Why You Need This: Today you're going to discover the "Quickest Way to Improve Ground Contact."

Sometimes, in golf, you can get into a rut.  There's something different about your swing that's causing you to play worse than normal, but you just can't figure out what it is.

In those instances, you are occasionally able to get a "tip" or "quick fix" that leads to a correction in your swing and you can improve quickly.

But real, lasting improvement takes time.  We have to ingrain the proper movements into our swing so that we don't have to think so much to hit the ball consistently.

It can be frustrating and it takes a lot of patience to truly become a better player.

What if I told you that there's a way to accelerate that learning curve?

Now, this is not a magic pill, and you're still not going to turn into a scratch golfer overnight (unless you're already a scratch golfer).  But it's simply a faster, more efficient way to learn.

In today's video, I'm going to tell you about this "different" way to train.

In addition, when you begin to have a bad day on the course, you're going to be able to adjust more easily and know what you're doing wrong and how to fix it.

Let's get started.....

Golf Pros Featured:

Instructors Featured: Clay Ballard    

Video Duration: 7:32

Video Transcription:

Hey, it’s great to have you here today. Let me ask you a question.

Do you ever set up to a really important shot, you’ve got a nice easy approach into the green, you’re feeling very confident, but you look down at that ball and it’s sitting down not quite perfect, you just have these little flashes in your mind that you’re just going to cold chunk this thing?

That you’re not going to hit it anywhere, you’re going to lay the sod over it, and it’s going to dribble up the fairway?

Now all of a sudden you don’t want that to happen, so you start to rethink again, oh man, I really want to adjust and not chunk that ball, and what do you do?

You make a swing, you thin it, and it skyrockets over the green, you end up making a double bogie. It’s happened to all of us.

Well, what I’m going to talk about in this video, the real science on how to improve your ground contact, to get that solid strike every time.

I’ve got a great little drill that you can do, and some easy instruction, technique-wise, what you should do with your body to pair this up and make that happen.

Let’s go ahead and get started. OK, so here’s what the motor learning research says.

What we would all love to have happen is to go to the range, set up a pile of golf balls, to grab a single club, and to start swinging, and every single swing will be nice and flush, and crisp, and as soon as we find that one good shot, we repeat it over, and over, and over again.

That’s the way we would love to think practice can happen. Well in reality, through a lot of research that’s been done, that’s not actually how our body learns the quickest.

If we want to learn the quickest, we have to do something called random practice and review between each shot.

I talked about in another video how you don’t want to just grab your same club and hit shot, after shot, after shot with the same club. Same thing applies if I’m going to work on my ground contact.

Now for this particular drill since we are varying ground contact, I don’t like to vary all kinds of different things at once, you can use the same club over and over again.

So any of your irons would be completely fine when you’re working with this. So usually when I’m doing drills, and why I mentioned that, is I like to just have one variable if possible, until I get it more advanced.

So I’d like to just focus on ground contact, keep everything else consistent. I do want to pick a target out in the distance, and be aiming to that target, trying to hit that just like I would be on the golf course.

If I don’t have a target and I’m just working on the ground, that’s not really going to transfer over to a real round of golf.

I need to make this as realistic as possible so visualize the hole on the course where you’d be hitting this iron into it.

Visualize a target that you’re going to hit, and try to hit that target when you’re doing each of these drills.

Now piece number one, again, I want to vary my intention with this. On the first one, I’m going to try to hit a really nice, solid shot.

What I’m going to do is I’m going to take several attempts until I get one of those with really good ground contacts. Let’s go ahead and try one out.

There we go, on that one, that was nice and flush, right down toward my target. That would be a very acceptable shot. That would count as a win, and I would immediately to the next one.

Let’s say that I was trying to hit that solid shot and I chunked it. What I would do is I would adapt and try to hit it a little bit thinner.

Maybe try to get – usually if I see players chunking, they’re falling back and hitting behind the ball, I would try to get a little more weight left, to my left side coming through contact to hit down and through, and hit a little bit more solid ball first contact.

I would adjust after each swing, until I get one solid one. If I hit heavy, I would try to get my weight forward, get a little bit more in front until I hit that one good one.

Now as soon as I hit a good one, I’m going to vary up my intention. The next thing I want to do, is hit one a little bit on the thinner slide.

There I had a nice, clean divot, this time I’m going to try to hit this golf ball without making a divot at all. You’re probably asking yourself why in the heck would I do that?

I don’t want to hit a thin shot on the course, why would I want to practice this way?

Well the reason is, if you can learn to adjust hitting thing shots and heavier shots, and adjust the depth of what your club is coming into the ball, that’s going to make it much easier to adjust on the course.

You have a day where you’re just happening to hit them thin, no problem. Couple swing on the range before the round, you’re hitting them clean again, you’re ready to play your round.

You have something go bad on the course where you’re hitting them a little heavy, no problem. I’ve practiced this, I know how to hit it clean.

The next thing I’m going to do here like I mentioned, I’m going to try to hit a good shot towards my target, try to make the result be fairly good, but I’m going to purposefully hit this ball a little thinner.

So I’m going to feel like I’m just barely brushing the turf when I hit this one. There we go, and I picked that one right off the turf. Now I’m starting to feel the adjustment, the first one was clean.

The second one was a little too thin. Now the third one, I’m actually going to adjust the other way and take a deeper, heavier divot.

Now the last key piece to this, I know this may feel like a lot to take in, but it’s actually pretty simple. You set up to the shots, you have an intended target, and you vary between good, thin, and heavy.

Now the big piece of this, and what they found with the motor learning research, if you really want to improve fast, here’s what you can’t do.

You can’t hit one of these shots and then immediately drag over another ball, and then whack away at another one, and whack away at another one, until you finally hit one good.

What they found is, if you take a little bit of time to think about what happened in the shot, to feel what your body did, and then try to make some little mini rehearsal swings here, some practice swings of how I would change or adapt that.

So you have a shot, you review that shot to figure out what went wrong, come up with whatever you feel like went wrong with the shot, come up with a plan or feeling of how to change that, and then go back and hit another shot.

Take at least 30 seconds between each shot to do a little bit of review. It feels like you’re learning slower, but in reality the research shows you’re learning two, three, four times faster.

So when everybody else is over there just kind of whacking away at golf balls, not getting any better, you’re actually improving. So now I’m going to take a little bit of time, I’m going to try to hit one a little bit on the heavier side.

I’m going to feel like again, I come down a little steeper, I chop down in this golf ball, and I take a little bit of a bigger divot on this one. There we go, and that one was pretty good.

That actually felt pretty good, and that’s one of the byproducts of this. I’m probably coming in a little bit too thin on my own shots.

So by feeling like I come down a little bit more, that shot actually felt incredibly solid. I didn’t even realize I wasn’t coming in to proper contact, this drill exposed that for me.

Now I started to feel that better shot by discovery, and I can now recreate that and hit more good shots. You’re going to learn a lot about your game by forcing yourself to do this.

It seems like it’s a crazy drill to do, but it really isn’t. Now lastly, if I really want to improve on this, there is some technique to this.

If my spine is going all over the place, so we talk a lot about the Stable, Fluid Spine. Let’s imagine my spine angle is straight up and down at address.

As I start at the top of the swing, my spine gets way over here to the left. What’s going to happen, I’m probably going to come down steep into this ball, kind of chop at it, I may lose my posture to come up and flip at it to try to adjust.

My spine angle needs to be fairly consistent to be very good at these drills. The next piece you’re going to do is go to the Top Speed Golf System, go to the Stable Fluid Spine, and work on level 1.

Get the address started out first. As I do that, these drills are going to get a lot easier. As I get my spine angle looking good address, man, it makes it easier to come in, hit that nice clean contact and a solid shot toward my target.

As I go to level 2, I start to work on my backswing and my follow through, it becomes even more ingrained.

As I get to level 3, it feels almost completely automatic as long as I did the drills every step of the way.

So pair up what we talked about today, which is the proper way to practice to get your best ground contact as quickly as you can with those long-term results, and making this automatic like we talk about in the Top Speed Golf System with the Stable Fluid Spine.

So finish the drill today, and I’ll see you in the Stable Fluid Spine.