Why You Need This: Today, you'll discover "Why is Lag SO HARD For Golfers? | Plus the Easy Fix"

If you’re trying to add distance, you’ve no doubt heard that you need to learn how to create lag in your downswing.

But, you might be wondering…

How much lag? And how do I do it?

In today’s video, I’ll reveal the secret to lagging the club (revealed around the 3:40 mark)...

…Plus, I’ll show you how to use your right thigh as a benchmark to doing this correctly.

This will make it much easier to create lag and get the clubhead speed and distance that comes as a result!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Golf Pros Featured:

Instructors Featured: Clay Ballard    

Video Duration: 10:24

Video Transcription:

All right. Felt like I made a pretty effortless swing. I got my seven iron here. That ball carried 189 yards. As about as good as I can hit one, to be honest. And you can only do that. It can only look fairly smooth if you have lag in the downswing and you release that out in front. Now, you've heard that before.

You wouldn't be watching this video if this is brand new to you. You've probably heard it tons of times, and there's one thing that I think people are leaving out that until you get this piece right, You can try to force lag more and more and more and it'll just never happen. You turn on the video camera, you videotape your swing, you feel like you got an angle like this, you look at it on camera and we're casting out like that and dag on.

Is it frustrating? Right? So let's go ahead and, and get that rid of that. I'm gonna show you, once you understand this one piece that I'll get to later on in this video. You'll realize why it's been so tough for you to get lag in the past, and we'll get you lagging it. I'm gonna work you through a step-by-step process to get there.

So first, what is lag? How much lag should we actually have in the golf swing? Well, I measured years and years I spent using PGA tour player examples when I would give online lessons and I gave. Uh, probably upwards of 10,000 online lessons, right? So I just saw all these pros and I started to realize over the years that they're basically doing the same handful of things, the exact same.

And I took 50 major winners, uh, from the year 2000 on, and I measured their swings and these things that I saw them doing over and over again. And these were the things that I saw of recreational players not doing. Uh, so these were the major differences between great players and players that were struggling a little bit.

And one of the things I came up with, which is one of the five real fundamentals of the golf swing is what I call top speed lag. And what this means is when the left arm is parallel to the ground in the downswing, this club should be at about a 65 degree angle or tighter than that. Now this will be 90 degrees club straight up and down.

This would be zero degrees, which would be impossible unless you have, you know, super flexible wrist. This would be 45, so 65 would be here. I wanna be at least at this angle or tighter. And that's what I saw with the best players in the world. And that's what I saw with even best recreational players. You take the best player at your club, you videotape his swing, I guarantee you he's hitting an angle just like that.

Now as you come on down, when you release this club. So when does the club split the forearms? So here I'd still have lag. When I release it or the club splitting my forearms here, the pros released this angle at about 40 degrees in front. That's what I call the straight line release. And the reason, that's another fundamental, those are two of the fundamentals of the the five that the pros do, that recreational golfers don't.

Why are those important? Why do we even care if we hit those angles? Well, the reason is that's telling me that we're moving the club efficiently, that we can let this club's momentum work for us. And get some pretty good distance without having to feel like we swing really hard. If we do the opposite of that and we start to cast, now, we're muscling it.

It's all hands and arms and there's no way, no matter how much you practice, to get the face to square up consistently or to get your divots to be consistent. And unless we have that lag and then we release it out in front. Now, one final little pro tip that you may not have seen before. Uh, when I measure those pros, another great way, a great checkpoint.

This is probably. The best of the best. If you have a decent high speed setting on your camera, this is a good one to check when the club is in the middle of your stance. I wanna see my club parallel, or excuse me, when your ball's in the middle of your stance. I wanna see my club parallel with the ground when my hands are roughly in front of my right thigh.

Most players that I see the club is way down there. Now, why is it so daggone hard? Let's get to that secret that I hinted at earlier. It has more to do with momentum. Than it does with the angle of the club. You see, if I start rushing my downswing, which I see a lot of players do, and I go really hard from the top, and you can do this with one hand, just grab the club with one hand anywhere comfortable, and I want you to swing as hard as you can from the top or jerk down on the club as fast as you can as you start the downswing and all of a sudden what, once it happened, it gets a little lag at the start, and then all of a sudden you can't keep that acceleration up.

So I'm accelerating. I'm accelerating, and as you accelerate, the club wants to lag behind, but you can't keep accelerating at that same rate. It's just impossible. You're not strong enough. No one's strong enough to do it. So the hands naturally start to slow down. And when that happens, the club overtakes the hands and it ends up being a flip.

Now the opposite of this would be take that same thing, let's go ahead and start down really slow, and then let's feel like we go really quickly through impact. So I'm gonna really exaggerate so you can feel it, right? It'll be something like that. So I went slow, slow, slow. And then as I start to accelerate with the hands, you notice how this club wanted to kick back that way.

So if you're struggling, you're trying as hard as you can, and you want the club to look like this. But you look at it on camera and it looks like that the reason is you're accelerating too hard from the top, and the club is always gonna overtake the hands. You'd have to have the strength of 10 people to be able to overcome the amount of force that gets built up in this club if you jerk it from the top.

So the real key here is to start out very slow in the downswing, and then feel as though we're accelerating all the way through contact. Now in reality, it's a little bit different. We're not gonna get into the. True biomechanics of this. But if you have the feeling that I'm gonna teach you here, you will get more lag.

So what I want you to feel here is we're gonna go a little half back swing, and I want you to almost feel like the club falls down until my hands get in front of the my right thigh. Then from there, I'm gonna really accelerate through to a full finish. So let's gonna look something like this, right? So I'm going really slow, right?

And then I'm speeding up. Through contact. So slow, slow, slow. And then I speed up. What it feels like to me is a club wants to do this through contact. It wants to lag behind and I feel like the club's almost, um, you know, the face is almost just got a lot of force built up in it and it's just wanting to stay really stable because it's way behind my hands.

So do the, about five or 10 of those really slow, then accelerating through. If you videotape yourself as you're doing that, you're gonna notice that the club looks much more like this than you're used to, especially if you're usually like that. So we're gonna do those five swings and we're gonna gradually build it higher and higher.

And I'm gonna add a couple more tips in. Number one would be, as I swing back, and I'm going a little farther, I don't wanna pick this club up. There's a natural reaction when you pick the club up to immediately wanna start throwing it and casting it. As we do this little drill nice and wide, as you're going back, don't feel like you rush it.

Give yourself a time to make a few mistakes on it. Just you'll get the hang of it if you stick with it. Don't feel the pressure to get it on the very first try. Just let it go nice and wide, smooth, and then feel like you're accelerating through contact. So just like this, now we can really see that club almost wants to go that way.

So it's wide, it sets late. And then it releases out in front. You can almost feel that same thing with one hand like that as they go farther and farther back. Again. Another mistake that I see people do is they fall on the back foot and then they can't even reach the ball without casting it and flipping it.

So what I want you to feel like you do is let your right knee as you're coming through contact, as those hands are accelerating on through, feel like your right knee comes forward and almost kisses your left knee. That's gonna force you to get to your left side. It's gonna force you to finish really strong through there and finish your swing so that you don't fall on your back foot.

So we're gonna go ahead and try that out. Another little half swing, nice and wide, really slow. Let the knee come on through. And that's gonna, if you look at that on video, you're gonna see right away that club's got a lot more lag in it's releasing out in front. So gradually build through that. Once you've done a good 15, 20 reps.

And you've built from very small and slow at the bottom to a little bit longer and a little bit longer until you're all the way up to a full swing. Then we're gonna introduce the golf ball again. The same sensation should be there really wide on the back swing, very slow to start the downswing. And then I'm gonna feel like my, my club is lagging way behind as I accelerate through contact.

And remember, let that knee come forward so that we can finish the swing. We don't fall back on that right foot, in which case we'd have to cast. All right, so let's go ahead and try it again here. There we go. And I really felt that club wanting to lay back. And you can see my distance went up, you know, had a few more practice swings, got a little bit looser, but 204 yards with a seven iron.

That's probably about as far as I've ever hit one on this machine. So doing those drills, it's even great to do 'em myself. Because it just makes you so solid through contact. The ball just explodes off the face. Now there's another piece to this that I think would be the perfect next step. You see when we rush from the top and we start casting the club, almost every single player I see that's casting is also, you know, pulling down this club and getting it really steep or vertical with a shaft.

The players I see with a lot of lag are actually shallowing it out. There's actually something I didn't talk about in this video, but it's very important here to realize is if I'm going toward this direction, When I lag this club, if I have it vertical like this or straight up and down, if I go change directions, it doesn't look like very much lag.

I'm gonna keep this same wrist angle and I'm gonna flatten it out, and all of a sudden it looks like a lot more lag. All I'm doing there, I'm not increasing the angle this way to get more lagged. All I'm doing is showing you when I have it from steep to shallowed out or more on plane. You can see how that makes the perception.

Of lag a lot different. So the next step to do is to check to make sure that you're getting the club shallow and if you're not, learn to shallow in a single practice session. And that's exactly what the 20 minute shallowing fix is gonna do for you. So if you remember top speed golf, go to instruction tab, top speed golf system, then the 20 minute shallowing fix there, you can check to see how much lag you have.

And if you don't have as much as you want or or how shallow you're getting, you're not getting as shallow as you want. I have a few steps that you can do in one range session. That I guarantee will get you to hit the most solid shots of your life and shallow it on every single swing. So check the shallowing next.

Head on over the 20 minute Shallowing Fix. I can't wait to see you there.