Why You Need This: Today, you'll discover "The FASTEST Way To Hit The Ball Then The Turf"

And do chunks and thin shots keep derailing your rounds?

It’s the number one problem I hear golfers struggling with…

…and today, I’ve got a simple drill for you…

…that’ll show you the secret to using your hips (revealed around the 3:15 mark) that I call the “Power U…”

…so that you can make consistent ball-then-turf contact!

 

 

 

 

 

Golf Pros Featured:

Instructors Featured: Clay Ballard    

Video Duration: 12:58

Video Transcription:

It is fantastic to have you here today. I want to talk about the number one problem that I hear golfers have drives you nuts. It's chunks and thin shots. Now, the sign of a fantastic golfer is can I come down and make a swing to where I hit the golf ball first and then take my divot in front of that golf ball.

So what I've done here is I'll put a piece of tape on the ground and what we're going to do is hit shots to where I hit this ball that's just in front of the tape and I don't hit the tape. There you go. That was a nice swing and felt great about that one. Nice little draw one of the first swings of the day hit the seven iron 187 That's pretty good for me.

And it was a nice straight shot. Just a little tiny draw So I'm probably gonna go downhill from here That's about as good as I got But you see that I missed the tape there now What I've done is I've taken about an inch and a half wide piece of tape if you're indoors This is perfect. If you're outdoors, you can take Um, some spray powder that you spray your club face with, spray a line on the ground.

Take a tee and just scrape a line on the ground. Whatever you gotta do, a chalk line, doesn't matter. But I'm gonna put, basically the front of this line, my entire golf ball should be on this side of it or the lead side of it. So if I put my golf ball right on this line, if I hit a good shot, yes I'm hitting ball first, but I'm gonna hit the front half of this tape, I'm gonna, I'm gonna knock it up.

I want the entire golf ball to be on front of the line. So this front edge of the line, My whole golf ball is in front of it. That's how you know that you have the correct spacing. Now, if I throw it way up here, I can still chunk it and not hit the tapes. I don't want to do that. I want the back of the golf ball right on that line.

Now, from here, this video, I don't want to water it down for you. You've probably seen tons of videos on hitting the ball in front. Most of them, in my opinion, are just hitting the highlights. They're not really getting into the details. It's not really what you need to actually fix the problem. I want to give you the good stuff here.

So we're going to break it down. I'm going to show you what you need to do with your body, then your arms, and the club. So you can watch this one video. You can fix the problem forever. As long as you follow the drills that I'm going to lay out here for you. And then we can be done with it. We can move on to the next thing after making clean contact.

So, first let's start. Get rid of the club. The reason for this is your center of mass, or where the low point of my swing is going to be, it's a huge deal where the center of mass of your body is. So if I take, roughly if I'm standing straight up and down here, the middle of my hips, you can imagine this is the outside of my hip, this is the outside of my hip, the middle of my hips, right around belt buckle height, is the center mass of my body.

It's not perfect, but that's a good, good idea for most golf swings at least. Now, when I make a swing, let's say I open my hips, I'm not saying it's where the belt buckle is, I'm saying, imagine the outsides of my hips, find the middle, that's where the center mass is. Now, if I'm falling back, And the center of my mass at, when I'm hitting the golf ball, is behind the golf ball.

So if I dropped a line down, if I held a club and let it hang down from the center of my hips, if that's on this side of that line, I'm toast. Not good. Gonna really struggle to hit it consistently. If I get the center of mass in front of that line, I'm gonna be pretty good. I'm gonna be able to hit that divot in front every single time.

So how do we do that? Well, it's pretty easy once you learn the body movements. What I'm going to do here is just focus on the hips, and you can imagine your femurs come up, they attach to your hip sockets here, and there's kind of like a ball at the head of your hip sockets. So imagine there's two, my two fists are my hip sockets.

As I go back in my backswing, my hips are going to rotate like this. As I start my downswing, they're going to drop lower. This is a big key here, because I've got to get my weight shifting down as it goes to the left. That's going to allow me to get my weight shift to move. It's going to allow everything else we need to have happen here.

It's only a small amount. If it drops a half inch, that's fine. If it drops two inches like Rory McIlroy, that's great. I go to the top, my hips drop, and then they come up the U. So you imagine if there's a golf swing or my hips, they're making a U type motion. So the backswing, they rotate this way. My hips rotate here.

That'd be like, here's my two hip sockets. They do this, and they're kind of going up the U a little bit. And my downswing, as I start my transition, my hips move to the left, they drop down. And then as I rotate open, they're going to come up the other side of the U. So it's this U type motion, that's what your hips should be doing in the golf swing.

If we don't do this U, and we think about them being flat with the ground, It gets real difficult to move your weight because I need to be able to drop to get my weight. It's almost like I'm skiing down a, uh, snowboarding down a hill here. I'm getting to drop. I'm getting my weight to move to the left.

Then I go ahead and turn the corner. If I don't get the dropping motion, if I'm immediately kind of standing up, I'm going to end up kind of going here and then popping back out of it this way. I'm going to have this type of a motion. So imagine that. I like to call it the power U. My hips are doing that in the golf swing.

Just take your hands, put them on your hip sockets, and make that U type motion. And when I finish my swing, I should be stacked up over this front leg. This is critical. I gotta have all my spikes off the turf. I should be able to lift my foot up, and I'm barely falling back. I'm balanced over my front foot.

I have rotated my right shoulder all the way over this front foot. If my right shoulder stays behind the front foot, my weight will be going back. You're going to hit behind the golf ball. As my right shoulder goes through the shot, if it gets even with the front foot or in front of it, like this, like you see with a lot of tour players, it's going to be easy to hit that divot in front.

So do a good 20 reps. If that feels easy for you, you're ready to move on. If it feels a little more involved, a little bit tougher, get another 50, 60 reps, whatever it is. It doesn't have to be strenuous, anything like that. Now, here's the next piece. I need to feel like my weight, when I make impact, because I'm going down that slope, I'm going down the U and then getting to the left, I need to feel like my weight is on my left foot.

So my hips and my weight should be on my left foot. The last body position I want you to get in here, my nose just has to be behind the golf ball any amount. That's the confusing thing. People think I have to be behind the golf ball. And that must be my weights behind the golf ball. My weight shifts to the left.

It's just my nose and my upper body is behind the golf ball. That's what allows me to come from the inside. So if I do the first part right, I get my weight to the left, but I get my head up here to the left, I'm going to come down over the top, I'm going to tend to cut across it and slice it. If I get my weight to the left, and I keep my nose slightly behind the golf ball at impact, I'm going to be able to come from the inside and hit the ball really nicely.

Now, from here, it's not really all that much more complicated than realizing that the bottom of my divot is typically going to be about four inches in front of the golf ball. So I want to have contact with the golf ball here. The low point of my divot, or the lowest point of the, of the divot that I make after the ball is going to be four inches in front.

So it's way up here. So you gotta have that visual right of I'm gonna hit the golf ball and have it in front. If we don't have that visual right, and we're thinking about the low point being at the golf ball, we're going to end up hitting this tape. Because you imagine if my divot is like this, let's say here's flat ground, here's the start of my divot, here's the end of my divot, this is kind of the low point here.

Well if I imagine that the low point is at the golf ball, well, I'm starting to hit behind the golf ball, it's no good. So I have to pull my divot in front of the golf ball, the low point's about four inches in front, with a good quality tour player. Now to make that happen, This is the second most important thing.

The hands have to be in front of the golf ball at impact. That's, that's really as simple as it has to be. If I get my weight to shift to the left, like we just talked about, and I get my hands, so this would be my hands, or the club shaft, straight up and down. If my hands are here, the low point is going to be at the golf ball, and when I swing, I'm going to hit this tape.

I want my hands to be in front of the golf ball. So if you can imagine, I'm going, shifting to the left, I'm pausing at impact, I'm going to set my club down there, I'm going to have both hands in front of the golf ball. So the back of my right hand should be in front of that golf ball on this side of it.

That's how I know I'm doing the right amount. That's a rule of thumb. The real number there is going to be about 30 percent of your loft is the amount of shaffling you have. So if a six iron, I'm hitting a seven iron here, it should have 32 degrees of loft, something like that. I'm going to take 30 percent of that off.

So I'm going to take a little over 10 degrees of shaft lean or 11 degrees of shaft lean. I'm going to be, this is zero degrees of shaft lean. This is 10 or 12 degrees of shaft lean. That's where my hands will be at the six iron. If I had a sand wedge or a lob wedge, let's say a 60 degree wedge, 30 percent of that is 20 degrees.

So as I go higher and higher loft, I have to get more and more shaft lean. And that's why you're going to see the pros leaning a sand wedge or a lob wedge forward 15 to 20 degrees at impact. With a six iron or seven iron, it's going to be 10 or 11 degrees with a three iron that only has 20 degrees loft.

It's only going to be five or six degrees, but with every single club, every single one of them that you hit off the ground, even three wood, you're going to have your hands in front. If we hit a three wood and we try to lift it up in the air, we get this shaft vertical. We'll get our center mass behind it.

We're going to be toast. The three woods designed with enough loft on there to get the ball up in the air. So even with my hands in front. It's going to have plenty of loft to get the, the ball launching up in there. So if I do this correctly, I should be able to get that power U and I want you to go ahead after you do the power U get about 15, 20 swings, where you just put down that piece of tape, scrape a line on the driving range with the tee, put a chalk line down, whatever you need to do, 15 or 20 swings, getting the divot in front of that line.

Don't worry about the hands. Then another 15, 20 swings. Feeling like my hands get in front of the line as I make impact. You'll see how that makes it even easier. Big key here, finishing on this front foot, right shoulder has to get in front of that right, in front of this lead foot or I'm going to struggle there.

Then we're ready to hit the golf ball. Now, if we start to slice it a little bit, that can be normal, just make sure your head stays back, and you're coming from the inside, and you're going to be able to hit some great shots. So here, watch my hips, watch my hands. There we go. Not going to hit one a whole lot better than that.

Actually picked up a few yards, got loosened up there. 192, the seven iron for the carry. That's pretty daggone good. And my club path, zero 0. 9 degrees dividend front. You can't overpractice this drill. You literally couldn't overpractice it. Put this piece of tape down in your living room. Make as many swings as you can every single day.

And you're going to thank me later for this because you're going to hit a lot of good golf shots. Now, the next best thing, the next best step for this is to go to the straight line release. So if you remember top speed golf, go to the instruction tab, top speed golf system, straight line release. And that's the same thing we worked on here today.

We want those hands in front of the golf ball at impact. That way when we release the club it's out here. That's going to get that divot in front every single time. Power turn, same thing, getting that shoulder to finish over that front foot. That's the second half of the power turn in the top speed golf system, the lag section.

So getting more lag in the downswing allows you to get those hands in front and hit the golf ball and then have the divot in front. The entire system works hand in hand with what we talked about here today, but I'd recommend going to the straight line release. And starting there, I'm going to challenge you to do a single video from level one of the straight line release.

If you do that, you're going to start to pull your divots in front, you're going to play a whole lot better golf. As you go to level two, you're going to start to ingrain it, and as you go through level three, it's going to become completely natural. So, do me a favor, don't do a few videos, start hitting it better, be happy with that, and then forget about the straight line release.

Because what's going to happen is you're going to fall back into old habits. Go through the three levels, it can really, as crazy as it sounds, golf can really be that simple. If you go through the three levels and you do the drills, and you complete them just as I lay them out, you're going to have that divot in front every single time, and you're never going to have to think about it again.

That's what I want you to do, I want you to go through this, go through the three levels, and then never see my face again. Just say, hey, I'm hitting it great, it's completely ingrained, I don't have to think about my technique at all, and I never have to take another lesson in my life. That's what you can do.

If you go through the full top speed golf system, you go through the drills, he get it grained once for all once and for all. And then we don't have to think about it anymore, unless it's just to try to get even better than that. So I get down to a low single digit or a scratch golfer and I want to get even better.

We may want to take a few more lessons to iron out the last little bit, but this is going to get you 90 percent of the way there. So best of luck. I'll see you in the straight line release. Let's go and get started.