Why You Need This: We all want to know the best way to "Strike down on Your Iron Shots"

Tell me if this sounds familiar to you....

Some days you swing feels great!

You're timing and rhythm is all in alignment and you're hitting crisp shots......you wonder why golf isn't always this easy.

As soon as the next day (or possibly even the next 9 holes), you feel like you've never even played golf before.

No matter how hard you try, your timing is just off and you can't hit the ball clean.

Well, you're not alone.....

In today's video, I'm going to show you a few different drills that will have you hitting nice, crisp shots on command.

The key is compressing the ball..

You'll learn:

• What you're doing to create chunks or thin shots,
• an entire drill on this "key" to the proper way to visualize your ball impact,
• to stop worrying whether or not your ball is teed up on the perfect tuft of grass, and
• how this all ties in to the Top Speed Golf system.

Let's get started.....

Golf Pros Featured:

Instructors Featured: Clay Ballard    

Video Duration: 12:28

Video Transcription:

We all want to strike down on that golf ball, to be able to make that ball-first contact, and then hit that divot in front of the golf ball that ensures that you can get a clean strike every single time.

Now there’s a few questions that I get from players all the time. I want to make sure that I answer those for you so that you can hit down on the ball without chunking, without thinning, or without losing distance.

Let’s go ahead and get started.

The number one question that I hear when I talk about hitting down, for players who tend to pick the ball clean, and let me see if this is a symptom that you have to know if this is the right video for you.

You’re trying to hit your iron, today here I have a longer iron, I have a 5 iron. But whenever you’re hitting your irons you find yourself kind of standing up out of the shot.

You’re losing your posture, you tend to flip the club a little bit, you tend to get the ball and kind of roll it around to get it just on that one perfect little piece of grass so it’s sitting two millimeters higher than all the rest of the grass, or you feel like you’re not going to be able to hit it very solid.

Maybe you find yourself on some hard pan, or some really tightly mown fairways and you’re thinking, man, this is really tough to hit this. I feel uncomfortable over the shot.

If those are the things that you’re feeling, this is going to be a perfect video for you. What I want to get you guys to feel is when you’re on a really tightly mown fairway, when you’re on a bare lie, you’re thinking oh, great, this is perfect.

Now I don’t have any grass in the way, I can really hit this shot nice and solid and right on the middle of the green just like we see with the pros doing that.

I think that can happen if we get the right idea. The number one question I get with this is, well if I hit down, won’t I chunk?

So a lot of players, and this is a very good question, we try to hit down a little bit more but when we do that, sometimes we hit a little bit behind the golf ball. We’re chopping down a little too steep, and all of a sudden we start to get some chunks.

Now a lot of this comes from a flipping motion from the wrist. So if I do this incorrectly, and I flip with my wrist, we’ll see my left wrist is breaking down, my right wrist is pushing the club forward, and you’ll notice that when I hit the ball, my club shaft is splitting my forearms already.

Now that means that I’m releasing the club too early, and if you’re releasing the club too early and you try to hit down, you probably are going to chunk the ball.

The right way to release the club would be to have a good angle of lag, and to keep this left wrist bowed. What I want you to visualize is what we call the Straight-Line Release in the Top Speed Golf System.

So if I take a ball going down my target line, and I just put a ball about four feet or so in front of the ball that I’m hitting, I want to visualize me releasing to this golf ball out in front.

So I put that right down my target line. Whenever I’m swinging, in my mind’s eye what I’m visualizing is that I’m releasing those wrist angles to this golf ball out in front.

I’m not releasing to the golf ball I’m hitting, and now the club head’s splitting my forearms. I’m getting forward shaft lean here, the club’s leading the way as I come through contact, and it’s not releasing until out in front.

Now one of the things that makes this a lot easier is what we call the Impact Glide. A great way to visualize this is when I get my hands low to the ground, let’s imagine I get my hands low enough and my club head is already on the ground, so this would be crazy extreme exaggerated bow.

Club head already on the ground, tons of forward shaft lean. Well watch my hands. As my hands turn back up and in, that club glides perfectly level with the ground for about a two-foot area there.

This is one of the reasons that the pros are so consistent. They’re getting that club to come down into the ground, and then level out and glide very smoothly with the ground so that they could hit a golf ball anywhere along this area and still hit it pretty solid.

Now the only way to do this is to make sure that first I get low, get my hands low enough to where they can turn up.

If I’m losing my posture and flipping, I don’t really have anywhere for my hands to turn up because if I turn my hands up, I’m going to swing right over top of the golf ball. So that’s the first piece.

I’ve got to get low enough to make this happen, and then I’ve got to feel like I’m rotating everything open to this release ball out in front, that way when I open up my body, my hands and arms can move back up and in to allow this to happen.

That’s a great thing for you guys to practice, that’s something you really want to work on.

So when you’re setting up to the shot, let’s go ahead and hit four or five golf balls feeling like I have my release ball out in front, I get my hands really low, and then I’m driving up and in as I come on through the shot.

Let’s try one out and see how we do. There we go, nice shot. That would be in the right-center of the green.

Nice divot there, we can see that I didn’t chunk that ball at all. It was nice and clean, but I came in very shallow and released on out in front.

Another common question that I get is I can’t stop falling back to the right, what do I do to get my weight to the left so that I can hit down and through this golf ball?

A lot of times players struggle with this because they feel like in their downswing they’re falling back away from the target.

They’re getting farther away from the ball this way, they can’t really reach the golf ball so they kind of have to flip and scoop to get the ball up in the air from back in this position.

Or, everything’s getting so much farther behind the golf ball and the weight’s going so far back that they’re going to chunk behind the golf ball.

If that sounds like you, I have a perfect solution to this and it’s actually the opposite of what most people think.

Most players when they think about keeping left, they try to set up more to the left. They try to get their weight on their left foot.

They try to keep their weight on their left foot in the backswing, and then keep your weight on your left side on the downswing so you can hit down and through.

It actually is more difficult to keep your weight left the entire time. If you want to make sure that you get your weight to your left, we have to first transition our weight to our right side, or our right leg and then shift our weight over to our front foot.

The weight shift is exactly that, it’s a shift. If I load up my right foot, if I feel like I put some pressure in my right foot, it’s going to make it easier to drive off this foot and get al my weight over on my left foot.

If I load up in the backswing on my left side, the natural tendency is you can feel that you’re too far in front of the golf ball.

The natural tendency is now going to be to push off this left leg and then fall back away from the target, and that’s going to get you falling back to the right, having a tough time hitting the ball, and again, chunking when we’re doing this.

A great way to feel this in the golf swing, let’s go ahead and set up with our normal address position, and I want you in your backswing just to lift your left foot up a little bit off the ground.

Then as you come through, go ahead and get everything up to where just the right toe is touching the ground on your right foot. So that would look something like this. A little left foot lift, and then I’m going to shift over to my right foot.

Now that doesn’t mean that I have to sway really far with my body. My body can stay fairly centered over top of the golf ball, just barely to my right side when I do that little heel lift and come on through.

What I don’t want to do is just keep everything way over here left, and then end up pushing off that left foot and falling back.

So do those reps, get that weight shift, and that’s going to help you to hit it a lot more solid. Let’s go ahead and try another one out, and I’m going to feel that same weight shift.

I’m just not going to lift my heel is the only difference. I’m feeling the same sensation, my heel just isn’t going into the air when I’m making my normal swing.

Now one thing I look at, my FlightScope X3 Radar is recording all these shots. It’s measuring how much down I’m hitting in the golf ball. This is a great tool that you can use yourself, too, I’ll show you with the divots here.

But on that shot, my angle of attack was -2.9, and that’s exactly where I want it to be with a 5 iron. It can be anywhere between -2° or -3° all the way up to -5° or -6°, and I’m in a pretty good zone as far as how I’m hitting down.

Now if you don’t have a $20,000 radar just laying around your house, there’s another way that you can check this.

If we’re in normal turf conditions, so if the ground is fairly soft, you’re going to see divots about like this. Kind of a dollar bill sized divot.

If anything I’d like to see maybe just roughing up the turf with the longer irons rather than taking these big divots.

If I’m coming down and I’m chopping through the turf, and I have these big, thick, deep divots on normal turf like this, I’m hitting down too much.

Remember, negative two or three degrees isn’t very much, barely hitting down into the golf ball.

If you imagine a clock face, one minute is about six degrees of difference, so we’re talking half of one minute, that’s how much I’m hitting down into the golf ball. That little tiny bit of an angle is all that I’m hitting down into the turf.

Now if you’re hitting in wet ground, it’s just rained that day, you’re hitting a higher lofted wedge with more loft, a pitching wedge, a 9 iron, something like that, it will dig a little deeper down in there.

You’ll hit slightly more down with those shorter irons, but as a good rule of thumb, a nice dollar bill sized divot is the way to go. If you’re doing that, you know you’re well on track.

Now one of the other questions I get is I just can’t keep my posture. I’m trying to hit down and through this. We’ve talked about how we don’t want to fall back to the right.

But what about the player that’s standing up, if you’re looking from the down the line view, their chest is getting farther away from the golf ball.

Their hips are coming in, and now we have to flip to be able to reach that golf ball and I just can’t get a divot because I feel like I’m standing up and having to flip at the golf ball.

We have some great drills here to stay in your posture. The first one I would do is put this club across your shoulders, and as you go to the top of the backswing, I want to feel like that club is pointing somewhere down toward the ball or just outside the golf ball.

As I come on through the swing, as this would be just after contact when my arms are released in front, I want to feel like that club and my shoulders, again, are pointing toward the golf ball or just outside the golf ball there.

If I start to feel like I lose my posture, now all of a sudden you’ll see how my shoulders are rotating level with the ground instead of being down in their posture.

Now another great tip for this, is to make sure you don’t fire the right arm too early.

What should be happening is, as we make our downswing, our body opens up, our right arm stays bent, and that right arm is releasing through contact, but it doesn’t get fully released until our ball out here in front, our Straight-Line Release position.

So when you’re firing that right arm, imagine that going toward this golf ball out in front rather than me standing up and releasing this right arm way too early, now I’m going to be casting, losing my posture, and flipping at the golf ball.

When I’m visualizing that Straight-Line Release imagine the right arm being a little bent at contact, and that club releasing on out in front.

Let’s go ahead and give that a whirl, that way we can hit down and through, just like we were talking about.

There we go, hit that one absolutely perfect. Winds pushing it a little bit to the right, but I couldn’t hit that one much better with a 5 iron.

Again, if we take a look at my angle of attack, we’re going to see a -5° angle of attack. So again, anywhere -3° to -6° is well within the range to hit fantastic golf shots.

Now for those of you who are members, I don’t want you to stop here. This is a great video going over a lot of the things that I commonly see with players that are having a tough time getting that divot in front.

But it really comes down to the Top Speed Golf System and engraining those motions to make this a lot easier.

Two of the things we talked about here was not falling back to the right in your downswing or not leaning way far to your left. Well that comes in with your Stable Fluid Spine.

If you go to the Instruction tab at the top of the website, you click on your Top Speed Golf System, Stable Fluid Spine section.

From there, if I can get my spine tilted slightly away, I can stay around that spine angle in my backswing and rotate around that spine angle in my downswing, things are going to get a lot simpler.

I’m not going to be falling back, I’m not going to be sliding to the left. That makes it where I set up my spine angle, I rotate around that back and through, golf gets a lot easier when I do that.

So make sure you go to the Stable Fluid Spine section, start working through those drills. We hit some great checkpoints here today, but if you really want to ingrain it to where you don’t have to think about it, you’re going to want to work through those different levels, make it where it’s automatic.

So start on level 1, start doing those reps. Also we talked about the Straight-Line Release here, and getting that golf club to release out in front of the golf ball.

If we can do that, contact is just getting in the way, the golf ball’s just getting in the way.

When I’m releasing to this ball out in front, it makes it so much easier for me to hit down and through, because my mind is visualizing releasing out in front every single time.

It also makes it easier to visualize how I’m going to shift my weight to the left, and what we also talked about with the Impact Glide. So all that is made a lot easier if we’re doing the Straight-Line Release correctly.

So again, go to the Top Speed Golf System, click on the Straight-Line Release, start working through those drills, that’s what’s going to make this stuff happen automatically in your swing.

Best of luck, and I’ll you in the Stable Fluid Spine, and the Straight-Line Release.