Why You Need This: Today, you'll discover "You Won't Believe How Solid You Hit Your Irons with This Drill"

You know the sound a ball makes when a pro takes a shot… and it just flies off the face of the club?

Today, I’ll show you a drill that’ll have you hitting the ball first…

… taking a divot in front…

…and striking the ball solidly, shot after shot…

…all while making that sweet sound as it flies off the face.

Then, I’ll show you how to transfer what you learn from this drill into your own swing–and don’t miss the role your right heel plays, revealed around the 8:30 mark!

 

 

 

 

 

Golf Pros Featured:

Instructors Featured: Clay Ballard    

Video Duration: 11:15

Video Transcription:

Clay: Hey, it's great to have you here today. And in this video, we're going to hit some incredibly solid iron shots and get the feeling of what the pros are doing through contact to be able to hit the ball first, get that dividend front and hit the ball solid time after time after time. Now there's a little trick here I'm gonna lead you through to get that feeling.
And then we're going to back it out into the full swing. And you've probably never done this before, but man, do not skip over this drill. It is unbelievable as far as how good it feels, and then you know how to repeat it. So, I'm going to set an alignment stick up here. Uh, I just like to put the ball maybe 5 or 6 inches outside the stick just so when I swing, I don't accidentally hit the stick.
And it's going to be perpendicular to my target in the distance. Now, when I set up to this, I'm going to go ahead and set up to the golf ball, normal stance. And then I'm going to turn my feet until my left heel is on that stick. And it's angled 45 degrees in front. So this would be parallel with the stick on the line.
This will be perpendicular to it. I'm going 45 in front or toward the edge of this screen. If I'm looking from here now with the right foot, I'm simply going to just line it up. And so my toes are parallel with each other or my toe tips are both 45 degrees in front like that. And you'll notice when I do that, my right kind of ball of my foot is on this stick.
That's when, you know, you have your position for this drill. Correct. Now from there, if my body is in front. All I'm going to do is this is forcing me to get my hips open at contact. So basically if I don't have to rotate my hips at all, if I come down to contact here, my hips are already 45 degrees open like the pros are.
Now the trick to this is when I do that, I don't want to have my shoulders open. I feel like my shoulders are turned until they're facing the target or even the feeling that they're facing even further to the right of the target. So this is the great drill that's going to help you with. You know, you'll hear about the kinematic sequence.
All that means is that the hips are leading and the shoulders are staying back. You hear about lag. You hear about saving up power. You hear about late hit. All of those things are just hips open, shoulders back. And this exaggerates as much as anything. So feet 45 in front. Now, as I set up, I'm going to feel like my shoulders are actually pointing out to the right there.
And then I'm going to make some little swings, feeling like I'm actually swinging inside out. Like I was going to play a draw to get that ball to come back. Now, another little great side benefit of this is if you can hit this draw and get the ball to turn over from right to left, well, when you go back to a normal shot, it is really easy to hit a draw.
So there, nice little draw on the screen, little chip shot. I got a seven iron here. You can use whatever middle iron you want, but I'm just feeling like I swing it inside out. Shoulders are kind of pointing that way. And the nice thing is because my hips are so open. it's going to tend to drag my hands in front.
And that does two things that are really important. Number one, it gets a shaft lean that we need to really compress the ball. So the more you lean the shaft forward, the more loft it takes out of the face. Pros are leaning their shaft for quite a bit at impact to turn their seven iron into a four or five iron.
So not only do you get higher ball speed, you also get the benefit of the hands leading and the clubhead trailing behind, which gives you more consistency. It's that divot in front of the golf ball. It also helps you when you're doing that to get that ball first contact and to feel like you don't have to do anything to try to get the divot in front.
So not only is the divot in front, we're, our body's in a position where it's very difficult. I mean, I'd have a hard time, like even getting the divot to be back behind the golf ball when I'm setting up this way. So it gives you consistency from hands being in front, it gives you more ball speed and more compression.
Cause they get lower loft and it gives you, uh, more consistency because it's ball first and then the ground after that. Now a couple little tips here. A lot of times players may feel like they hit it thin. Well I want to feel like I bend forward a little bit more to really make sure that I'm getting down there and getting the shaft line.
If you have a tendency to stand up out of your posture, this drill may expose that and you start to get some thin shots. Here's a great little work around for that. Do this drill where you choke up to where your fingers are on the steel of the shaft. And now I'm really down there. I'm staying in my posture a lot.
That's going to really keep me from standing up out of it or I'd miss the ball totally. Do a few swings like that. And now all of a sudden when I go back to my normal grip, it's like, wow, it's much easier to stay down there and hit this shot. Another thing I want to feel like here is I want to get my grip correct for what's natural for your body.
Anybody can walk you through some kind of progression that teaches you exactly how to get your logo of the glove perpendicular to the face and try to teach you to get a grip like a certain pro, but here's the real deal. With the left hand, the grip for PJ tour players is anywhere from Colin Markawa, who's one of the weakest on tour like this to guys like Matt Fitzpatrick who have their hands 70 degrees to the right of his like that.
So you can play professional golf. with your grip anywhere from there all the way to there or anywhere in between. I want you to find what works best for you. So let's go back here to this drill. Let's pause at impact. Again, my hips are going to be open, shoulders closed, or shoulders feeling like they're pointing to the right.
At impact, my hands are going to be well in front of the golf ball doing this drill. I'm going to have the face square, so it'd be a straight shot. And then from there, I'm going to go ahead and say, how would I grab this grip that feels comfortable to me? So that feels pretty good to me, and that's going to be my left hand grip.
So I'm a little bit on the stronger or to the right, but fairly close to a neutral grip for me feels the best. You can go a little more this way, or turn your hand over to the right. You can go a little weaker to the left. Whatever feels good for the only thing that matters the most, which is impact. So get correct impact, then let's get the hand and the grip in the correct spot.
Now from there, again, I want to feel like I'm swinging from the inside. Like my club's coming from in here and then my club face is definitely releasing and covering on top of that golf ball. So I don't want to have too many that fade out to the right. I want to feel like I draw these shots back into the left.
There we go. And that was nice and solid little draw. So even these little half swings with this drill in my body so open, I can only take it back to about here. But as I accelerate through, I compress it so well, I get so much ball speed on it, it actually flies pretty far. That flew 135 and it's such a low bullet stinger type shot, it rolled out to 170.
I'm getting a smash factor of 1. 43. Now if you're not familiar with that, that's roughly the smash factor that a lot of people get on their driver, which means this, the ball's coming off this seven iron as hot as it comes off a driver. Whereas normally I would get a lot lower ball speed from that. So basically it's saying that even if I'm not swinging that hard, I'm only swinging 73 miles an hour, a ball speeds, 104 miles an hour, because I'm getting so much into it.
Now, as we start to do that drill and get comfortable with it, hit 10, 15 shots like that until you're hitting those low, solid draws dividend front, all this great stuff. And you'll hear it. The sound will be totally different. It'll sound like the pros you hear on the range when you hit these correctly.
Then I'm gradually going to start to work off of this. So let's take my 45 degrees in front toes and let's start to work them to 30 degrees, 20 degrees, 15 degrees. Obviously you can spread out your feet a little bit as you go more and more toward a normal shot but let's say this is my 15 degree closed angle and at impact I'm going to feel the same things.
Hips open, shoulders back. Hands in front, and I'm hitting a little draw and feeling like I'm de lofting this club quite a bit. The only difference here is I'm going to be able to swing a little bit faster. Because I can make a bigger backswing. So there, that went to 181, nice tight little draw. And I feel like I hit that really nice and solid.
Now finally, as you get to normal swing, you're just going to set up with your normal stance, ball positioned about in the middle of the stance, and then feel like you're getting the exact same body alignments. As you were in those drills, one little small key here, as you start to get a wider stance, your right heel will have to lift up off the ground to really get those hips rotating open for most players.
Unless you're super flexible, you're not going to keep that right heel on the ground. You're going to let it lift up off the ground. Now, a lot of times players are asking me, okay, I get the shaft lean, but how do I know if I'm doing enough of it? Well, shaft lean and straight line release. Go hand in hand together.
So what happens is if I start to cast this club, and I don't have shaft lean Well, look my straight line release or the first time that the club splits my forearms So if you're familiar with the top speed golf system You'll know that the shaft should be leading the way and it shouldn't release and split the forearms meaning my left arm Right arm this club shaft splitting the middle of my forearms until 45 degrees out in front Now what a lot of players will do is they'll release it early The shaft is straight up and down at impact.
It's splitting the forearms. Their straight line release is at the ball. That comes from wanting to hit the ball, feeling like the swing is at the ball, like a pendulum. It is not like a pendulum at all. And in fact, if you study the major winners, you study the greatest players of all time, they are well up here and it's not one or two of them.
It's all of them are well up there is where they're releasing the club. So what I want you to do is to start to pay attention to the straight line release and build in with a couple of tricks that I can show you. How to get that ingrained in your swing so you don't have to think about it anymore. And that's exactly what I do in the Top Speed Golf system.
So we start in level one of the straight line release. If you're a member of Top Speed Golf, I just want you to do the very first video in the straight line release section level one. Now that's going to get you started and you're going to get to get, you're going to get a little bit hooked. You're going to do this drill we did here today.
Today, then after you do that, you're going to go and do just one video from the straight line release. And it's going to start to feel pretty daggone good. And I'm going to challenge you, uh, to keep on chipping away at that until you get to level two. And you'll notice as you start to get to level two, you still have to think about it a little bit, but you're doing pretty good as you work through those drills.
They're nice and solid. Then as you work through level three, it becomes completely automatic where you don't have to think about it at all. And that's the secret to playing great golf. You have to build these things in your swing, bake them into your swing DNA, if you want to call that, to where you don't think about it at all and you just have great fundamentals.
That's going to happen as we get through level three and it gets ingrained into your swing. So this, this drill, you're going to hit it great, but I don't want you to forget in a couple of weeks. Oh yeah. What's that drill that I did. And you're back to doing the same old thing again. I have so many players that do that.
Go to the straight line release right now, do a single drill from it. And if you're a member of top speed golf, I need to log in, go to the instruction tab, straight line release level one. And then you're going to be hooked as you get to level three. I can promise you that we baked in your swing forever.
You're going to hit tremendously solid shots, best of luck. And I'll see you in the straight line release.