Why You Need This: In this video, "To Drive Long or Straight in Golf | Which is Better?"...

You'll finally discover if you should focus on distance or accuracy.

First, you'll get a discussion on PGA Tour stats.

The stats are crystal clear for tour players.

I took a look at the 2015 stats, and the players that hit it longer made tons more money.

In fact, a lot of the shorter, and more accurate hitters, struggled to keep their tour card.

Think about it...

Would you rather be 170 yards to the hole in the rough...

Or would you choose to be 210 yards away in the fairway?

For tour players, the answer is easy...

The closer the better.

The same applies to the rest of us.

If you're playing a long par 4 (let's assume 450 yards).

A long hitter may punch it out 300 yards and be left with a 150 yard approach shot.

A short hitter with a much lower swing speed may hit it 240 yards and be left with a 210-yard approach shot.

Given a choice, I'd bet you'd rather be 150 yards out in the rough that be in the fairway with a long 210-yard 2nd shot.

Clearly, if you have really good swing speed but you're so wild that 9 out of 10 of your drives are out of bounds, then you should concentrate on your accuracy.

But the vast majority of players should focus on improving their swing speeds and getting more distance.

In this video, you'll learn some great tips to get more distance on your drives.

You'll discover...

• How to make a full power turn, and
• How to swing your driver with a higher launch angle.

Watch now to get more distance on your drives!

Golf Pros Featured:

Instructors Featured: Clay Ballard    

Video Duration: 6:45

Video Transcription:

Hi guys, welcome back. Great to have you here today. I’ve got a great question, I had a couple questions on the website about this recently, and it’s talking about what is better, to be straighter or to be longer?

Probably one of the most common things that I get requests is how can I be more consistent and how can I hit the ball straighter?

One of the cool facts, one of the cool things on the PGA Tour now is that they have all these statistics and shows you every thing that the top pros are doing.

If you go back and you look at from PGATour.com, go to 2015, this is one of the most clear-cut pieces of information talking about is it better to drive it straighter or is it better to drive it longer?

If you look at 2015, your top four in driving distance were Bubba Watson, Dustin Johnson, Jason Day, and I believe it was either Rory McIlroy or Adam Scott.

There you have those four players, they were averaging the four longest on tour. I believe all those guys were averaging over 310 yards off the tee.

Combined, those guys made about $23 million that year. Tons of money, and three out of those four guys I believe were in the top six or seven in the world.

The longest hitters were also the best players in the world, in general. If you went on down that list and you looked at the fifth, sixth, seventh guys, those are all highly ranked on the PGA Tour.

Now let’s look at the straightest guys on the PGA Tour, the guys that hit almost all the fairways. Those guys in general were averaging much slower swing speed, and that’s one of the reasons that they kept it in the fairway a little bit easier, or a little bit more.

You look at the top four in driving accuracy and combined they only made about $2 million that entire year, which is not very good. You have to make about $800,00 or $900,000 just to keep your PGA Tour card.

A couple of those guys would have lost their Tour card if it wasn’t for previous exemptions. If you’re looking at, at least for the PGA Tour, the farther you can drive it, the longer you can drive it, the lower your handicap’s going to be, the more money you’re going to make.

It applies to the average golfer, too. If you’re out there and you’re struggling with distance, the number one thing you could do to lower your handicap – and there’s tons and tons of stats on this – is that as we increase our driver swing speed, our handicap goes down.

There’s like a .97 correlation, so really, really strong correlation with this. The faster you can swing, the lower your handicap’s going to be.

That said, I want you to get a little bit out of your comfort zone today when you go out and practice. I’m going to give you a couple tips here, and when you go to the range, I want you to hit about 10 or 15 balls absolutely as hard as you can hit them.

Now it doesn’t necessarily mean that we have to put out tons of effort and not get the swing speed, I want your swing speed to increase a little bit.

Let’s make some practice swings first, then let’s take it and hit a few balls doing this.

Now the biggest thing to keep in mind is when we’re talking about swing speed, maximum swing speed, it’s how much torque can I put into this handle.

So how much power, how much force can I put in to the handle of the club throughout the swing and in the right spots of the swing. That’s all that creates club head speed.

It’s just what I’m doing right here into the handle is what creates the speed in the club. There’s nothing else that’s going to react to that.

It doesn’t matter if you’re seven foot tall, it doesn’t matter if you’re 300 pounds or 100 pounds. All it is, is how much force can I put into this handle here.

So the size of the players makes no difference, that’s why you see Rory McIlroy also one of the longer drivers on Tour, he’s only 5’10” or so.

Two things I want you to focus on with this. Number one, our Power Turn that we talk about in the Top Speed Golf System.

What want you guys to really focus on in the backswing, is getting a good, full turn. So if you put a club across your shoulders, if we’re making practice swings, I want that club to point all the way back hereto my right foot.

Now go ahead and lift your left heel. A lot of players out there that are members of the website, maybe not have the flexibility of Tour players. I don’t have the flexibility of Tour players, and that’s completely fine.

I’m going to go ahead and lift my left heel a little bit. If I don’t lift my heel I can get to there. If I lift my left heel, I can go a little bit extra.

Also, here’s another tip that you may not have heard before. Your right leg, there’s a lot of information out there saying let’s keep this right leg really flexed, let’s load into the right leg, let’s keep that knee pointing perfectly straight forward throughout my backswing.

So I’m going to keep that knee locked in. What happens there, is that gets really tight on the outside of your hip. Here’s what I want you to do to try this out.

Keep your knee facing perfectly toward the golf ball. Some people even say to kick that knee in like that.

Now as I turn back, you’re going to notice that you feel a lot of tension in the outside of your right hip, and in your hip socket there as you’re trying to keep this knee forward.

As I’m keeping the flex in my knee, as I’m keeping that knee there, my hips aren’t allowed to rotate. I want you to go ahead and release a little bit of that tension, and let that right knee straighten just a little bit.

Now it’s still going to keep some flex, and overall my knee is going to be facing overall in the front position.

As I’m there, my knee is rotated a little bit out to the right, but I’m not doing this. I’m not letting my knees slide all over the place, or letting my lower body kind of do that.

I am keeping it overall forward, but I’m going to let that leg straighten out a little bit. Now watch what happens when I do that.

Here’s both feet on the ground, there’s the most turn I can get. I’m going to lift my left heel onto there. I’m going to straighten my right leg a little bit, and now I’m going even farther than that, so big-time swing speed.

Then finally, let’s work on getting the club to work up through the golf ball. If we’re looking from this view, the grip of my club, I’ve got some good lag in this golf club head.

As my grip starts to turn back up and to the left, that club is going to accelerate through the golf ball.

So coming through contact, the idea I want to have is I want to turn this grip back up as hard as I can. So I’m going to be pushing into the ground with my left leg, my left hip, my left shoulder.

All that’s going to be moving upward to let this club really whip on through there. You can feel that as you’re swinging. If you have a lot of lag, the harder I turn that up, the more that club head is going to whip through.

Let’s take those three keys, and let’s try to hit 10 of the hardest drives you can hit. Once you’ve hit those really hard ones, we can always tone it back down, make some more controlled swings and work on our accuracy, but let’s try to boost up our swing speed.

So we’re going to let the left heel lift a little bit. Big shoulder turn, the right leg might straighten a little bit, then I’m just going to turn this club head up as hard as I can.

I recommend focusing on each one of those tips for two or three swings and then moving to the next one.

So I’m going to try to put all those together, really rip the ball as hard as I can on this one.

All right guys, best of luck. May even have lost my balance a little bit on that, but that’s OK, I’m trying to swing as hard as I can. We can get our balance back on those future swings, this one is all about pure swing speed.

So give it a rip. If you hit it all over the place on the driving range, that’s OK. We can always tone it down, but we’ve got to try to get that swing speed up to lower our handicap and shoot some better scores.

See you guys soon.