Why You Need This: In this video, "New Golf Lag Drill to Crush Your Irons," I'll explain some of the benefits of "lag" and show you a cool drill to work on it.

By using a simple paper plate, you can start enjoying that "forward shaft lean" you see from the pros at impact.

Getting good forward shaft lean is crucial to playing your best golf.

Not only will this video help you add distance...

You can take this drill and use it to eliminate that "chicken wing" and "flip" which may be ruining your game.

Watch this video today so you can start getting excited to use those irons again!

Golf Pros Featured:

Instructors Featured: Clay Ballard    

Video Duration: 7:35

Video Transcription:

Hi guys, and welcome back to Swing Speed Saturdays. Today we’re going to take the driver, put it in the bag.

We’re going to take out that middle iron and talk about how to get some good distance with our iron shots and how much getting good forward shaft lean can help when you’re talking about compressing your irons, hitting those iron really, really solid.

So to start off here, I’m going to hit a good iron shot, nice forward shaft lean, good release, and then I’m going to go ahead and start doing the chicken wing or the flip like I see so many people are struggling with, where they really push the club through with their right hand.

We’re going to see how much distance you lose with that.

Then I’ve got a great drill that is going to help you to get a lot of forward shaft lean right away, even if you’ve never had forward shaft lean before, this is going to get you the right feeling today.

Let’s go ahead and get started. I’m going to make a few swings here, let’s put it to the test.

All right, so we can see right away when I got a good forward shaft lean, when I release the club properly, I hit the ball about 193 yards with the 6 iron. Pretty good swing on that one, feel I hit it nice and solid.

Then when I did the flip, I did the chicken wing, the wrist broke down, my left elbow kind of popped out, and I was really pushing hard with my right hand. I lost a lot of distance, I lost almost 23 yards which with a 6 iron, that’s a ton of distance to lose.

So now let’s talk about how we can get some forward shaft lean, how it’s going to work out, and a great drill you can do for this.

What I want you guys to do, and what a lot of people struggle with as soon as they start trying to get forward shaft lean, is as soon as they lean the club shaft forward, let’s imagine I’m hitting the ball this way.

As soon as I lean hat club shaft forward, look how the face opens wide up, it’s pointing to the right. You try to get that forward shaft lean and you start blocking those shots out, hitting terrible shots.

What we’re going to do, is we’re going to go ahead and we’re going to close this club face. If this is a square club face, I’m going to close it about 30°, set it down to this ball, and then I’m going to make my normal grip.

I don’t want to close it with my hands like this, I want to close the club face first, then take my normal grip. Now when you lean the club shaft forward, look how that’s going to square up that face nice and straight.

In order to practice this, we’re going to set a stick right down your target line just a few feet in front of your ball. What I want you to do is go ahead, again, the first thing we’re going to do is close that club face about 30, even 45°.

Then we’re going to take our grip, now as we set up, we’re going to go ahead and get to our impact position.

Our hips are going to open up a little bit, big time forward shaft lean with the hands, and I’m going to try and hit some little chip shots, maybe 50-60 yards that go out to the right of that stick.

That ball went out to the right and started to draw back. Nice, low shots. Go ahead and do that right now.

Make some practice swings, go out to the driving range next time you go out, do about 50 of those until you feel pretty comfortable with it. Make sure you get four in a row to the right of that stick.

Now if you’ve seen this drill before, there’s one big piece that they’re leaving out. They’re not telling you what to do to now go back to your normal face alignment and your normal grip. That’s what we’re going to go over here next.

Let me go ahead and set up another ball. This time what I’m going to do is I’m going to take my normal face alignment, my normal grip, and now I’m going to work on releasing the hands properly.

There’s my normal face, straight up and down. Set up with this normal grip, now as I get some forward shaft lean, we can see how naturally that’s going to open up my face.

What I’m going to have to feel like I’m doing here is rotating this grip to square the face. My hands are going to rotate this way. My right hand’s going to rotate that way, my left hand is going to rotate this way to square up that face.

If you’re looking at the back of this grip, imagine you’re going to turn this counter-clockwise. I’m going to twist this grip as I’m coming through contact to get that face to release.

Now as we’re doing that, I want you to still be able to get that forward shaft lean and to get that ball now hitting this stick. Ideally, I want to hit that stick right out of the ground as I’m going that.

Then I’m going to show you another drill to even help you do this even a little bit easier. There we go, so knocked into the stick. That’s good, first try, got pretty lucky on that one.

Let’s focus in on the right wrist now, and I’ve got some drills I want you to work through to get comfortable squaring up the face.

All right, there’s two things I really want you to work on to get this motion down correctly, and get that forward shaft lean once and for all.

The first one, as I mentioned, is going to be squaring the face up by using the hands properly. So again, as I start to get forward shaft lean, if I’m used to casting when I get that shaft forward, now the face is wide open.

My right hand is going to have to feel like it squares up the face a little bit more. Now I’ve got a great device that anybody can do here. I’ve just taken a paper plate and I’ve drawn some lines you can see how it’s rotating.

If I’m hitting the ball this direction, as I come into contact, now my hands going to have forward shaft lean, so this plate instead of being straight up and down is going to be angled forward about 45°.

To square up that face, as I mentioned, we’re turning that grip counter-clockwise. My right hand is going to do this motion. It’s going to actually turn this plate in a circular motion.

Notice the direction this face is pointing. The plate is pointing down to the ground, it isn’t actually moving, but I’m releasing that face letting it turn on over with momentum, letting the momentum of the club head release it as its coming through, so we’re getting this twisting motion.

When I go ahead and take that, we’ll look at it from this angle here a couple times first. There’s forward shaft lean, and now I’m going ahead and releasing that club. That’s happening all through contact.

I get rid of that plate, and we look at that with the golf club now, as I get this forward shaft lean coming into contact, there I’m doing the same motion to square up the face as I’m coming on through.

If you do that too much, you’re actually going to stat to hook the ball which would be great, which would mean we could have even more forward shaft lean, and we could do it a little bit less and straighten that ball flight out.

But the first thing to do is get that ball turning over right to left. It will also help you as a byproduct to come in a little shallower, and to release that club a little bit easier.

That’s the first thing I want you to do work on, so do a good 50 to 100 reps with your hand working in that release just like I showed you.

Now the second thing we’re going to work on here, and I want you guys to be careful of as you’re doing these entire drills, I have a swing mirror made by EyeLine Golf. I use this a lot of times when I’m working on my body line.

One thing I want to make sure, as I’m getting this forward shaft lean, I don’t want my body to slide way out in front. That’s a tendency I see a lot of people do, trying to get more in front and hitting down on this ball.

The problem with that is now I’m going to be chopping down into the ground, and I want to come in nice and shallow like the tour pros, hit that nice clean, shallow divot.

When I’m looking in this alignment mirror, I’m going to make sure as I get my forward shaft lean into contact, that my lower body, my ankle, my hip, my shoulder are all in a straight line, and they’re angled slightly away from the target.

Just a little tiny bit away from the target, that’s going to get my body in a position where I can release this club every time and come in nice and shallow with that forward shaft lean.

So go through those drills, first we’re going to work on club face closed, big time forward shaft lean. We’re going to hit some shots to the right of the stick.

Then we’re going to work on releasing that club with the right hand, just like we turned on that plate.

Then finally we’re going to check our body alignments to make sure that we’re nice and square there. If we do all of these things together, we’re going to have good forward shaft lean, we’re going to hit some nice straight shots, and we’re going to have some nice, clean, shallow divots.

All right guys, work hard. Get that forward shaft lean, it’s going to completely revolutionize your game. I’ll see you guys soon.