I've Helped Thousands Of Golfers This Year With This One Simple Drill

All of the players that come in to see me, who can hit the ground consistently, are good ball strikers. But really what we're trying to do to do that is get the arms, hands, club fully extended, get the weight forward, get the weight and hips 80% on the lead side, get the arms, hands, club fully extended. Those are the two pieces we need to be able to do. My trail arm is the one that I need to learn how to straighten and punch. See how when I take my trail arm from 30 degrees bent to fully extended, that gets the club down. Look at me, look at Rory, look at the pros. Notice as I'm getting my weight to my left side. How many times am I missing the ground by the way? None. How many times am I hitting the ground at or past the ball? Every time. Let's go ahead and do one more like that. Matt, I don't know if you can hear it, but that's about as solid as I can hit a ball. Here's the brutal truth. 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You know, over my 20 years of coaching, I've found that all I really need to see with my student is where they get to about two feet past impact, and really it tells me everything I need to know. If my student comes in and they get into good spots past impact, I can tell their general handicap level, how solid they hit the ball, how consistent they are. But if I look past impact and they're in poor spots through the ball, same thing. I often find those are the golfers that continually struggle. In fact, if we learn how to get these two moves I'm going to show you in today's video correct, you could get a lot of other things in your swing wrong or have them off and still be a pretty darn good ball striker. Okay, and the two things that I see really good ball strikers do, I'm going to show you the drills, the feels, and give you a simple test in a minute, but the two things I see really good golfers do is they're able to, in order to hit their iron solid, go from having 50-50 weight distribution in their feet at setup, 50 on the left, 50 on the right, to having 80 plus percent on their lead side at this position past impact. They're able to go from 50-50 to 80-24. That's a big increase of weight and pressure in their lead side. The second thing they're able to do is have the arms, hands, and club fully extended at this position a couple feet past impact. If you look at me here and you're going to look at the pros that we're going to put on the screen, you're going to see basically every pro, every good ball striker is able to get here. Now I don't think that's a coincidence, right? Do you think that's a coincidence? No, right? Our ability to get there is really important, so why not train that in? In fact, I had a recent student come in. I showed him how to do the three-part drill that I'm going to show you, and he got unbelievable results. He was so happy because he went from having like 10 different swing thoughts or things to worry about to only one or two. In fact, at our golf schools, I'll have students come in, and I want you to test this yourself at home or next time before you go hit balls. I'll have students come in and I'll say, hey, can you do me a favor? I've got an eight iron here. Take your setup position and can you consistently get the club head to hit the ground? Now that sounds pretty simple, right? Pretty easy in theory, but you know what I find? All of the players that come in to see me who can hit the ground consistently are good ball strikers. All of the players that are good ball strikers that come see me can hit the ground consistently. The players that come in when I say, hey, can you hit the ground consistently who aren't able to do it? This might be you. Those are the ones that struggle. They struggle with contact, compression, and consistency, and when we teach them how to get the club head to hit the ground consistently, all of a sudden, a lot of things get easier. Now you need to learn how. I'm going to show you how to do that, but really what we're trying to do to do that is get the arms, hands, club fully extended, get the weight forward, get the weight and hips 80% on the lead side, get the arms, hands, club fully extended. Those are the two pieces we need to be able to do. Now the weight forward part, the weight forward part is all about where the club hits the ground. I said test number one is our ability to get the club to hit the ground. In order to get the club to hit the ground, that's the arm extension. I want to be able to get all of my arms and club head as far away from me as possible. Most people, when they're trying to do this, focus a lot on the lead arm, but instead, I'm going to show you and I want you to focus on the trail arm. Why is that? The lead arm really just stays straight-ish the whole time. It's straight-ish at setup. It's straight-ish when you go back. It's straight-ish when you come down, but the trail arm, there's like a good amount of movement we need to be able to do. At setup, my trail arm is bent about 15 degrees. There's a little bit of bend to it. If I do my takeaway, even just to my takeaway, my trail arm is bent like 30 degrees. If this is 180 straight line, it's about 150. It's 30 degrees from straight, which means if my trail arm is bent 30 degrees from here through the ball, I need to straighten my trail arm 30 degrees. My lead arm is already straight. I don't need to straighten it at all. It's already straight. My trail arm is the one that I need to learn how to straighten and punch. See how when I take my trail arm from 30 degrees bent to fully extended, that gets the club down. The second piece of good ball striking is not just your ability to get the club to hit the ground. It's your ability to get the club to hit the ground at or past the golf ball. Before you start hitting balls, make sure you can do this first. A, hit the ground in the right spot. B, make that spot to hit the ground at or past the golf ball. An expert level player would come in and be able to do that every single time. Now, we said the main thing that gets the club head down to hit the ground is your trail arm punch. We'll go through how to do that in a minute. How do we get the low point forward? How do we get where we hit the forward? That's where the weight in the feet comes from. That's where the lower body forward comes from. The shift, the weight transfer, the hips forward. Me going from 50-50 at setup, 50-50 during my backswing, to 80-20. Now, my student that came in that I had at the school wasn't able to hit the ground at all. Really struggled. I didn't give him a golf ball for probably 20 minutes. We're doing this as a two-minute drill, but really, you can do this as long as it needs to. I put a ball in after 20 minutes. When I stood there and I could see him over and over and over, hit the ground, and hit the ground at or past the golf ball. Now, we're going to see with the Swing Coach app here, players like Rory McIlroy and myself throughout getting the lead hip forward. It's a really great way to check yourself to make sure you're doing this correctly. Go download the Swing Coach app if you haven't already. The three-part drill that I had him do, my student, 20 minutes, no ball, but then we put the ball in, and this is the drill I gave him to do that he went home with. Part number one is just swinging from takeaway to takeaway, kind of parallel to parallel, meaning from my setup position. Again, at setup, my weight's about 50-50, and if we show some pros from setup to past the ball, look at the difference of their setup position compared to where they are past the ball. Look at the difference where their hips are. Hips are in the middle of their feet at setup. Where are they past the ball? Forward towards the left ankle, right? Look at where their arms and club are at setup. Look at where they are stretched out past the ball. This is what we're trying to do here. Now, in order to train this in, step one, I want you to take your setup, weight 50-50, which, by the way, my student asked me, if we're starting 50-50 and we want to get to 80, would it be okay if we cheated, he said, a little bit and started a little more on the left, like 60? Well, now I only have to go 20% more forward. From 60 to 80 instead of 50, I said, absolutely okay. He said, well, what about 70? I said, there's no rules. Okay, we got to get to 80. You can make your own judgment as to where you want to start, but let's just say 50-50, my left arm's straight, my right arm's bent about 15 degrees. When I make my takeaway, I'm going to feel as though my weight stays 50-50. There will be a little bit, a little bit of increase in my trail foot, but let's just say, keep it simple, we're staying 50-50. Now, my trail arm's bent 30 degrees. Now, from here through the ball, that follow-through position, I need to straighten my trail arm 30 degrees to where it's fully straight, and I need to get my weight 80% left. Do this with me right now. Get a club or stand up with me, make a little takeaway, 50-50 to start, still 50-50, trail arm's bent, straighten the right arm, weight to the left foot, 50-50, get to a takeaway, 30 degrees, straighten the right arm, weight to the left foot, 80. Now, when we started to hit with these, these first couple of swings looked something like this. Straighten the trail arm, weight to the left foot, 80%, and we hit really solid little shots. I hit my 8-iron 75-ish yards there, and that's what I did with my student. So, we did 20, 20 minutes without a ball for him to be able to hit the ground. I said, I'm not putting a ball in until you can hit the ground three times in a row. She's not doing it. We got all day. Let's take our time. So, we joked around, we stood there, we had a couple sips of water, 20 minutes. Then, we did this drill first for probably another 15 minutes. So, we were punching 8-irons like 75 yards. That's where you should start. When you've got the Swing Coach app on, that'll help you know that your hips are forward enough, okay, but you're going to get the club head to hit the ground, hit the ground at or past the ball. That's what I want you to do. So, level one, club is just parallel to the ground, trail arm's bent 30, straighten the arm, weight to 80% on the left. Now, part two is we're just going to lengthen it out a little bit. So, we're going to take that from takeaway, a club parallel to the ground, to about left arm parallel. Now, weight and the feet stays the same, starting 50-50, feeling like I'm staying 50-50, getting to where? 80-20. But now, the longer I make my backswing, the more my trail arm bends. The more my trail arm bends in the backswing, the more I need to straighten it on the way down. Where do I need to get my trail arm to pass the ball here? Zero bent. Zero. Which means at setup, I said it's bent 15. Okay, I'm throwing some math at you here, stay with me. It's 30 degrees bent during the takeaway. At left arm parallel, now it's about 60 degrees bent. So, my arm's about 120. You guys with me on that? 180-60, 120, okay? So, now I need to straighten my trail arm from here through the ball 60 degrees. This is why I don't like focusing on the lead arm. It's very straight. Focus on the trail arm. 50-50, stay 50-50. My trail arm's bent here about 60 degrees. I'm going to punch the trail arm. I'm going to get my weight forward. Look at me, look at Rory, look at the pros. Notice as I'm getting my weight to my left side, how many times am I missing the None. How many times am I hitting the ground at or past the ball? Every time. Notice as my weight's going to my left, where's my head and upper body? Is it going way forward with it or is that head staying over the ball? What do those pros look like? Huh, head over the ball. So, part two about left arm parallel, I'm going to feel the same thing with the 8-iron. Punch the trail arm, weight to 80% on the left. Really, really solidly struck shot. That's what we're going for here. That 8-iron was probably 130, I'll say for me, about 130 yards. Now, the third part of the drill, after we spent about 30 minutes on that until that arm parallel, was going to full swing. Now, full swing, same thing. Weight in the feet 50-50. I'm going to feel like I stay 50-50 to the top. That's what I'm feeling like, but now my trail arm's bending all the way to 90 degrees. Now, if you're paying attention so far, we know the trail arm's got to go from 90 degrees bent to where? No bend, which means the longer my back swing, the more the trail arm bends, the more I have to focus on straightening it. I'm feeling like I'm punching and straightening the arm at about 2-3 feet past the ball right here. The club head's fully away from me. My hips are forward, so my weight's 80% on my left. Okay, that's a sensation. Make sure your club hits the ground. In fact, I would do one or two practice swings. Make sure you hit the ground every time, then put a ball. If you don't hit ground, no ball. No ground, no ball. Okay, 50-50. I'm going to get to about 90. I'm going to straighten the trail arm, get the weight all the way on my left foot. Let's go ahead and do one more like that. Matt, I don't know if you can hear it, but that's about as solid as I can hit a ball. So, when you're practicing, the test I want you to do before you hit balls, I see this correlation with my students all the time. If you can hit the ground every single time, and you can hit the ground at or past the ball, you're going to be a good ball striker. If you can't do that, odds are very high you're going to struggle with contact consistency in your game. In order to do that, to hit the ground, focus on the trail arm, not the lead arm. Get it to punch fully straight. Always focus on getting your weight to about 80% of your left foot at that point past the ball. The arm straightening will hit the ground. The weight forward will make it forward enough. Okay, if you haven't downloaded the Swing Coach app, that's our AI golf coach. All you got to do is download your phone, pop your phone behind you, start swinging. It does everything else for you. It's going to automatically analyze your swing, identify what your main issues are, give you a scale of 1 to 10, and color-code how important they are. It's going to put it in order for you. It's going to give you auditory feedback every single swing. It's absolutely unbelievable. It's going to try it for free for 14 days, and that's only 15 bucks a month. Put the QR code up here. We'll put the link down below. Go download that now. I'm also going to put another card on the screen for a similar style video, more info on how to get the arms and body through the ball. If you like this, you're going to love that. Thank you guys, as always, for watching. If you want to watch more like this, check out this video next.