Why You Need This: Today, you'll discover "This "Trunk" Drill Makes it Easy to Stop Rushing Your Downswing"

Ready to change your game and surprise your golf buddies with longer, more accurate shots?

Then trust me, you don’t want to miss today’s video.

I’ll show you how an elephant’s trunk can make you a better golfer.

Yeah, I know how weird that sounds…

Watch today’s lesson to see what it’s all about.

 

 

 

 

Golf Pros Featured:

Instructors Featured: Clay Ballard    

Video Duration: 11:47

Video Transcription:

All right. So if we want to have a nice smooth swing, still get some good power. I had a six iron, 190 yards there. How do we do that? How do we feel like we're not rushing our downswing, but still get the speed? Well, in a minute, I'm going to share with you what I call the elephant trunk drill. It's going to help you to get that perfect sequencing and get this just buttery smooth and transition with a lot of speed.

But before we do that, let's get to the root cause. What's making the downswing quick? Well, if I was to ask a hundred golfers, When does the downswing start? They pretty much all say, when I get to the top of the swing, the downswing starts when my club stops going in the backswing direction, and my club starts in that downswing direction.

My body is also going to start in that downswing direction. My weight is going to shift to the left. I'm going to get over to my front foot. My body is going to start opening up. And they would think of that as happening all at once. So, body, hands, arms, club go in the backswing direction, and then body, hands, arms, club go in the downswing direction.

Well, in reality, that's not the case. You actually want to start your downswing when your hands are just about halfway back or about chest high. Now, what's going to go on there is the body is going to start first. If I wait until I'm all the way at the top of my swing to begin my weight shift to the left, your transition is going to be lightning fast no matter what you do.

The reason is, from the top of the backswing, or from my hands and my club reach the top of the backswing, all the way back down to impact, is only about a quarter of a second. It's simply not enough time to shift your weight to the left and start opening up your hips. So what you want to do, is you want to actually, when your hands are about halfway back, they're still going in this direction back up, I want to begin to shift my weight to the left.

As that's happening, I want to feel like I'm almost pointing my left butt cheek here. I'm almost kind of poking it out toward the target a little bit and getting my weight to the left while the hands are still going back. Then once I'm to the left, it's going to feel like my hands and arms almost pause up here.

Or if they're not completely paused, they're just barely moving. And then after I'm all the way down left, everything's going to swing down nice and smooth. You see, if I wait till I'm up here, then I try to go left and down at the same time, I end up standing up out of my posture. I end up kind of casting that club out, getting a steep swing.

And basically my downswing looks something like, like this, if I'm doing it incorrectly, right? It's really quick versus this is the right way. Weight shift starts to the left as my hands are still going back, smooth transition, and then everything comes through to the finish. So it looks something like this.

And you can see how my weight started to move to the left. My body moved to the left while my arms were still going to the right. My arms look like they're almost hovering there for a second. And I'm still able to create a lot of club head speed when I'm doing that. So let's get to how in the heck are we going to build this into our swing?

Well, that's great, Clay. I can see that the pros are doing that, but how do I get that in my swing? It's the elephant trunk drill. And what I like to think of here is you imagine your head and your chest, your upper body is like the head of an elephant and you got this big trunk kind of dangling down. Now what I'm going to do is I'm just going to shift right and left.

Let's actually get rid of the club for a second and I'm just going to shift right and left like this. I'm not moving much at all. All I'm doing is putting pressure right foot, left foot. I may be moving an inch with my body from right to left. And then from there, I'm going to start to swing my arm as though it was that elephant trunk.

So my weight goes to the right. When my arm is over here, the trunk kind of lags behind and then it swings the trunk over the right side. Then my weight shifts to the left has the trunk is on this side. The trunk is lagging behind and then it swings the trunk back this way. So if I'm doing this, if I just let my arm kind of go free motion here.

That's exactly like what we're doing in the golf swing. So body leads the, the way the trunk gets slung along with it, and when I'm hitting a golf ball, what I'm trying to do is get that trunk, the weight to shift to the left, the trunk's kinda lagging, and then it's slung through the ball. That's that effortless power that you can get right at the ball, rather than feeling like my trunk and my body are going at the same time.

That's also, you know, if you ever feel like you're muscling it with your hands and arms, That's because your body didn't get over here, your momentum didn't start to shift to the left. You were still on your right side and you felt like you had to throw it with the right arm. So you gotta get the momentum going left, the weight going left, everything swinging over there, then that swings the trunk through or the club through.

So let's grab a club now and do the exact same drill with it. Now instead of being, you know, real, real loose with my entire arms and my elbows, I'm gonna imagine the main point that I'm loose is my wrist. So as I start to swing this back and through, I want my wrist to bow. So in the backswing, my wrist is going to angle back, knuckles back toward my elbow.

As my weight gets left, then it's going to swing it on through, uh, sorry, my downswing I mean. In my backswing, my wrist is going to bow the other way and it gets swung that way. So it looks something like this, if I'm doing that correctly. So really loose arms. You can even take both hands with it,

right, and I'm just letting my body swing the club. Once you get that sensation of it being slung or flung, the trunk is flung through contact, that's exactly what we're doing in a real swing. Now, let's go ahead and hit some shots doing this, and I'll give you what I feel when I make this happen, and this is how I keep it kind of effortless.

I want to feel like, as my weight shifts to the right, again, my hands are being kind of pulled back from that. My weight gets to my left side, and I kind of imagine that that trunk is just kind of slinging back. That's that lag that everybody wants. The lag comes from not overusing my upper body and throwing the club, but shifting my weight and opening my body.

Letting that trunk lag behind here. And then as the weight of my club and arms fall down, I'm letting that sling through the target, and I almost feel like my arms get very long, and that trunk would almost fly down the target. If you imagine, you know, you've seen elephants. They, uh, spray water up in the air.

Imagine that you're saving all that water up and then shooting it down the fairway. And everything, all your momentum from your body, your arms, your club, everything is being flung down the fairway. That's a good visual to have. I also like to sometimes think about if there's a paintbrush and I dipped it in paint.

I want to be smooth in this transition. Like I'm not getting any paint off that brush yet. It's all lagging behind. And then as the momentum flings it through there, then all the paint goes down the fairway that way. That's another great visual to get the same kind of feeling. So let's make a few swings really nice and soft.

Weight shift lags behind and then boom, I'm letting everything be flung down the fairway. Let's give that a shot. And I swung when I felt like was. 30, 40% power, 170 yards of the six iron, not too bad for really not feeling like I'm not putting much into it at all. Now I'm going to do that. I have that tempo down.

I'm just going to crank up how far I go back and through, make it a little bit bigger and I'm going to ramp up the effort level. So say that was an effort level of three or four. I'm going to make it go up to a six or a seven. Now my effort level here, as the arms are lagging, as the trunk is being bent back, It's like a one very, very low.

It's not until I'm slinging the club through the ball or slinging that trunk down the fairway slinging the paint down the fairway that I really feel like my effort goes to a six or seven. So light, light, light, very little effort and then boom, right through there is where I feel like I'm really applying the force to the club and slinging everything down the fairway.

Let's go from a three or four up to a six or seven. There we go. Really solid on that one. 203 with a six iron. And again, if you look at the transition, really not rushing very hard in the transition. I'm saving that up for impact. So once I get this down really well, then that's when you're going to see the guys like, uh, uh, Fred Couples, uh, and Ernie Ells.

These guys that look like they're so smooth. That's what they're doing. Super slow up here. And then letting that fling on through contact. I'm going to crank it up to a 10 though. Let's see how much speed we can get. Without ever having to speed up that transition at all. Let's see if I can get a little over 205, 210 with this six iron doing that.

There we go, 212. Not going to do much better than that. Definitely happy with it. You sling the trunk. Instead of the trunk slinging your body, you let your weight shift first, then let everything come on through. You're going to be consistent. You're going to be smooth in transition. You're still going to have a ton of power.

Now, one piece of this that is really important is the shoulder turn, and we touched on this a little bit, but I want to go a little bit further and I want you to ingrain this to where you don't even have to think about it at all. So if I'm picking the club up with my hands and arms, I really can't do what we talked about here.

I have to get my body moving, my body turning in the backswing, changing direction and turning on through, or I can't sling that trunk. And that's what I call the power turn in the top speed golf system. If you're a member. of Top Speed Golf, then all you're gonna do is click the instruction tab, Top Speed Golf System, Power Turn, and we're gonna work on getting that good full turn.

You'll notice that in these swings that I just took, my arms didn't go back very far. I didn't make this big, gigantic, long swing with my hands and my club, but I did make a really good turn with my shoulders, my hips, my knees, and I'm gonna show you exactly how to do that even if you're stiff as a board in the Power Turn section.

So once you get the turn down, Then that allows you to get that trunk swinging with some power. Now, if you haven't got, if you're not used to making a turn, the tendency is to do it all with the arms, and it takes a little bit of practice, and a couple of key, uh, areas that you have to learn some things about, specifically how you move your hips, that I'm going to show you in the power turn section, that make this really easy.

But you'll have to think about it a little bit. Well, that's what level one is for. I've got a few secrets that are going to show you how, once and for all, get this big turn back and through. You'll start hitting it farther, you'll start driving it past your buddies. You'll start feeling like you're not swinging that hard, but the ball is really just taking off and going far.

And the best thing is, once you do this, you're actually going to be relaxed with your body, as you're turning big back and through. That's all in Level 1. Now, you're still going to have to think about it a little bit in Level 1. As you get to Level 2, it starts to become natural. And as you work to Level 3, you won't even have to think about it ever again.

You're going to naturally make this big turn, because you're just going to ingrain it, and you're going to be hitting it 30 or 40 yards farther, feeling like you're swinging with no effort at all. And it's just going to be part of your game forever. So you don't even have to look, think about it or look at your swing.

As soon as you see your swing, if somebody was to video it for you, after you get through level three, it automatically just looks like you have this great turn and sequencing like we talked about here today. And there's zero thinking involved whatsoever. But that's how you really ingrain it. So if you're looking for one tip here or one tip there, that gets you started on day one.

That gets you hitting it better right away. But if you're tired of the tips and you want to bake that into your swing, So that you make that great turn every single time. You swing the trunk every single time without even thinking about it. That's how you do it. So I want to see, I want to see you over in level one of the power turn right now.

Just do one single video and you'll start to get hooked. And I can't wait to see in level three when it's completely ingrained and hear about the great golf that you're playing. So best of luck, head on over to the power turn right now. Just do a single video and I'll see you there.