Why You Need This: In this video, "How to Stop Casting the Golf Club | Student Review"...

You'll find out my exact recommendations to stop losing your lag on the downswing.

We'll take a look at a student's swing and discuss how he demonstrates some excellent movements...

And dive into some keys he can work on to improve even more.

In doing so, we'll compare his swing to the great Rory McIlroy's swing and show you some crucial similarities and differences.

(I'll even share some tips on how to stop casting the golf club from drills that are normally locked away for All Access Members!)

Watch this video now to get more lag, shaft lean, and compression!

Golf Pros Featured: Rory McIlroy    

Instructors Featured: Clay Ballard    

Video Duration: 7:56

Video Transcription:

Hi guys, I’m Clay Ballard with Top Speed Golf, and today I’ve got a great student review for you.

For those that are struggling maybe not getting as much consistency as you want, I’ve got some great tips on consistency, and then also how to build lag and to release that lag to improve your compression to get a better strike at contact.

So if you’ve been struggling maybe flipping, losing lag a little bit early, you feel like your balls are kind of gliding up the face and losing a lot of distance so that the shots are going too high, this is going to be great video for you.

Let’s go ahead and get started.

All right, so we’ve got a member of the website here, Erik who has been kind enough for us to send in his swing so we can take a look at some of the things he’s doing really well, and then also some things that he can work on.

Let’s go ahead and first talk about how stable he is throughout his swing. That’s one of the things that I really like, he’s not moving around. If you look at his head, it’s not moving all over the place in the swing. Camera’s moving a little bit, but you can see the head’s pretty stable overall.

This has to do with something we call the stable, fluid spine, which is one of the five keys that we talk about in our Top Speed Golf System.

The Top Speed Golf System is just the most important, the five most important moves that you can do in golf to allow you to play your best. It’s kind of based on the Pareto principle, which means you’re going to get most of your results from just a few actions.

Here at address, we’re going to compare him with Rory McIlroy and talk about how overall, he’s in a pretty good setup position. One thing that he could do if he wanted to get perfect with this, and eliminate even more movement, is get a little bit more tilt with his spine as he’s at address.

So the upper body would go just slightly more -- excuse me, wrong click there – slightly more to the right, and the hips would bump just slightly to the left, and you could see how his spine would be a little more tilted away.

Right now, he’s almost straight up and down, but a good thing that he does here, is as he goes into the top of the swing, if we go ahead and go to the top, we can see that he gets in a great spine tilt as he completes the backswing and now you can see it’s tilted away there, just very, very slightly.

If we look at in comparison with Rory, we’re going to see something very similar. So as he’s still going back, it’s almost the start of the downswing there, so about right here. Rory gets to about the max that you want to get tilted away. But overall, very good position here.

The main thing that he does well is he maintains that angle very consistently through contact. So as he comes down through contact, let’s pause here, just after contact and you can see how that spine angle, that spine angle away from the target has remained very consistent throughout the stroke.

That’s going to allow him for some pretty good consistency and overall hand-eye coordination, because things aren’t moving around.

A lot of times what I’ll see people doing is leaning back to the left on the backswing with the upper body kind of going back toward the target. Then it would be the classic reverse pivot, and then as they fall in the downswing, they have to lean back away from the target, and then the weight falls back on their back foot.

So he’s doing a pretty good job with that, but one thing that he could do that would really, really help with both distance and his consistency, would be in the downswing working on getting a little bit more lag and releasing that lag farther out in front.

We’ll see as soon as he starts down here, he starts to lose that angle between the club and his forearms, if we go another click here we can see how that’s really losing some of this energy.

If we compare this with Rory on the right, we can see how as he starts the downswing he’s actually increasing that angle, and if we pause at about the same position, we can see how his club is still well-behind the hands and the forearms.

So that’s retaining that angle, and he’s really building up, or saving that as long as he can. We can see even here as he’s well in his downswing, the club if we drew a line from it, would still be pointing behind the ball.

If we’re looking here as we’re about the same point in the downswing, now the club would be pointing well in front of the ball. This is the video that I go over in level 1.1 of the lag section, where I talk about how to maintain that angle.

I want you to imagine, this is a great drill for you to improve your lag is as you start your downswing, let’s imagine that there’s an arrow or a stick kind of shooting out of this line from the club.

We can see here as you’re about half way down, this line is pointing behind the ball. As we get any farther though, the club is now pointing well in front of the ball.

So what we want to imagine is that club stays pointing behind the ball for as long in the downswing as we can. We want the hands to go all the way up here by the right leg almost, kind of like we’re seeing here with Rory.

Get them fairly close to the right leg, and still have this club pointing down behind the ball. That’s going to allow you to retain that lag for a very long time in the downswing, and that’s going to get you to save up the angle of the wrist.

So what’s happening in your current downswing as you continue to go into contact, we can see how we’re getting a little bit of a breakdown in the left wrist that adds some loft to the club face, and overall you lose some distance.

We can see how we’re losing some angle here, and then we get a bit of a flip as we’re coming through contact. That’s going to cause you to lose distance, for the ball to go a little bit higher, and usually to not get, or definitely to not get as much compression on the golf ball as you can get.

Now the reason I picked Rory McIlroy for this comparison, because he does a really good job with the right wrist and saving that angle late into the downswing.

So we can see here his forearm angle compared to his right wrist angle, is very, very angled back. He’s not going to release that right wrist until he’s coming through contact.

You can see now it’s starting to release, and it gets fully released at about 45° past, which we call our straight line release point.

So now you can see from the chest all the way down the club, this is released about 45 in front, and now this right wrist is very, very flat, and that’s allowing him to release that energy as he’s coming through contact, and we can see how the left wrist doesn’t break down.

If we want to compare that, I’ll put his hands at about the same position -- oops, sorry about that -- in about the same position that yours are, and we can see the difference in the left arm and the club, versus the left arm and the club here, and then definitely in the right wrist angle.

So we can see the right wrist is already released and it’s gone a little bit flat. A great visualization for this, a lot of times people will just try to hold on with the right wrist, and that doesn’t really work.

What we really want to work on here is releasing that club farther in front, and releasing the momentum and the energy of the club out in front of the golf ball.

I have a great drill for you called the hammer throw video, which is in 2.1 of the straight line release, and that would be a great visualization for you to feel like you’re letting this club shoot away from your body about 45 in front.

That’s going to get the feeling of how you release the golf club and how that’s going to happen. Then it will be very easy to go back to say the Pet the Grass Drill, where I talk about the right wrist, and saving that up until you’re coming through contact.

That’s what I would work on mainly in your swing. I think overall, you’ve got a very nice swing. I’ll tell you, I love the finish too. Nice high hands in the finish, completely balanced over the lead leg. That’s a great looking finish.

You’ve got the big pieces of the swing as far as balance and stability of the body down, now we just need to go ahead and add how those hands and arms are going to work to really take it to the next level.

Work hard, watch those two videos, the 1.2 which is the stick behind the ball lag drill, and the 2.1, the hammer throw release. Those are both going to really help you in this downswing to improve that, and to get you some overall better distance.

Good luck, and I’ll see you guys soon.