Why You Need This: In this video, "Solid Contact Why Not to Get Stacked | Golf Lesson"...

You're going to find out a couple of super common causes for losing lag and coming in too steeply on the ball.

I can almost guarantee you've done one of these (and probably both) at some point:

• Playing the ball too far back in your stance
• Stacking your left ankle, hip, and shoulder vertically at impact

I'll teach you a quick fix for the first issue and a simple drill for the other.

These changes will get you coming in to the ball much shallower...

And that's what all the Tour pros do.

Check out this video now to find out why to avoid the common advice of "getting stacked" at impact...

...and how to align yourself properly instead!

Golf Pros Featured:

Instructors Featured: Clay Ballard    

Video Duration: 3:56

Video Transcription:

Hi guys, and welcome back. I’m Clay Ballard with Top Speed Golf, and today I’m going to talk about an issue that I saw recently with a student.

This student, what he was doing, was losing a little bit of lag, and he had a tendency to come in a little bit steep into the ball and lose some compression also. There’s a very common, or two very common things I see with this, that are really going to help you to improve your game.

So the first one is going to be playing the ball back in the stance. A lot of times to be able to hit down and through and make ball first contact, sometimes people will recommend playing the ball farther back in the stance.

So if this is the center of my stance, the ball is almost on the back edge of that. What this is going to do, is you can imagine as my club swings, I’m going to have an arc. So it’s coming down and then back up.

The farther back that my ball is in this arc, the more down I’m going to be hitting into it. Pros, really high quality players that are compressing the heck out of the ball, are coming into the ball very, very shallow, even with the driver.

They’re coming in about even with the ground with the driver, -1° or so, and then with an iron they’re coming down into it about -4°, -5° with a pitching wedge. That’s a very shallow angle of attack.

If you can imagine a clock face, there’s 360 minutes on a clock, each minute is 6°. So the difference between 12:00 and 12:01 on a clock face is 6° difference, we’re talking about coming in even less than that into the ground with the highest quality players.

So if we play this ball back in the stance, now we’re going to be coming down in too steep into the ball, our angle of attack is going to be kind of bombing down into the ground, and we’re going to lose some compression.

A great way to visualize this is just like a plane landing. Plane comes into the ground and right as it’s about to land it shallows out, and it’s very, very smooth.

We want to have that same kind of angle of attack with the golf club, and the best way to do this, is to play the ball about off my left ear, or the logo of my shirt as I’m at address.

So if I play the ball a little bit farther forward in my stance, now I’m going to be able to come in shallow and as I get forward shaft lean, I’m going to be able to really compress that golf ball.

The second thing is getting stacked, I see this a lot, this is very, very popular over the last couple years. Whereas I’m going to get stacked meaning that my left ankle, left hip, left shoulder are all up here to the left, and they’re almost my shoulder’s in front of my left ankle.

That got very popular with hitting stinger shots, and hitting low shots. But again, that gets my angle of attack very, very steep.

When you watch the best players, I was watching Jason Day the other day playing some awesome golf, and you’re going to see with all the top players, their left ankle, their left hip, and their left shoulder are going to be angled away from the target just slightly as they’re coming into impact.

Let’s work on a couple practice drills to really improve this. First, I’m going to look at my ball position, ‘m going to make sure it’s off the logo of my shirt as I’m addressing the ball.

Then I’m going to make a couple practice wings where I pause at contact, and I’m going to make sure that my angle from my let ankle, left hip, left shoulder is slightly away from the target.

So I’m going to come into contact, there I am, I can see everything is slightly angled away, I’m letting the weight come off my right foot a little bit as I’m doing this to help me to rotate. Then I’m going to come all the way on through to a good, full finish.

So just pause at contact, get about 100 reps in to where you can really feel that.

Now I’m going to make some full practice swings, recreating the same thing. Ball a little bit forward in the stance, I’m going to be angled away, because I’m still getting forward shaft lean, I’m going to compress that golf ball and I’m going to do about another 100 sings making that nice fluid, full motion with the practice swing.

After I’m doing that, now I can go ahead and hit some golf balls, and I’m going to incorporate the same motions.

There we go, hit that one really solid. Nice compression line that those left ankle, left hip, left shoulder stacked away. Good ball position, that’s going to help you to hit the most solid shots of your life when you get that down.

So good luck to you guys, work hard, and I’ll see you soon.