Why You Need This: With these "Solid Contact Drills", you will be hitting the center of the club face in no time.

I will go over my 5 favorite drills to hit the ball first every time, make center contact, and learn 600-1000% faster than traditional coaching.

Let's get started .....

Golf Pros Featured:

Instructors Featured: Clay Ballard    

Video Duration: 22:56

Video Transcription:

You’re really excited to go play a round of golf. You can’t wait to get out there, it’s been a few weeks, you’re feeling good. You really know that you’re going to have a great round, so you’re very, very excited to go to the tee and start hitting some shots.

You take out your trusty 7 iron, you usually hit that one pretty good. You make a swing, that’s a little thin. Not the best, but you’ll get in the groove once you hit a few more.

You hit another one thin, another one thin, then you try to adjust, maybe get a little bit more lower on the face, and all of a sudden you hit one and you chunk it. Then you start slicing, and hooking, you hit them all over the place.

You just can’t, no matter what you try, you can’t hit the ball solid. Then you go to the course and it falls apart even worse, you have one of the worst rounds of the year.

That is extremely, extremely frustrating. What if I told you there’s a way, a series of drills that I can get you to work through that would actually allow you when you do hit unsolid shots, when you’re not making that perfectly clean contact, you could adjust and start hitting them solid in a matter of minutes?

What if I showed you an actual way to improve and get this down 6 to 10 times faster than your competitors?

You’re going to improve, if you practice for an hour, they’re going to have to practice 6 hours or 10 hours to improve the amount you’re improving.

That’s exactly what I’m going to show you in this video. I can’t wait to show it to you.

Let’s go ahead and get started.

OK, so let’s jump right into it. Just a few minutes ago I hit some shots to demonstrate how the ball flight is affected if we hit it a little off the toe, a little off the heel, a little thin, and a little heavy.

The very first shot I hit a nice, solid shot. All of these, you’re going to notice I’m swinging somewhere between 87 and 92 miles an hour, some a little faster, some a little slower.

But this first shot, 158 yards, pretty nice, solid shot, right toward the flag, right in the middle of the green.

Now the second shot, I purposefully tried to hit on the toe to see how this would affect it. You can see from the strike point on my club, it’s well off the toe and that one only carried 146 yards.

So I lost quite a bit of distance when I went off the toe. If I hit off the heel on the next shot, again, 149 yards, so I still lost some distance there.

What that’s showing you is, in a ballpark, if you hit it off the toe, if you hit it off the heel, you’re going to be somewhere around 8 to 10 yards shorter than your normal distance.

Now that’s not that bad, that’s only 30 feet. That’s going to leave you kind of if the pin is in the center of the green, if you can miss around that area, you’re still going to be on the front of the green, probably have a putt or maybe a really easy chip if you’re doing this.

The next few shots I hit, I’ve decided to draw a line on the ground, we’re going to go over this exact drill later, and I hit one a little bit thin.

Now on that shot, still, not too bad, 156 yards, only 3 yards short of my good shot. A little bit of thin isn’t going to kill you, and I purposely even chunked a few to see what happened there.

The first one, you can see that on that line I contacted the line right behind the golf ball, so I’m probably about a half inch behind the golf ball hitting it. That’s OK, it went 152 yards, only lost a handful of yards.

Then the last shot here, I really tried to chunk it. I was probably an inch behind that line, so my club is taking up two inches of turf before it gets to the ball and I still got 150 yards.

What this is showing is two things, number one, if you’re hitting it off the heel or the toe, you’re hitting it a little thin, or a little heavy, then you’re going to lose somewhere in that 8 to 10-yard range.

You’re still going to be around the green. What we really have to learn to do is eliminate those big misses, the ones where we just hit a cold, dead chunk, or completely scuttle the ball.

Those are going to be the ones that really jack up your scores, that feel terrible. We don’t have to be perfectly precise like we’re seeing with the pros, to be able to play some really good golf.

Then number two, there is a way to adjust this, just like I adjusted on these shots. If I can use these specific drills, I’ll be able to adjust my contact point forwards and backwards very easily, so if I do hit one bad shot I can get right back on track.

Let’s go ahead and get started with my first and one of my favorite drills which I call the Tee Drill.

This is what I call the Tee Drill, and this is one of my favorite drills here. In this one, we’re going to first work on making contact with the ball, either more toward the toe, or more toward the heel.

Now I’m going to get to a trick in a minute, like I talked about earlier, how you can improve way faster. We’re going to practice this the right way. We’re not going to do the old way where we just hit a billion balls day in and day out.

So here, what I’ve done is to start out, I set the tee outside the toe of this club, and I’m using an 8 iron here. It’s about three-quarters of an inch or so.

If you’re not quite as accurate you can go a little bit tighter in there. If you get really good at this you can make these pretty tight, even a quarter inch outside the toe of your club.

Now on the heel, the hosel side, since my hosel is angled back a bit, I want to bring the tee a little bit wider out away from that.

If I’m not using the sole of my club, I’m kind of looking at where the hosel of my club goes over this tee. I want at least a finger-width in between there.

Basically what I’m saying is, on the heel side the tee’s going to be a little bit wider, because your hosel is angled back in.

Now the great thing about this drill, I can swing through this like a gate. This is going to allow me to get some visual feedback on whether or not my club is moving toward the dead center, the sweet spot of my club is moving toward the dead center of my ball.

Let me go ahead and try one out here, and what I’m going to do to measure this, I have a little cheat here which is Dr. Scholl’s Odor X foot spray powder. We’ll give you a close up of that here in a second.

All I have to do is just to spray that on my club and it puts a white powder on this club face. Now this is really cool, because it gives me feedback, immediate feedback if I’m doing what I think I’m doing or not.

So one of the keys to improving faster, we have to have measurable feedback. If you go out there to the driving range and you hit a shot, and it doesn’t feel good, and you’re not sure if you hit it off the heel or the toe.

Now you’re guessing and you’re really not going to improve your game as much because you’re trying to figure out what happened. You’re not really sure.

So spray that club face, set up the tee to where I’m going to hit a perfectly solid shot now, and let’s go ahead and try one out, try to hit it right toward the flag, and then we’ll adjust from there.

All right, right at the flag. Again, wasn’t the best shot in the world as far as being solid, but I got about a six or eight-footer, which I’ll take all day long.

Now on there, we’ll get to what we talk about in the second part of this video, but from here you can see that was on the center of the face and just a little low.

We’re going to work on the low and high later in this video, but the key was we got it in the center.

Now if you find yourself hitting it a little bit more toward the heel or the toe, that’s where this drill is really going to help you out, because we can adjust where we put the ball between these two tees.

So if I move this ball a little closer to the toe side of the tee, to where now if I was to hit this ball on the dead center of the club, my toe of my club would actually clip that tee.

Your brain’s pretty smart, you’re a pretty good athlete. You’re going to be able to adjust pretty fast. What you’re going to find yourself doing, is pulling that club in and hitting a little bit more off the toe, so that you can miss that tee. That’s exactly what we’ll do here.

Another good key for this, if you find yourself constantly hitting toward the hell, that’s when you’d want to do this drill to make sure you hit off the toe.

If I’m constantly hitting toward the heel over and over again, one of the things I could be doing is kind of standing up out of my posture. My hips are moving toward the target, I’m moving closer to the ball, and all of a sudden, I lose room and my hands raise up and my club starts to go out this way a little bit more.

So really concentrate. If you’re trying to hit more on the toe, feel like your weight sinks in more toward your heels on the downswing, and you feel like if you had a wall behind you, your left butt cheek is going to push through that wall.

So you’re really trying to get your body, get some space to swing on through this. Again, if I’m hitting a little too much off the heel, I’m going to purposely try to hit on the toe.

I’m going to do that by putting this ball a little bit more toward the toe side of the tee, and then I’m really going to feel like I’m back on my heels. My left butt check is going through that wall. I’m going to put a hole in the wall in my downswing. So let’s try that out, I’m going to purposely hit toward the toe here.

There we go, again, right toward the middle of the green, but I was able to adjust about five feet right of the pin, I was able to adjust. This is going to be a little harder to see this one, I’ll clean it up for you slightly because I’ve got some dirt on there.

You’ll see I was able to actually hit that ball right here in this toe area. I don’t know if it will show it as much on the camera, but you can see it really clear as day here when you’re looking at it live in person.

A lot of people are probably asking at this point, like why would I purposely hit one on the toe? That doesn’t really make sense. Why shouldn’t I just be trying to hit on the sweet spot?

That’s what’s called variability training. This has been tested to death, hundreds of tests have been done on this.

What they find when you purposely train yourself to feel what the fringes are, so if I’m not hitting it solid, I need to purposely hit some wrong off the toe, purposely hit some wrong off the heel, and now I get a full spectrum of what’s going on, and I know what that feels like to do either one of those.

I know if I want to hit off the toe, I have to feel like I’m coming back this way with my hips, let my hips come up kind of into that wall, and I start to get that toe result. My brain says OK, I know that’s what a toe shot feels like now.

Next, we’re going to do the heel shot, but when you do both extremes, your body gets a full picture of what’s going on, and you’re going to learn 6 to 10 times faster.

If I just try to set that ball up in the middle of these tees and hit the sweet spot every single time, I’m not really learning what makes me hit it off the heel and the toe, I’m just kind of guessing and doing a lot of work, but not improving as fast.

Don’t gloss over this, this is one of the most important things I’ve learned in all my teaching, we’ve got to use variability training if you want to learn fast. If you guys start doing this, you’re really going to pick up on it.

Now let’s go to the heel side. Let’s go ahead and spray the club here again, so we’re going to be able to see a little bit easier. Again, that’s the Dr. Scholl’s Odor X, that’s the best one, it really puts a good coating of a white film on the club.

Now we’re going to go a little bit more, you’ll see when I’m placing this ball here, I’m going a little bit more toward the heel.

I almost have to hit a little off the heel or I’m going to clip this inside tee, and again, being a good athlete that you are, you’re naturally going to start to do this.

Now one of the things that I found, is that players are coming too far off the toe. If you tend to hit off the toe again, and again, and again, this is the drill that’s going to get you out of that.

A lot of times what I find as players are coming over the top, kind of falling back away from the target, so you’re falling away from the target, and then swinging across that, now that’s leaving the toe of the club kind of glancing across the ball.

What I want you to feel like to hit it a little more off the heel, is get a little bit more inside, so you feel like your club’s coming a little bit more from the inside, you’re swinging out to the right, that would be the opposite of over the top.

Then really make sure your weight shifts to your left foot as you’re coming down and through. Let’s go ahead, again, and purposely try to hit two or three balls until you can force yourself to get one a little bit off the heel.

There we go, that’s another dead straight shot. I might have to start hitting them off the heel or toe all the time, this is the best I’ve been hitting in a while.

You can see a little bit here, I caught a little bit of the grass. That’s one thing you’ll notice if you start to catch too much of a divot, some times it wipes the paint off there, but I went ahead and made it a little bit larger. You can see that’s off the heel side.

So again there, I had a pretty big spread. I’m not saying a millimeter one way or another, I’ve covered a lot of the face, but all three of those shots are right on the flag. They’re all pretty good birdie putts.

That’s telling me that I don’t’ have to be dead-on precise, I just have to be in the ballpark. If I can do that and work on this drill over and over to adjust and get it toward the center, somewhere on the center, I’m going to be pretty good.

Now let’s move on to the ground contact. What if we’re chunking and thinning? I’ve got some great drills for you on that too.

Now I love this drill, it’s one of my favorite ones for controlling where you’re making your divot in relationship to the ball.

I’m going to pretend like this middle tee, what I’ve done here, I’ve set three tees up in the ground, about a half-inch sticking above the turf. This middle one would be what I would set up to as though I’m going to hit that one as the ball.

Now if I can come down and miss this middle tee and this back tee, and clip this first tee, that would train me to really get my divot in front. Now I want to start out by doing that.

Again, we’re going to use that variability training so we can learn 6 to 10 times faster. But here, as I start to hit that first tee, what I’m going to feel like as I shift my weight to the front, and I want to make sure that I’m not doing this by coming over the top.

I don’t want to shift my weight to the front and then slice down across this tee like an over the top move. I want to feel like I’m coming from the inside, my weight’s still getting to the front, and I’m just going to clip that tee first.

If I do that correctly, it looks something like this. Now I’ve hit that tee out of the ground, left the other two tees intact.

Now the reason I’m doing this so exaggerated, imagine this is my golf ball, now I’ve really gone way up here in front of it. If I can get the exaggerated, the extreme, my mind makes what’s called a mental map or a blue print a lot faster.

If you want to sit out there and hit 10,000 golf balls and learn it the slow way, hey, that’s fine. That’s the way I did it for years. This will actually help you learn a lot faster by going to the extremes first.

So again, I’m going to feel like my weight comes to my left foot, exaggerate that, still want to come from the inside. I don’t want to chop down over top of it.

I’m brushing the grass, and I’m just going to clip that front tee out. There we go, I did that again. Do that three times, you can successfully miss both of these back tees and hit the front tee.

Now, I’m going to do the opposite of that which would be clipping this back tee, back tee only, and trying to miss the front two tees.

This one’s a little bit tougher, because your club naturally wants to come down and through as you’re hitting these. If you clip a little bit of that middle tee, I’m completely fine with that, but I don’t want you whacking both of those tees out of the ground.

Again, I’m going to set up like this in my middle tee. Instead of letting my weight shift way up to the front, now I’m going to feel like my weight stays on the back a little bit more, almost like I’m falling back here like I would be scooping up on the ball.

Again, this is incorrect, just like going way too far forward is incorrect, going too far back, falling back and flipping is incorrect, but I’m going to do it the wrong way to that extreme.

So I can feel if I start to hit behind the ball too much, my brain knows what’s causing that and I can adjust from there.

So set up to your middle tee, I’m going to fall back on my downswing, I’m going to clip that back tee and kind of come up this way. It’s actually a bad swing, but I’ll go ahead and demonstrate what that looks like.

Fall back, there we go, and I clipped that back tee, you can see how I really got stuck on my back leg. Let me go ahead and do that again, see if I can get that out of the ground.

I got the back tee out, I clipped the middle tee a little bit. That may happen to you, slightly. I would prefer you exaggerate enough to where you don’t even hit that middle tee.

A lot of you guys that are already falling back in your swing may think, Clay, this is the easiest drill I’ve ever seen in my life.

I fell back 10, 15 times in a row, I nailed that back tee, didn’t even get close to any of these other tees. But that’s where I want you to start.

Then finally here, we’re going to go ahead when we do this correctly, set those tees up again, I’m going to clip this middle tee and the front tee. I’ve felt what it’s like to get too far forward.

I’ve felt what it’s like to fall too far back, let me find that middle zone which is right int eh middle where I want to be, hit those middle tees just like that, clipped them perfectly, I’m well on my way.

Now that’s the beginning part of this. We’re finding those big extremes, way too far forward, way too far back. Your brain makes a mental map of what that feels like. Now let’s hone in on what’s good and get a little bit more precise with this.

When we’re doing this, hitting off the ground is a three-step process. In the first part where we’re going heel and toe, I found most players can keep it on the face fairly easily, but when they’re talking about hitting those irons, making ball-first contact, hitting the ground tends to be a little bit more difficult.

The second phase of this drill, I’m going to take a thin towel. If your towel is a little bit thicker and it’s setting up off the ground, you may need to put your ball a little bit more in front. This is a pretty thin towel, this is fairly short-mown fairway.

I’m going to be able to easily miss that towel, come down, hit the ball first, and then the ground in front of it. I’ve got this ball about three inches in front.

If you need to sneak a little bit farther forward in the beginning, that’s completely fine. What I’m going to do here is I’m going to make a swing, and the goal of this is for me to miss the towel, so I’m coming down and through, I’m not hitting behind the golf ball.

Make ball-first contact, and then again, I’m going to hit in front of that tee or where that ball is.

So if I want to spray a little bit of that Dr. Scholl’s Odor X to make this a little bit easier to see the feedback, I can also do that, just spray that on the ground, that’ll give me a line knowing where my ball is so I can see my divot.

Here, I’m going to set up to this. Again, I’m going to feel like I’m clipping that middle tee like we did the last time, see where my divot is. I put a little tee under this ball to cheat, to make it easier as we’re starting this drill.

There we go, so we see I missed the towel, that one’s right on the green, maybe 10 feet right of the flag. I see that my tee is in the right position, my divot is in the right position.

Here’s my line, my divot started, get the tee out of there, my divot started right on that line, went nice and in front of that, and I missed this towel. That’s a perfect shot.

Now what you’ll find if you start, a good thing about this, it’s not rocket science. Again, one of the things that’s a key if you want to improve fast, you have to have immediate feedback.

You can’t be guessing what’s happening. By drawing this line there, if I start to, and having the towel behind it, if I start to hit behind this a little bit too much, let me try to chunk one a little bit.

There we go, so I saw my towel got marked up a little bit, and I’ll notice that I actually did clip a little bit of that, that line’s still the same but I almost flipped it so it kind of caught my towel first.

So again, that’s giving me immediate feedback, I’m too far behind, and I know I need to adjust my divot farther forward.

The cool thing is, again, talking about learning faster, if you can give your body a direct immediate feedback, you’re a good athlete.

What’s happening a lot of times when we practice, though, is we hit a shot, we’re not quite sure what we did, and then we make the wrong adjustment. Having this gives me feedback.

If I hit a little too far in front, again I’m going to put the back of my ball right on this line. If I hit a little too far in front, you’re going to notice that either one, I’m going to hit it thin and there’s not going to be any divot, or two, the divot’s going to start two or three inches in front of that white line.

So let’s go ahead and try that out. So there I hit that ball thin, no divot. I know that I didn’t come down to hit it good enough. So I got immediate feedback of what happened.

If I do a little bit less than that, I’m going to try to get one with a divot and actually have it a little too far in front, you’re going to see exactly what I’m talking about there.

I can adjust, if I’m too far back, get my weight coming a little farther forward. If I’m too far forward, get my weight going a little farther back.

There you go, so I got that one, got away with it, still hit it fairly decent. You’re going to see my divot is almost an inch in front of that line.

That means I probably hit the ball a little bit thin as I was coming through that and results in a not-quite as part of a shot.

Doesn’t have to be that complicated. Set a towel down so you know if you’re hitting behind it. Draw that line, so you know if you’re hitting farther in front of it, and then adjust from there.

So finally, let’s take this towel away, and let’s really focus in on honing in on this line. These last few shots, what I want you to do is go ahead and take two or three balls and I want to look at that immediate feedback and try to get my divots going all the way down this line.

If I finish this drill perfectly, I’m going to have divots in front of this line and none behind it. I’m going to be very precise in where I’m looking at this.

Let me go ahead and hit a shot, and see how I could adjust if I wanted to get it even better. On that one, a little bit thin. I noticed that I roughed up the ground here, but I really didn’t take much of a divot.

If that happens to you, and you start hitting them a little bit thin, what I want you to feel like you’re doing is sinking into the ground a little bit more, this is something that all the pros are doing.

Feel like as you start your downswing, you start to open your hips, but your knees kind of flex into the ground a little bit.

That’s going to get me slightly closer to the ground, the opposite of that would be kind of doing this, letting my hips come forward, stand up, that’s going to be a thin shot.

I’m sinking into the ground, and I’m going to go ahead and feel like I really hit down and through on this next one. Let’s try that out. There we go, much better. I can see I got a nice divot in front of that line again.

Let’s say I’m doing the opposite thing. Instead of going too thin, I’m going a little heavy. So there, I’m probably falling back.

Almost everybody I see hitting behind the golf ball is falling back this way, and kind of flipping or scooping the ball up in the air.

Another symptom of this would be if your ball is flying too high. If you tend to hit those balls that kind of float up in the air, you’re probably falling back and scooping.

A great drill for this one is, I’m going to start with my feet together. I’m going to take a step as I make my backswing. As I swing forward, I’m going to pivot onto that front foot.

Again, I’m going to start with my feet together, step, pivot, and as I finish, I want to check to make sure all my weight’s off my back foot. I should be able to pick my back foot up just like this and hold my finish position.

That’s going to ensure that I don’t fall back and hit behind this golf ball, I’m going to come nice, down and through this golf ball and get that divot in front.

Let’s try that one, that same feeling out. I’m not going to take the step when I actually hit the ball, but I’m going to have the same feeling for a weight transfer. There we go, another good one.

All right, so go through these series of drills. I promise you, you’ll make better contact, it’ll be much more solid, and you’re going to be able to learn 6 to 10 times faster than your competitors.

You match up with them again, six months, eight months down the road, and you’re going to be miles ahead.

Now I don’t want you to stop here. In this video, we talked about how one of the biggest problems was falling back away from this shot, that caused you to hit behind the golf ball, or maybe you’re kind of sliding too far in front and you’re over the top. That’s that one that’s way too far out in front.

Well if we’re doing that, that means our Stable Fluid Spine is off, and that’s something we didn’t talk very much about in this video, but it’s a really important part to this.

If I can get my spine angle correct, and rotate around that spine to the top of my swing, rotate around my spine to the bottom of the swing, my spine is setting in a position, and I’m just turning back and through around that stable position, that makes it a lot easier to hit the ground consistently every time.

Makes it a lot easier to hit the center of the face consistently every time, and it also keeps our eyes very still as we’re going back and through.

Our head isn’t moving around a bunch, and that gives you the best chance at hand-eye coordination.

So make a commitment to yourself this week, go to the Stable Fluid Spine section, you’re going to click on Instruction, Top Speed Golf System, Stable Fluid Spine. Work through level 1.

Start to knock out at least two of those drills this week. You’re going to be well on your way. If you’ve already knocked out some of those videos, pick up where you left off.

Plan on hitting two more Stable Fluid Spine videos this week, you’re going to be well on your way to making golf a lot easier. I’ll see you in the Stable Fluid Spine Section.