Why You Need This: You see the pros "Shallow the Club" into the perfect slot, and hit one great shot after another.

So why is it that most players can't seem to stop coming over the top?

They'll steepen the club to start the downswing, and lose tons of distance and consistency.

Most of this comes from confusion of exactly what you should be doing with your hands and arms to shallow the club.

It can be hard to know for sure, since you can't even see the club at the top of the swing.

I am going to solve that problem with a very simple set of drills.

You can do the drill with the club right in front of your body to allow you to see what is happening.

Then shallowing the club will be simple.

Let's get started.....

Golf Pros Featured:

Instructors Featured: Clay Ballard    

Video Duration: 9:26

Video Transcription:

All right, we all want to shallow that club to start the downswing, get that club to come down into the slot, that way we can come from the inside just like we see the top pros doing on the PGA Tour every single weekend.

So why is it so hard, why do we have so much trouble getting that club to want to steepen up? A big piece of this is we can’t really see what’s going on at the top of the swing.

We get to the top of the swing, we’re looking down at the golf ball, some stuff is happening back here with our hands and arms that we can’t really see, and it’s tough to really know what we should be feeling and what we should be doing.

So the club shallow actually happens from three separate moves, they’re actually really, really simple to do. I’m going to put those right in front of your body, show you how the hands, arms, and wrist work, and the proper motion.

We’re going to get in some good reps, and it’s going to make things a lot easier.

Let’s go ahead and get started.

Now there’s three separate motions that are going to allow us to shallow out that club. The first one is a turning of the overall shaft into a shallower position.

Let’s go ahead and get into our posture here, and let’s go to the top of the swing. I’m at the top of my swing here, like I said, my hands are completely behind my body. I can’t really see what’s going on.

But if I stand up out of my posture and I get my lower body facing where my upper body is, this is what’s going to be happening at the top of your swing.

Basically your hands and arms are just sitting up kind of above your right shoulder here. So we can work on what this feels like with our hands and arms, just working right in front of us.

Then when I get back down in my posture and rotate to the backswing, that’s going to be the same exact feeling.

Now this helps out a lot because I can see the club, I can see exactly what’s going on, and I can see if what I’m going, what that’s going to feel like, and I can recreate that same sensation in my swing, makes things a lot easier.

The first one is a shallowing, or this club turning to the right. If you can imagine I’m going to put my left hand on the grip, and my right hand up here down the shaft.

If I rotate everything to the right like this, you can see how that would be like kind of turning a steering wheel over to the right.

Now when I do that, that’s going to shallow out that club. In the golf swing, let me show you what that would look like in my posture.

Here would be a very steep swing, up and down. That would be this kind of a motion. Then as I go into a shallower motion, I’d be shallowing it out this way.

Now it really helps when you’re doing this, that first motion, to feel like your right elbow gets tucked in, your right palm gets more toward the sky as that’s happening, and the logo of your glove also gets more toward the sky.

What’s actually happening in the hands here, when I do this, my right hand is feeling like it’s going this way, while my left hand is feeling like it’s moving over this way.

My left hand actually coming out as my right hand goes back allows that to shallow out a little bit more. My hands are kind of doing opposing forces. Right hand’s going that way, left hand’s going that way, and that shallows out the club.

As I do that in the swing, let’s go to the top here again. This would be very steep. Let me get that sensation of the club shallowing out.

When that happens is kind of in the second half of the backswing. So as soon as I get to here, I’m going to start to feel that happen as I complete my backswing and start my downswing. That gets me a lot more into the slot.

So if you’re struggling with an over the top, a lot of times players will say OK, what am I doing if I’m coming over the top, or I’m steepening the club, you’re making the hands go the opposite direction.

The right hand’s wanting to push out or push this way across the club, and the left hand is kind of stiff on there kind of resisting it.

When you start your downswing, it’s that right hand wanting to push the shaft this way to what feels very powerful and like it’s adding speed is actually steepening up the club and will actually slow down the club head speed in the long-term.

Let’s do this to actually ingrain this and get this feeling. I want you to put your hands above your right shoulders, have the club straight up and down, and then do five of these where you shallow the club a good from vertical all the way to parallel with the ground, a good 90°.

I’m practicing my backswing, shallowing it, and then I’m coming into my downswing. I kind of lift my arms up on a steeper plane, and then shallow that out.

Do five repetitions of this to get the feel for that, and then get that same idea in your backswing. The one key takeaway from this is that the right hand is going this way as you start your downswing versus the right hand going that way as you start your downswing.

Let’s go ahead and give this a whirl, see if we can get one right down the middle of the fairway.

OK, so piece number two, we talked about the shallowing with the hands or the turning, what about the club head itself? Are we opening or closing that club head?

As we go to the top of the swing, when we come over the top, a lot of times what’s happening is that face, that left wrist is cupped and that face is wide open and we just kind of slice across it in an effort to square it up.

If we put this club again over our right shoulders, imagine this is a clock face. If I take that clock face and I turn it this way, that’s going to allow my left wrist to bow.

Again, the logo of my glove is up toward the sky, and the palm of my right hand is now also facing to the sky. Kind of like you’re holding a waiter’s tray there.

Go ahead and lift the club up over your shoulder, let’s get in a good five reps of that, too. That’s one, two, three, four, five.

Now when you’re doing this, what that’s doing is turning the club to square it up toward the golf ball. As I make my downswing, this would be wide open. The face is open there.

My left wrist is cupped, my right hand is way underneath. This would be squaring that club up. So again, if I went to the top of the swing, that would be wide open, this would be square.

Way easier to see if I’m having this club in front of me, and I’m just rotating it to the right that way. That’s the sensation that’s happening.

When I add both of those in together, I can turn the club this way and then I can also rotate it at the same time, that’s not only shallowing the club shaft, but squaring up this face.

That’s one of the biggest things that I see people that struggle with this, they’ll start to get the club a little shallower, but then the face will be wide open, this left wrist will be cupped, and now I’m in a position to where I really can’t square up the face at all and I end up blocking them way out to the right.

If you want to shallow it the correct way, the ways the pros are doing it, we have to get a little bit of this rotation to square the face and it’s a lot easier if I can get that up at the top of the swing.

Think about somebody like Dustin Johnson who would be a very extreme example of this. Now it’s not that we have to bow the wrist like Dustin Johnson or John Rahm, but it does help to have that sensation or that visualization in our mind that that’s what’s happening.

Just a small amount of that will be fine, where the left wrist starting to flatten out as you’re completing your backswing and starting your downswing will be perfect.

Again, get in those good five reps, get the sensation of what’s going on there, let’s square that face up early, so that we don’t have to flip late in the downswing.

Now the last piece of this is what I call the push. If you can imagine your hands in front of your body, if I want my club to shallow out a little bit easier, it’s good to get that hands and arms to push away from our body this way.

If you imagine the hands and arms coming up, and then going more over the right shoulder as I start my downswing.

Now the reason I say to really get this to shallow out, you can have the hands kind of ride down even a little bit more out.

So for example, it’s OK if the hands kind of come down a little bit more this way as long as that club shallows out. But the one that I see players doing a lot is they’ll get that right shoulder really engaged and then get this club really racing across the body early in the downswing.

That would look something like this. I go to the top of my swing and my first instinct coming down is to get that right shoulder and that right hand kind of pushing the club to steepen it up like talked about earlier, and now my hands and arms are really coming out and coming across the golf ball.

So the sensation I’d love for you guys to have, is as you start the downswing, I'm going to get my hands to move more outside my right shoulder.

So they're going to from over my right shoulder, to outside my right shoulder. When I do that five times, I’m getting the sensation that my hands are going up and then coming out across my body as I’m starting my downswing.

Get in a good five reps of that, and then we can pair that up with the motions that we’ve already talked about, and we can see how that would shallow out the club, kind of loop it from the inside and get it coming in the slot as a lot of players would call that.

So do those three drills individually, get the reps in with those, it’s going to feel a lot more comfortable when you’re looking down at the golf ball.

Now I don’t want us to stop here. In this video what we really talked about was The Move. We talked about how to shallow out the club, and then how to rotate to square up the face.

Now if we stop here, we’re going to be well on our way, we’re probably going to hit some good shots when we go to the range today, but it’s not going to be fully ingrained.

What you want to do is go to The Move section. So click on the Instruction tab up at the top of the website, for those of you that are members.

Go down to the Top Speed Golf System, and the click on The Move section and start working through those drills.

I have some awesome drills in there including the tennis racket drill, that are going to help to make this very, very easy to do once we start working through and getting those reps in.

We don’t want to stop here today with this one, let’s keep right on moving with it so it becomes completely natural.

We can shallow out that club and square up the face without even thinking about it. Let’s jump on over to The Move section, start working through those drills. I’ll see you there.