Why You're Not Hitting The Ball Far: The Fixes You Need

So I think it's safe to say we would all like more distance for free. Unfortunately that's not always possible. Obviously if we get our maximum potential out of what we're doing is in kind of the technique movements and the strike and kind of the loft in the club we will get the most out of us without adding any extra speed or effort. So today we're trying to edge your speed up a touch by using a few technical things and also some speed training stuff that will help you just increase your speed by a few mile an hour that obviously will give you some more distance. So potentially we can add just one or two mile an hour more speed, club head speed, that can basically give us about six more yards of distance. It's kind of half a club. So the simple stuff when it comes to adding more speed is basically making sure our swing is wide and long. Now as we get older our swing definitely gets shorter. Mine has definitely got shorter. So making sure we try and turn, use the whole of our body, let the whole of our body work, even let this lead heel raise off the ground if we need to to make the swing feel high and wide and handsome. Feeling we get this kind of stretch and rotation shoulder behind the golf ball is the first step for me. The second step for me would be making sure the club is traveling from what we class as an inside arc. That way then we get the forces and torques all working with rotation to maximize the speed that club's going to travel at. Again so we're making the swing wider and longer which making sure we travel from the inside. The third area I want to look at basically is increasing the speed in which we take the club back. Now the research shows the faster we take the club back the more speed we generate on the way down. Now from a rhythm perspective that can mess some people up. So we definitely still want the downswing to be faster than the backswing but if we can increase that backswing with a tiny bit and even doing exercises which I'll discuss today like a kickstart drill where we start forward and get that momentum going to again feel that backswing is bigger and faster that can encourage an overall general speed to our golf swing. I'm also going to share with you today some towel exercises that you can do with your driver that I've seen from a long drive coach Steve Fullinger which I think are really really good which you can start to use again in the garden and even on the practice ground before you hit golf balls to create some resistance to your training that will also help increase speed. And the last thing I want to talk about is far click training and this video is sponsored by USOL Fitness people which have provided me with a bike to showcase parkour training. So I'm going to showcase a little bit of that during the video and thanks to them to sponsor and if you use the discount code provided you'll get 10% off any of their fitness gear. So the first steps we talked about making the backswing faster and bigger and wider. So the drill I want you to do basically is do what I call a kickstart drill. So address the golf balls you would do normally, hover the golf club, move it forward to about a halfway through post impact position. From there drag the club back, make a big turn, let the lead heel come off the ground, try and make the swing feel fast and wide and then hit the golf ball. Doing that swing is going to increase more speed, more rhythm, hopefully bigger movement also. So the contact in these is going to be pretty poor. Let's just try a shot shall we. So hover, forward, big, through. Really thin, pretty straight, but a really thin contact. And again because we're starting with a hover we might find our levels might be a little bit higher off the ground. So the radius of our swing might be higher off the ground. Again all we're trying to do from here is get you moving faster and more. That is it and if we can do that we will increase more club head speed. So that is definitely going to be method one and what I'd like you to probably do with that is probably try and spend 10 minutes doing that on the range session, maybe once a week or maybe even just practice swings doing that. Again if you find you start to get some muscle strain from doing it relax, don't worry about it. There's content more on the technical sides and some of the off-course speed training we can talk about with the kind of towel exercises and also that bike exercise which I'm going to show you later on. The second thing we talked about was making sure we hit from the inside. So if I take my dress position now and we've got this yellow rod in place, I can swing back and miss that rod and then on the downswing I want to feel like the club is traveling underneath that rod and in doing so I'm getting that golf club to travel more behind me. So again that creates more of that rotational arc in the shaft and the club head which will create more speed, more torque and also the club head's got further to travel which means it's in traveling on a wider and a longer journey. So what I'd encourage you to do is do some practice swings where we have this rod in place, see how unusual that feels to you. If you're an over-the-topper this will feel a huge difference. I tend to hit slightly from the inside I definitely start down steeply but then at the bottom of the swing my club definitely pops from the inside at the bottom. So for me the bottom part of this isn't as hard, hitting shots will feel a little bit more strenuous mentally because that's a bit of a fear factor there for sure, but what you can do again is start off with some swings going slowly, just try and see if we can encourage that kind of pattern of movement. Shots should go a little bit down the right hand side, maybe a little bit of draw if you really get the clubface working and releasing correctly, but the key thing is we're going to start to see slight change in shape depending on how you currently swing the golf club, and again the more from this inside the more speed we'll create and the more efficiency we'll create, so it kind of helps both of those things we've talked about in the past and now for that speed. It's also important to note that obviously we release the speed in the right spot, so swinging light objects like speed sticks or alignment rods are creating that speed, so again making sure the body turns behind the ball, accelerates and decelerates to get the speed in the right spot. If we don't decelerate the body no speed is going to go in the right spot. A great way of showcasing this, and I've seen this online, so I've pinched this, is if I move my body and I don't decelerate you'll see that the ball doesn't really fly off my chest very much, whereas if I swing and decelerate you'll see how this ball really flies off my chest, and I really like that particularly for the driver swings. We need to accelerate and decelerate our body fast to get the speed and energy in the clubhead at the right spots, so this little exercise here just using the ball trying to get the body to go turn, fast, decelerate and get it to really spring is what we're looking for. Now the driver, this is the drill again I picked up from the long drive guy, attaching the towel to the bottom of your golf club, making swings, and the added resistance really makes you have to put more force in the right places when you swing, so what he recommended using was the left hand for x mile reps, and the right hand for x mile reps, and then two hands for x mile reps, so you can kind of go 10 with each, and at the moment I've just got this hooked around the clubhead, you can actually tie this on, it won't fly off at all, but for me I've got one of these towels with the little holes in it, I can just pop it around and swing. Now if I swing it fast than I was just doing then obviously there's more chance of it popping off, so I was trying to swing a bit more controlled, so that doesn't happen from the point of view of the video, but again if you wanted to just tie your towel around there that would actually be a safer way of doing this exercise, as in terms of it wouldn't be flying off, so just tying that towel around so it's on the bottom of the club, trying to use that as like a wind drag, an extra force to swing, so we're trying to get the force in the right area, and then after we've done that for a few reps, then putting the ball in play and giving it a bit of a smash. Don't be scared to lose a bit of balance and go for it, again in your practice and have some fun, that's a way of getting your overall speed a little bit faster, just by having a fun 10 ball type of set, where you lose a bit of control, you feel like you're a bit wobbly, then you look at the long drive guys, how they're moving and stepping back all the time, again taking yourself to this high level of speed and out of control is a way of your natural speed just nudging up a touch, that's what I'd encourage you to do. So what you'll see from this little exit of the video is what I call far click training, and it's not me inventing this, but the idea in this is we go basically as fast as we can for a short period of time, and then really slow pace for a period of time, for example it might be 30 seconds on, 30 seconds off, or it might be a minute on, minute off, depends on your capabilities and endurance, and you can do this obviously on any type of fitness equipment, so running machines, XS bike, rowing machines, and this helps develop fast twitch muscles, so instead of having to sit on the bike for hours and hours and hours again, we can be really effective in a few short sets of going fast one minute, slow for one minute for example, for maybe 10 minutes in total. The beauty about this bike also is the screen, the screen's fantastic, we can screen cast our phones on the screen, so we can watch your favourite shows, YouTube videos of what you like, while you're sat there on the bike, this is a great piece of equipment, and again use the discount code to get 10% off. So the keys to this video is really can we get a few more mile an hour of swing speed out yourself, by one moving correctly, but also using some of these exercises here to be a more efficient version of you, can we do some speed training, and my experience of speed training is when you do speed training, it tends to last while you're doing it, so once you stop doing it, it has to become something that becomes a weekly habit, so if you do speed sticks regularly, it will increase your speed, if you use the alignment rod and swing it fast, it will increase your speed, if we change the technique as we turn more, get wider, longer swings, that speed will stay with you forever, so for me it's looking at the technique, what we can do to improve your speed, but also then using some of the small techniques to increase how your body moves, maybe going outside your comfort zone, and then taking that then to your normal golf swing, so it involves your normal golf swing, glide a little bit more speed, you get a little bit more distance, to lower those scores. If you're new to the channel, please click like and subscribe, and share the video, it really helps me, and I appreciate the support, see you back here real soon.