(club hitting ball) – Hi, Adam Bazalgette here,
founder of Scratch Golf Academy. Today's subject, how to shallow the club and hit longer drives. I'll show you what that means. It's a term you've probably
heard a fair bit of. I'm gonna give you a couple
drills that I think will really help you put it into practice. And if you do it, you
will hit longer drives. (intense music) Well just briefly, if
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if you would please, and let's have a look
at this whole business of shallowing the club.
(club hitting ball) So, what is this business
of shallowing the club? What do we mean by that? It's pretty important,
let's have a look at the pros first, then we'll
start to break it down. – There's Ricky Fowler on the left, Charles Howell on the right, two great drivers of the ball. What we call shallowing the club, let's look at both these
guys and their backswing. If you look at the plane there which is pretty darn good on both of them, in each case the club comes
done in a flatter plane. Now, I've picked two
guys that do this a good, good deal to make it more obvious, but you can see it comes
down in a flatter plane, and when the club's coming
in more level to the ground and flat that way, that's just a term we, or that's a term some
of us are being shallow.
Steep is coming down this way. So, not every great
player gets it down quite as shallow as they do or
quite as flat as they do. Some players, let's take Rory McIlroy, trade a, most people trade
their driving ability with his. If you look at Rory on the way back there, and you look at him on the way down, it really isn't dramatically different. It's slightly, slightly more behind him, but the angle of the
shaft isn't different, but that's okay, it's
perfectly, perfectly acceptable and in a nice approach to the ball. Well out here, the beautiful
mediterra 15th hole on the north course,
you'll need to get the club in a good position to
hit a decent drive from the back tees or you're
gonna be losing the ball. But let's have a look here for a second why does shallowing the club
help you hit it further? Well two things, really. First off, and let's not
even call this a reason, that's the design of the club. You start redesigning
the club in the downswing and swing it on a totally different angle, probably not gonna be that good.
But here's the two reasons
why getting that driver nice and shallow builds more distance. Number one, when the
club is further back here on the downswing, it is three dimensional, it is further from the golf
ball than when it's up here. This isn't as much distance,
so the longer you can keep it back there, the
more whip and more speed it has as it comes in. And number two, now picture
doing this with your hand. If there was a coffee
table in front of you, if you come from the side of your body, you sweep and go more up and out.
If you come from out
here, you hit more down, so you need to hit a
driver level to slightly up there if you're gonna really maximize your distance. That is almost impossible
to do when you're steep, the club goes down too much on the ball. So those are our two big
reasons, compelling reasons I might add. Let's have a look at our
first drill then that I think might help you
get the feel for it. So, believe it or not,
here's our first drill, hitting some balls off
your knees with a driver.
If you want, you get a
towel underneath you so you keep your knees clean. Let me whack one here
and I'll show you from this angle why this is
so helpful and how to translate it to your regular swing here. Let's have a little rehearsal. (club hitting ball) Decent shot, let's have a look. So, why does this foster the
feeling of being shallow? Well, my hands are so
near the ground if I don't keep everything pretty much
in a circle fairly close to the ground, not gonna
hit two good shots in a row, lucky to hit two good shots out of 50.
So, you can start to get
this feeling of this almost circular swing around your
body, and kind of feed off that. Now, let's have a go here
and then we'll talk about how to apply a little bit. It's an old ball by the way. It's about a one in 20 chance I'm gonna be finding this one, but let's have go. (club hitting ball) That was a good drive right there, it's not gonna make it over. The feeling, though,
you don't wanna hit like a lot of shots like that in a row. You wanna do that, then
maybe make a practice swing about belt-high to feel it, and
then just drop it down here. And again, you'll start to get
the sense the club's coming in much more level to the ground. You can even do this at the
house or in the basement or something. Get the towel down, work your way up, swing from here then there,
and just go back and forth until you start to build some feel.
It's kind of fun as well. So our second drill, and
this is much a proof to you that you can do it as it is a drill. Take a towel, grip it with
both hands in this instance, and just make a little golf swing there, not super hard to do, what's the big deal. Well, play around, see
if you can hit yourself behind the legs, see if
you can take it back and swing over there.
Of course you could, of
course you could swing this way steep. It's as easy to do that with a golf club. Now listen, if you lock in
and mentally you've gotta hit a good shot and solid
contact, you can forget it. You won't change it that much, you have to playfully relax, allow
for some silly hits, maybe just swing at the
tee for a couple minutes. The one caveat to this
drill is if you're gonna swing more there to feel a shallow swing, don't whip the club back there, take it back correctly, take it back normally, then just swing one out in that direction. Play around with the
golf club a little bit without the ball first, then with it.
Add some speed, you can
shift this thing around. Now sometimes, let me just say this, when you start to feel
something really new and change something, you
can get a bad mixture of some of your old
tendencies with some of the new feelings in the golf club,
and run into some problems. Let's have a look at a pro,
and look at the body motions, and then we'll show you how
to combat that pit fall. So in my experience of
working with golfers, the golfers that get
steep on their downswing, which is many players, usually the steepness leads either to some raising or sometimes
some excessive side bend this way, just trying to
mitigate it a little bit.
So sometimes when a
player first starts to get the feeling for how the
club should shallow out, or at least stay on a fairly level plane, then they have a little
bit too much of that old backup body motion, and
they start to dropkick shots way back there. It's okay for a little
while when you're just trying to get used to it, but most of time, let's say this, most of the time it's not
that they're too shallow, it's that their body's out of position.
So, the cure I would say for that, don't back off on the shallowness. Now obviously I can't see you on film, but I'm assuming this, don't back off on getting shallow. Just feel like once that
club's gotten shallow, it isn't easy at high
speed to feel exactly where your body is or re-manipulate it without losing flow in the swing. So once it's shallow, just
get the feeling that you, the bottom section of your
swing is chased around, and chased more level to the
ground and less up this way just a little bit 'til
you get the feel of it. So, there's my shallow feeling. And again, you gotta release a driver, you can't just place it
in position and hit it any good at all. So, once this is here,
again, just feel like you can chase that club through a little bit until such times as you're
getting fairly clean hits and you're not drop kicking it. So, let's see how I do.
(club hitting ball) Well, I hit it in the hill, but it's a, I didn't drop kick it,
it's a reasonable hit. So, there's Adam Scott,
driver extraordinaire. Let's look at him first hitting maybe, it looks like a wedge or a niner on there, on the picture on the right. And let's look at him as he comes down pretty much, back him
up just a touch there, pretty much straight up the left side. Let's check it out with the driver of course he's a little
bit more behind the ball at address. And as he goes to hit it
there, hips not so different, upper body definitely a little
bit more back on the ball.
This helps him hit it a little
bit more with an upward hit, but it's not dramatically
different, and if we look at him at the finish,
or close to the finish, let's say, we'll get them
both close to the finish. They are, again, a little but different, but not dramatically different. So, subtle differences for
the driver, not drastic. Well, I hope you found that helpful. Would really appreciate
it if you liked the video, that you hit the thumbs up button. Again, helps build some
momentum for the channel, helps us bring you content. Hope these are helpful thoughts to you. Feel free to put any
questions or comments, if you'd like, down in the
question box down there. I'll get to those. And of course, you know, the
big theme here is shallowing the club, it'll get you more distance. Hope these thoughts will help you. (funky music).