Why You Need This: Today, you'll discover "Setup Fully Explained | Must Do's and Don'ts"

Today, I’m joined by Top Speed Golf certified instructor Ronnie Snowden…

…and we’re going to take a deep dive into all the do’s and don’ts of the setup.

You’ll discover everything you need to know about the address position, no matter the club you choose…

…plus, we’ll go over a fairly common hip issue that might be the reason your swing is mostly arms (revealed around the 2:25 mark)!

To the perfect setup,

Clay Ballard

 

 

 

 

Golf Pros Featured:

Instructors Featured: Clay Ballard    Ronnie Snowden    

Video Duration: 14:24

Video Transcription:

Clay: Hey, it's great to have you here today. I'm joined with Ronnie Snowden, certified top speed golf instructor. We're going to go over the perfect distance to stand from the golf ball. You probably feel like sometimes maybe you're a little too cramped. Your arms are up against your body. It doesn't feel comfortable.

And then other times you feel like you're standing way far away. Let me break down the exact distance to stand from the golf ball step by step. So you can nail it perfect every time and it's some great shots. So let's jump right into it, Ronnie. Um, right now he has a middle iron, a six iron, this posture and set up will work for basically any irons.

And then we'll go over how to use it with woods in the future or in the, at the end of this video. So here Ronnie's, I set up with his feet just slightly wider than shoulder width apart. So when you look at the pros, if I was to drop a line down from the outside of the shoulder, It's going to hit just about an inch inside of the edge of his foot here.

So he's probably about an inch with each foot outside of the tip of the shoulder. That gets you enough power and enough, a stable enough of a stance to where you can deliver energy from your body into the ball. If I go too narrow, let's put your feet almost together, like touching each other. Well, it's not going to be very powerful.

Maybe you ought to make the right positions, but they're not going to be very fast. If he goes way too wide, then all of a sudden, Things are going to be locked up, it's difficult to shift your weight from right to left, all these different things can be a problem. So let's go just barely wider than shoulder width apart.

And from there, this is probably one of the most common things I get, is how do we hinge into our posture, how do we get into our posture. Um, what would you say on that? What would you try to do to get into good posture? Well, one thing that's very important 

Ronnie: is when you do hinge over to get into your posture, it's not strictly just hinging over.

You need to push your hips back as you hinge over. Um, that allows you to not have to kind of round off your shoulders to get to a comfortable position. And probably the biggest thing is it allows your, your weight to not get out onto your toes. It lets it be more evenly distributed as far as, you know, I'm feeling like when I get in a good posture, I'm feeling like you see my foot do a symbol here on my shoe.

That's about where I'm feeling like my weight is. So it's kind of right in the center of my foot. 

Clay: Yeah. I like that. So if you stand straight up again. It's almost like if I took this and pushed on his belt buckle and pushed him that way his hips would go back And that's what would get his entire upper body to hinge forward into his posture versus stand straight up again And now don't move your hips and just round your shoulders.

Well now all of a sudden, you know He's gonna be really rounded on his back. That's probably gonna be more of an arm swing So from there, how far do we need? to hang out. This is probably the most common question. So let's drop the golf club for a second, get in that good posture forward, and then just let your arms hang down to your sides.

And then just once they hang down, just put your hands together. Now, when you notice that you're going to see his hands are a little bit away from his body. There's probably about a hand width between his in front of his thighs and the back of the butt end of the club. You're just letting the arms hang down.

So if this was straight down from the middle of the shoulder, It's very slightly forward from that with an iron. So now go ahead and do the same thing with an iron. And we'll go on a second while that's important because if you get too close or too far away, that's when things start to feel really weird.

So that's a really good, good posture there. You'll see how he's got that gap between his hands. Now, lastly here, these hands, we want to have those a little bit forward with some forward shaft lean. Every club that you hit off the ground, you're going to have forward shaft lean. Your hands are going to be in front of the golf ball at impact.

So why not just set them a little forward, like they're going to be an impact, the most important thing. Um, and then finally, or go ahead and do you have something to add there? No, I was just going to, I know what you're going to. Oh yeah. Yeah, we talked about this a minute ago. So this is a, one way he likes to do it, I think is really good.

And we've talked about it before, is the, is the spine tilt. So the bottom of the club, if he takes this and puts it on his belt buckle, and then the top of the club, almost on his chin, We need to be slightly tilted away from the ball so that we're behind it. So he's going to tilt until this club hits the inside of his leg.

Now you can see how his upper body is behind the golf ball. And that gets me in a position to where I can swing from the inside. He can have lag. He can be powerful. All those good things. And I will say too, 

Ronnie: Clay, that when you do this tilt, you know, you get it on your belt buckle, up under your chin. Now, you don't want to just simply tilt away until it touches.

You're getting way too much weight on your, on your trail side to begin. You want your weight to be more evenly distributed. So what I do is I kind of hit my tilt my hips forward as I start tilting away. And then now my, my, the center of my hips have kind of moved up a little bit as I tilted away. So my weight's more 

Clay: evenly distributed.

That's if I drew a line, if you set up there straight up and down, if I drew a line up from the middle of his chin, through the belt buckle and the ground, you're going to see when he bumps, the belt buckle goes in front of that. The chin goes behind that. And now he's got this tilt. And he's got good weight distribution.

I mean, everything looks really good there. If you just, if you just lean your upper body back, like you said a minute ago, you're going to tend to struggle hitting behind the ball a little bit. If you do it this way, you're going to hit in front of the golf ball, which would be really good. Now, uh, let's go ahead and talk about, this is where the arm spacing comes in.

And what I see a lot of people do is they set up to the golf ball and then they go through this whole routine, getting the right spacing. What I want you to do is get into the right address. Have the arm sitting down there. Now we're in the perfect spot. And it doesn't matter if the ball is over here or back there.

I'm going to move my body. So I'm going to keep all this the same. And I'm going to move my body to now get the club face on the ball. That way you get in this good spot and you're just moving into it or moving away from it. And you feel really, really good. Uh, if you crowd it too much. Now, if I stand too close to it, this is probably, this is where we're getting to the actual spacing now.

That was the perfect setup. Let's get into now, what happens if you're not the right distance from the ball. Well, if he crowds it too much, you're going to see how now the hands get against his thighs a little bit. And there's not really room to swing there. So the way he's going to make space is by standing up out of his posture, lifting the hands up.

And now, yeah, you have more room to swing your arms, but we've got a bunch of other problems that are no good. Yeah, because another 

Ronnie: thing that you could do if you're too close to the ball, you know, you can still get to it, but you notice here if the club shaft is straight away from me, I have no forward shaft lean.

That's as long as it can possibly be, right? But as I start pushing that club shaft forward, you know, it shortens the distance between me and that club head. So if I get a ton of forward shaft lean, And I can make room, but you know, you don't want to have to do that. And especially if you don't want to get that much javelin, that could be 

Clay: a little excessive.

Especially if you don't have a lot of club head speed, maybe getting too much. But like you 

Ronnie: mentioned, typically what I will see is that if you're too close to the ball, you just stand up away from it and you're forcing yourself to kind of flip into it to create that space 

Clay: and get to the ball still.

Yeah, tell them when you, when you stand up at it, what you were talking about earlier with the club angle. And the divots, whenever you're doing that. Yeah. So, 

Ronnie: so your divot, when you do that, and that clubhead is coming in like this, you know, you'll see the leading edge, the head of the club is the toe of the club is what's going to hit the ground first.

So if your divots seem to start on the toe 

Clay: side, that's most likely what's happening. Yeah. We can show a picture of that. So this is just divot you're looking at now is a toe down divot. That's not from having the face open. Like a lot of people think that's from standing up, being too close to it, standing up out of your posture.

And now all of a sudden the toe is hitting first, getting that divot to be a little lopsided. And what happens is, that's going to pull the sweet spot up and now you're going to hit those shots thin. Even if you hit it as good as you can hit it, unless that ball is fluffed up on a nice piece of grass, it's going to be a slightly thin shot.

Uh, when you look at this divot, it's perfectly square. You can hit that divot from a perfectly fluffy lie, you can hit that divot off hardpan, and you're going to hit him solid. Uh, let's do the opposite now to where, let's say we're really far away from it and we're stretched out. And some of the problems with this is, now his arms are really out from his body.

That's going to tend to pull his weight forward toward his toes. Remember earlier, he said that good foot joy logo in the middle of his foot is where he felt balance. I think that's a great spot to be, especially if you want to stay in your posture. Middle of your stance with your weight distribution is good.

If he gets out here on his toes, everything pulls forward. And again, you're either going to turn off your body and try to, you know, just use all arms. Or if you use your body, you're going to go toward the toes, you're almost going to stand up out of your posture if you get too far away from it too, to keep from kind of falling forward and losing your balance there.

Um, so let's do a driver now. Uh, oh, ball position, we can talk about that. So anything off the ground, you're going to have roughly the same ball position. So if it's a pitching wedge, a middle iron, even a three wood, the reason that you're going to have roughly the same ball position, is I'm going to come down hit this ball first and I'm going to take a divot in front of that ball.

So even with a three wood, the club is rounded. So it doesn't take a divot, but you're hitting the turf in front of the golf ball. What would be a divot? Um, you're hitting down on it two or three degrees. That's one minute on a clock face is six degrees. So you're saying you're hitting down on it a couple of degrees.

That's what the three would, if you're hitting a pitching wedge. So, you know, what people think, Oh, I'm taking a much bigger divot with a pitching wedge. You're only hitting down on it about five degrees. So there's very slight difference on how much you're hitting down on it with a three wood, a six iron, or a pitching wedge.

The only reason the wedges cut a bigger divot and the irons hit a bigger divot is because they have a sharper leading edge and actually just cuts the grass more. So, when I hit a, a pitching wedge, what I would say is, middle of stance or maybe slightly behind the stance. So this inside ball here would be the pitching wedge ball position.

Um, so slightly back, that also helps you to flight it down, get a little more shaffling like Ronnie was talking about earlier. Six iron is gonna be in the middle. Three wood is just a little bit, obviously we're getting farther away from us. but it's just a little bit farther forward. Again, that's enough just to be a little more level into the ground.

You're still hitting the divot in front, um, but you don't want to throw that three wood way up here in your stance. Now, if we go to driver, grab the driver here, we're gonna do the exact same kind of step by step process that we did with six iron. But when you hold your arms out, so let's go ahead and T one up there.

And, uh, when you hold your arms out. Because the shaft is longer, you're going to have to be a little farther away from the ball. And then when you hinge forward, the only change is here, you don't have to hinge as far forward. So with a lob wedge, I have to hinge pretty far forward to get down and be able to reach the club.

But with a driver that's longer, I still drop my hips back the same way, I just don't have to go as far forward there. And because of the longer shaft, the less bend from your body. That's going to have your arms, instead of being a little more down and slightly forward, they're going to be even more than that.

So if you look at the spacing between the back of the butt end of his club or the back of his hands, and his, the front of his thighs, it's probably a hand and a half or even possibly two hands would be, be totally fine there. Uh, from the ball position standpoint, if you want to hit it long, you really got to get it on the upswing or at least level.

And that means that the ball is going to be slightly more up in your stance. So, here's another misconception with how far to stand for it, where to put the ball position, all this. If you imagine a pitching wedge or a sand wedge is here, where it's just slightly behind the center of the stance. He's going to be hitting down on it.

And if he has his hands, go ahead and hit it like you're going to hit a driver and get where your hands would be at impact. So if his hands are right here, if he has this ball position, look at all that shaft lane. Now he's leaned it forward at the wedge like everybody does with the pros. If you just change ball position and nothing else in your swing, Look how the shaft lean goes away, and now he can hit up on it with a pretty neutral shaft and get a great launch there.

So you don't really have to make that difference of, different of a swing when you're hitting driver. It's all about ball position, and you can pretty much do the other stuff the same as long as you just get a little farther away from it because you're not hinging forward as much. Alright, so thanks Ronnie, I appreciate you joining us for the video.

No problem. Whenever you're trying to get better at golf, the number one thing is certainty. So you're, there's no shortage of instruction out there. You've watched this video, I guarantee you've watched hundreds of golf videos from not only myself, but other people. You've watched golf on TV, you read the magazines, and then you go out and have a round and all your buddies are trying to tell you what to do too.

Well, that's not a great formula to really get better. What we need is someone that knows what they're talking about, knows how to get you better, that can tell you exactly what to do, and you just focus on that, and you have complete certainty of how to improve. And that's exactly what Ronnie does. So he does, uh, swing reviews, online swing reviews, where you can sign up with Ronnie as your coach, you send him your videos on a regular basis, and he tells you exactly what to do.

So you set out your goals, whether it's to... Fix a slice or to win your club championship or anything in between. You tell him exactly what you want to get out of your golf game. He looks at your swing, sees exactly what you're doing and lays out a custom plan on how to get you better. And it just works.

So, there's a great news, because today he's got a couple of spots open in his program. He doesn't open those up all the time. So, when you have these spots open, if you want to get better at your game, I recommend you take advantage of it today. Just go ahead and click the button down below this video. If it's happened to already sold out, and there's no spots open when you go to that page, just make sure that you get on that waiting list.

Because, if you're on the waiting list, next time he's wanting to open spots, he's gonna contact you first, so you have kind of first dibs. Um, that way, you know, you know whenever he opens them in the future. So... If you want to get better, I highly recommend working with Ronnie and I can't wait to hear about your great results working together.