turn.

So heel lift, and my belt buckle goes to the right like this pointing over here and then my belt buckle rotates all the way through to the left.

I may have to hit a rain delay here in a little bit, let’s hope that no lightning comes. So I’m going big hip turn, back and through.

Again, I’m going to go ahead and do that four or five slow times to get the feeling and then we’re going to go ahead and try to crank one up here.

So big hip turn on this one. There we go, that was pretty good. I got weak on you, only 120 on that one. Slowed down a little bit, so I’m kind of worried about the rain.

It looks like it’s coming down fast here, let’s take a little pause and I’ll hit you up with the second half of this video in just a few minutes.

All right, so I had to take a little break there. Rain came down too hard yesterday, so I had to wait until it dried out up here today. Let’s pick up right where we left off.

So when we left off, trying to break kind of our high speed. Again, that’s going to happen the best from the 20-Minute Distance Fix, but we’re going to hit on some of the high notes here.

When we left off, we want to make sure that those hips turn, and one thing that you really want to make sure of when you’re practicing this, is that as your belt buckle rotates in the backswing, I don’t want to have this hip slide to my right.

I don’t want my hip to slide this way and get a reverse pivot. I want to make sure that as I turn, if I look at my right leg it should be angled in like this.

So as I’m making these swings, I feel like my right leg is angled in, and I’m making this big turn to really load up.

Now I may be exaggerating it there, even just a little bit for this example, but that’s how I want to feel. It’s almost like if you were going to turn this way and there’s a chair here, I could sit down in this chair this way.

That’s how much I’m turning my hips, my rear end, my butt is now facing toward the target. If I sat down, I could sit in a chair here in front of me.

Now I don’t want to do this, that’s really exaggerated. I’m just saying I want to rotate like that. This right leg is going to straighten, it’s angled in, and your rear end is facing the target at the top of the swing.

So keep on doing a few of those where it’s right, left, and I’m just kind of swinging back and forth. On these, don’t go 100 percent yet, what we’re really working on keeping this leg angled in.

If I look at it from this direction, my leg is going to straighten a little bit like that to allow my hip to turn, but it’s staying angled this way so I don’t have a reverse pivot. I don’t want to do that.

Big turn, then all the way through. Let’s go ahead and do a couple hard ones now. So I’m right and left through the ball, and I’m letting this leg stay angled in while I’m doing that.

Let’s try that out. Big turn, there we go. I have to loosen up a little bit, 125, not too bad to start.

Let’s go back, cool off here a minute, and do four or five reps again to where I’m just working on the motion. So the things I’m focusing on right, and left, that momentum is coming back and through this shot.

I want to feel like my rear end gets towards the target at the top of the swing, and I want to make that I complete the swing on the other side, too.

So I’m really rotating, opening up and rotating all the way on through. So good full backswing, good full follow through, that really ensures that you’re going to have not only a good weight shift, but more effortless power.

If I’m short, and I’m really quick, there’s really no way to have the effortless power. So the shorter I go, the more jerky, the faster I have to go.

Here’s a great way to test that. Let’s take a little break for a second and test out the opposite. One thing that’s good to know when you’re trying these drills out, if you can test out one extreme and the other extreme, it starts to make it crystal clear why this works and doesn’t work.

So let’s test out a couple of the extremes so that it doesn’t just work today, but our understanding lasts kind of a lifetime on this.

What we’ve been working on here is big turn in the backswing, belt buckle’s turning, that right leg is really allowing it to happen. As I come through, I’m finishing my swing all the way around.

The reason that gives you more power is because as I go to the top, as I let this turn, naturally my shoulders turn more and my arms can go farther back. My hands now have all the space to travel as I come into contact.

The opposite of that would be limiting your hip turn, trying to keep your arms short and not very far back, and trying to have a short, compact, very aggressive swing.

So here I want you to do a couple drills the wrong way. It’s going to feel quick, it’s going to feel tight, it’s going to feel rushed, and you’re going to see your swing speed numbers just tank when this happens.

I want you to feel like you do now, is I want you to feel like you keep this right knee toward the ball, the target line.

Your belt buckle toward the target, and I want to feel like you only take a little half backswing like this. So I’m going to go ahead not move my lower body at all, and I’m going to try to swing as hard as I can.

Now you’re going to get some speed out of this. Everybody has some amount of speed they can make even if they’re doing a short swing. For me, that went down to 108.

That’s nothing to sneeze at, that’s not saying that that’s a terrible swing speed to get, that’s just 18, 19 miles an hour slower than my true potential, that athleticism that I really have inside my body.

Now if you’re swinging the club 100 miles an hour, when you do that short swing maybe you see a number around 90.

If you think about that, giving up 10, 15, 20 miles an hour, that’s 2.6 yards per mile an hour, that is going to be hard to play golf.

Again, if you’re equally matched, your skill level and another player’s skill level are the same, but you hit it, you swing 10 miles an hour faster than they do, you’re driving it 25 yards farther than them on average, you’re going to beat the pants out of them.

I mean, you’re not going to be able to hardly ever lose to that person. You flip that scenario around the other way, two equally matched players, one’s 25 yards longer, that player that’s longer is going to win every single time.

When you’re making these little short swings, no hip turn, no body turn, real short, compact swing, yeah, I can get some speed out of that. I could hit the ball solid doing that.

I could do a lot of things well, but my speed is just never going to be what my true potential is.

So again there, another 108, let me go ahead and do one more. Again, a real short one. This time I want you to focus on no shoulder turn.

So instead of loading up, feel like you’re just keeping your shoulders still in the backswing, just all arms. I’ll see this a lot of times with players, all arms, and then all arms coming through, there’s no rotation of the body.

It looks like this, right? That’s kind of the…we all see the players finish kind of like that. No rotation coming around, the arms are just kind of pushing the club through.

Even if I try to swing hard doing that, again no shoulder turn, no hip turn, no body turn, I’m going to swing really hard. I’m going to be able to create some speed, 107 miles an hour, but that’s only a fraction of what I could create.

If you’re swinging 90 miles an hour normally, you may have the potential to swing 105 and you just haven’t tapped into it yet.

All right, so enough of the bad swinging to get a feel for the wrong way. Let’s go back to the good swings again.

So again, let’s start to make a big hip turn, legs angled in, so I’m going to make a couple practice swings just testing that.

Looking at my right leg to make sure it has a little bit of that angle, I’m looking at my hips to make sure they’re rotating really good, and then I’m going to go ahead and finish the swing really nice and slow.

This foot rotates all the way around, my hips, my shoulders, everything rotates around, and I’m going to practice that side of the swing.

So good turn going back, weight shift, good turn coming through. I’m just going real slow doing that for now to get a feel for it. I’m looking down, everything looks good, finishing the swing.

Now let’s crank it up again, and get some more speed. So let’s try one here where I really rotate on the way back and finish the swing.

There we go, that was pretty aggressive there. Oh, 120, getting slower. Going to crank it back up here. Let me give you another one where I really go after it.

Oh, that had to be faster. 126, all right, so I’m back up to what I would say is a great high-end speed for me. Now let’s take it one piece farther up the chain.

We’ve worked on weight shift right and left, so we’re delivering that energy through the golf ball. We’ve worked on hip turn back and through, so again, we’re delivering that energy through the golf ball.

Now let’s work on the shoulder turn, really getting loaded up back and then driving through that to finish the shoulder turn on the way through.

Here’s the way we’re going to start focusing on this. Go ahead and take your arms and just put them to your sides. Just kind of like out like this, like 90° to your sides.

As we rotate back, again I’m going to get that good hip turn. This has to rotate like we just worked on, but I want make sure my shoulder turn goes past 90°.

If I’m here, that would be a 90° shoulder turn. My arms at T. I want to go here to where I’m going well past that.

Everybody’s going to have their own different range. So if the most you can go is there, that’s completely fine.

Look at your hips as your left knee loosening to allow your hips to turn, as your left heel coming off the ground. Is this belt buckle rotating?

If that’s happening, I see very few people who can only get to here. I see a lot of people who can get it much more than that. So I’m kind of letting my arms swing, and I’m really loading up.

Then on the follow through, I’m going to do the same thing. Now I’m going to feel like I open my body so everything’s opening up, and then I swing through the other direction to the full finish.

So I’m here, big turn, just turning like that. I’m looking down the line, I’m staying in my posture as I’m doing this at first. Big turn going back, and then I’m staying in my posture and the turn coming through.

Now that’s not my full finish, my full finish is going to be all the way like this. That’s as far as I can go kind of staying in my posture. That’s what I’m going to start out with.

Turn back, turn through. Feel a little bit of a stretch in the middle of your body to load up like this. Feel like your right shoulder gets long and goes back in the backswing, and gets toward the target as much as you can as you’re staying in your posture.

Now when you’re in your posture, you’re only going to be able to go to about right there, or here where the shoulders are roughly at 90°.

In a real swing, we move past that into the finish. But let’s start out by working in the posture. So back, and through, give me about four or five of those.

The key here is the hips and the foot action. If my left heel doesn’t lift, I can’t rotate. I’ve got to get that left heel to lift in the backswing.

I’ve got to get my right foot to lift in the follow through to be able to move my hips and move my shoulders.

But as I do this now, I can start to feel like my shoulders are opening up and I’m getting more momentum through it.

Now I want you to do the same thing, let’s just grab a club. So I’m going big turn on the way back, as I come on through instead of stopping in my posture, we’re stopping here.

I’m going to go ahead and finish the swing all the way around. Let’s try out about four or five of those with the club now.

In my posture, big rotation in the backswing, all the way through to the good, full finish. So I’m not staying in my posture when I do this one, I’m going ahead and letting everything stack up over my front foot.

If you’re looking at from this way, here’s what I mean by that. If I stay in my posture, I can only swing to here. I want to finish my swing all the way around to where now I’m stacked up over this front foot.

This back foot is a big key on this. If the back foot is down like this with a little crinkle in the toe, you’re not going to be able to rotate worth a dang.

You’re going to be stuck and not be able to get any kind of swing speed. I’ve got to get this right foot all the way on through it like that.

You’ll see lots of players with their foot like that. Again, if you’re stiff, I don’t mind opening this foot 20° or 30° so as you come on through, now you can make that good, full finish.

All right, so let’s do a few of those again. Full turn back, big shoulder turn going back, I feel like I’m getting as much of this as I can, and then I’m going to turn on through.

All right, so let’s see what the number is on that. 117, I’d say that was probably about a 90 percent effort. I’m going to do a few slow ones until I get the feel again.

I’m going slow enough to where I can kind of get my energy back. I don’t feel like I’m going to get out of breath. Nice and easy. Good turn back, good turn through.

Then finally I’m going to give it another good crank at one of these. So I’ve got to break 126 today, let’s give it a whirl. All right, there we go. Oh, slowing down, I’m getting weak!

Probably getting too tired, making a few too many swings. That’s another good side note, that was only 120. If you do too fast, I’m almost getting a little bit out of breath, you’re never really going to be able to reach your true potential.

So don’t be afraid as we’re going through these drills to take a little bit of a break, pause the video. Come back to it, or just rest a little bit as we’re talking through some of this and pick up where we left off.

The final piece here that I want to work on today with our speed and really creating as much club head speed through the ball as we can, is I want to feel like I’m getting a little bit of lag in releasing it.

Now we’re just going to barely hit on this today, the 20-Minute Distance Fix is really where you want to go if you want to ingrain that motion.

We also have The Lag course and the Straight-Line Release course on the Top Speed Golf System. The three of those put together is going to give you the best program to work through.

I do want to hit on it here a little bit today, because I think it’s important to creating speed. The best of both worlds would be if I can create this huge turn, really load up, and again, if you can only get to here, that’s fine.

If you can get to there, that’s fine. If you’re super flexible you may be able to get more than that, that’s even better.

But you want to get as big a turn as you can, and then to that, I want to add a lot of lag and get that club to really release out in front.

So I’m going to feel like I get this lag, my body’s opening, and then everything is throwing to what would be my Straight-Line Release point. My hips, my shoulders, my arms, everything is releasing out here.

 

I’m going to go a little bit deep into the science here for a second, just for a couple minutes. If you think about part of this is we’ve got to learn why this stuff is important. I can’t just tell you these drills are important.

Somebody may say something down the road that contradicts this, and it won’t make sense. You’ll ditch this, and go do something else, and you might get worse.

I want to make sure we really understand the reasons behind it. If I’m swinging this club, let’s say my hands are in front of my right thigh, and my club is parallel with the ground here.

Then at impact, my hands are basically in front of my left thigh, inside of my left thigh, and my club is roughly straight up and down.

That club handle, or the logo of my glove if you want to think of it that way, has only moved about 10 inches. That’s the linear force of the swing.

If I took this club and just drug it through impact with no wrist hinge at all, so just dead-armed back and through, that’s only moving from right thigh to left thigh in that period. That’s about this far.

Now with PGA Tour players, that ends up being about 20 miles an hour with the hands. Through impact, or through this impact zone, the hands are only moving 20 miles an hour.

If I had no wrist hinge at all, that would be the speed that this would translate to, so if I kind of multiply that over the length of the shaft, it’s not going to be very fast. That’s the linear speed of the swing.

So how does a guy swing 120 miles an hour if their hands are only moving 20 miles an hour, right? Doesn’t really make sense.

The rest of that comes from being able to have this big angle of lag and have this club rotate through 90°, so the club’s rotating from here all the way to there in that same 10-inch period.

The handle’s only moving 10 inches, the club releases and moves 4 or 5 feet. If we take how many degrees a second this club is rotating, and we take the length of the shaft you could actually calculate exactly how much of that contributes to the club head speed.

I’m going to make it a lot simpler for you. Hand speed and the linear force of the hands, it’s 20 to 25 miles an hour, that’s all it’s going to be.

No matter what you do, the dragging the handle toward the target is only going to contribute to 20-25 miles an hour of the overall club head speed. The rest of it comes from getting this lag and then releasing that out in front.

Let’s go over a really good drill that works on this. I want you to feel like as you come through this shot, you get your hands all the way over here, that would be tons of opposite of lag, or it would be tons of lag holding on through it.

Then from there, I want you to release that as hard as you can. So I want to get us, most players release everything here. I want to do the opposite.

I don’t want to hold on to this, but I want to release it much later, out there, out in front. Imagine like I’m releasing it out toward the target.

That’s going to look lik this. I’m going to go really, really slow for you. Big angle of lag, I’m opening, opening, opening, opening.

Now as my club gets way out here in front of my body, my hands are about belly button, chest high. My club is perpendicular with the ground.

Then from there, I’m going to go ahead and let it release fully. That’s going to look something like this. Lag, lag, lag, open, open, open, and then I’m going to release it up here.

So I feel like I’m releasing this club hard, but way over here somewhere. You do that by opening your body, letting your body open up, let the club lag behind, and then it releases more out in front.

If I’m closed with my body, then I’m going to be pushing with my hands and arms through the shot, and I’m not going to get very much speed.

So I want to get that big turn back, that big turn through opening up, and then release that club what feels like for most players way out here somewhere.

Let’s give that a whirl to see what that looks like. You can see that club really lags, I’m opening up. Then I’m really seeing it out in front. That’s a big key to the speed.

A question I usually get right after I explain it to somebody is, you know if the hands are only moving let’s say 20 miles an hour through contact, why does it matter how much I load up in the backswing?

Well, that creates the momentum for this club head to swing down so that when you do release that lag there’s tons more momentum built up in this club. That’s your decelerating power.

Imagine that if I had this club – I’m going to get a little more complicated here, but this will all make sense when I boil it down in the end.

If this club dropped from the sky, you know if somebody dropped it from an airplane, 10,000 feet up, and it’s just coming down like this.

If I grab this end of it as it hits my hand, it’s going to swing on through. If I just let this club drop and I grab it, it wants to whip and swing that way. That’s kind of what we’re doing in the golf swing.

We’re getting all this momentum so that when we do release that club it’s going to really want to whip on through there.

So we’re trying to, in order to get that lag and release, we’re trying to get our body to clear this way as hard as we can to get the club to whip back up and in as hard as we can.

That gets that speed out in front. So I probably haven’t done the best job of explaining that, because it is a little bit more of a complicated issue, but here’s all you need to do to think about it.

I want to go ahead and I want to get as much lag as I can, and then I want to release it as hard as I can but I want to release it over here toward the target. That’s the feeling that I want you to get.

So let’s try that out. Again, we’re going to make a big swing, bunch of lag, I’m turning toward the target, and then I’m releasing it. Let’s do that about four or five times. Toward the target, releasing it.

So again, that weight shift to the right, to the left, everything’s toward the target, then I’m releasing the lag out here. Let’s do a few more of those.

There, you’ll notice how you’ve really got to get very open with your body to feel like you’re powerful when you release that. So four or five more of those, I’m opening. Getting that big angle, and then releasing it as hard as I can.

All right, two more. Big turn open, getting the hands way out here, then I’m releasing it. So what I’m doing there is I’m feeling this position, and then I’m going back and trying to swing through that release out in front of it.

Let’s try to add that now to the full swing. Probably packing a little bit much into this lesson, but we’ll get the foundations of this stuff here soon. So big turn back, release the club through here.

So I’m not doing this, that’s going to be terrible for speed. I want to release that thing as hard as I can, but I want it to be over here somewhere.

That way when it’s coming through contact, it’s actually accelerating the most down by the ball, because most people are doing this. I want to do that later through the golf ball.

Let’s do a big turn and try the same thing out again. All right, 124, a little bit faster. Hit my last few, let’s do one more big one here.

I’m really going to focus on getting this body open and then really releasing the heck out of that thing. Let’s try it out. All right, getting a little slower.

Maybe I’m getting tired on you, let’s do one more, that one was only 122. Maybe worn out for today, 121 is the best I’m going to get here. I’ve been doing too much talking and swinging.

Don’t be surprised if that happens to you also, where the more you swing, if you start to feel yourself get a little bit out of breath, especially where I’m talking and swinging, doing the whole thing here at once.

You’ll see your speeds go down to a certain point. Give yourself 30 seconds, a minute, two minutes to rest, feel like you’re 100 percent again, and then go back at it.

So I’m going to give myself about 10 more seconds, 15 more seconds, I’m going to rest up and then I’m going to try to really crank one here and we’ll see what we can do.

All right, so let’s put it all together. Big turn in the backswing, big shoulder turn, big high hands, and then I’m opening up, releasing that lag out in front and let’s see. We’re going to break something high here, l’m going to call a 128.

Let’s see what I can do. Oh, 125. All right, so I’m getting weaker. Probably done for the day on the speed stuff. Hope you had a fun time doing this, hope you learned some stuff from it, worked along with these drills.

I can’t wait to come back to you again, get back to working on the contact and really get some more control.

So we focused on rotation, big speed, we focused on contact, let’s get the shot shape direction control down in the next video. I can’t wait to share it with you.