– The secret to consistency in ball speed on the golf course is
forward shaft lean, bar none. If we have forward shaft lean then that club face is going to be stable through impact; meaning
the shots are going to be much more consistent. They're going to be much straighter. There's going to be less curve. And if we are, have shaft lean, we're
also delofting the club, meaning we're going to get
more energy into the ball and the ball speed is going to be higher. So this is a must have. If we're wanting to be
consistent on the golf course and hit great shots, we can actually even swing
easier and hit the ball further. So what we're going to go over
today is something you may have heard before, but
if you stick with me, I'm going to show you how you're
going to be able to finally get forward shaft lean
every single time you swing.
So if you've seen me
do any instruction yet, you know that I really like
to explain things in extreme. I think it's a really easy way to make so we can easily see what we need to see so that we can make easy
adjustments in our golf swing. So if I'm looking for, forward shaft lean, I have to be a certain
height from the ground. So let me explain that in the extreme, the extreme would be if I'm
standing straight up and down, if I'm standing straight up
and down. When I make my swing, if I were to get forward shaft lean, I wouldn't even be able to reach the ball. I can't physically reach it. So if I'm standing straight
up and down and be able to hit this ball, I'm going to
have to flip the club.
I'm going to have to
extend, to hit the shot. So the opposite of that,
that would be the extreme, the opposite of that would be me covering the ball with my chest. So let me explain, covering
the ball very quickly. Covering the ball, if I was
going to cover the ball, and it's almost like I'm
putting a roof on it, this would be me completely
covering the ball. Now we can't actually do
this when we're swinging. So what we're going to do is we're going to cover
it to a certain extent. The more that my sternum
gets closer to the ball, the more that I'm covering
the ball with my chest, and this is the secret to
getting forward shaft lean, and it's going to control my height so that I can get forward shaft lean. So if I go to cover the
ball and I'm going to over-exaggerate this even more, just like I did standing
straight up and down and I were to release the club early, I would hit, this is almost
two feet behind this ball.
So in order for me to
hit this ball solidly, I'm going to have to do
something in order to do that. And the only way to do that
is to get forward shaft lean. I guess I could do
something kind of weird, but this is not going to be something we're going to be able
to do in a full swing. So if I'm covering the ball, I have to get my hands in front
to get forward shaft lean. So the opposite. If I
do this and I really, really cover the ball and
I hit this ball solidly, that ball is going to
come out super, super low. You can see my, my loft on that was 4.6. That's crazy low compared
to a, a regular golf shot. So how do we apply this to our full swing? Well, the answer is this guys, it's really this simple. And when we're making our down swing, I'm going to show you
exactly how to do this.
We are going to really, in our minds, over-exaggerate this chest
getting closer and closer to the ball and we want to
do this on our downswing. If we're doing this, ideally, we're going to stay about the
same height on our backswing. Then on our downswing, we are going to, on our down swing, cover
the ball with our chest as much as we possibly can, even in your mind, if you feel
like I was doing it earlier, when my chest is completely over the ball, this is what we're going to
feel like we're doing now. What actually happens. When
you go to hit the ball, your mind's going to know
where that club head is. So you're not going to actually
be able to get this low. If you do get this low, that's great. You can start toning it down a little bit, but most of the time the
player is going to feel this.
Now the number one mistake
just real quick that you don't want to make is you don't want
to do this with your nose. You don't want your head to go down. You want to make sure your
actual shirt buttons or your sternum goes down. So I like to tell my students
to keep their distance between their nose and their
shirt button the same. And we don't want to tuck our chin. We want to make sure we keep
that distance the same as we cover the ball with our chest. So when you're working
on this, start off with, you're going to have, you're going to need to make
sure you pay attention to where your bottom point is because
it's going to be much different than it was before.
So the drill you want to do
is start off with taking nice, easy swings, really on the downswing, cover the ball of the chest as
much as you possibly can and hit the ball solidly. If you don't hit it solidly at first, that's fine, but you will hit it solidly. If you keep covering it, you're just gonna have to find
a little bit different way than you're used to, to get to the ball.
So I'm covering this. I know
it looks a little bit weird, but I'm really over-exaggerating this so I can keep my chest down. So what we're going to do is
really work on covering the ball consistently down as
far as we can go and hit it solidly. Once we feel like
we can do that consistently, we're going to make sure that
when we can check ourselves on camera, we're going to
make sure that we're, we are staying either the same
height as we're coming into the downswing, or even
covering it a little bit more.
And that way that's going to
guarantee if we hit that ball solidly that the hands
are going to be in front, we'll have that stable club head. We can release it out in front
and get that ball speed that we're looking for. So once we
feel like we've really got it. So there we go. That would
be about a normal loft. That's actually a little bit
lower than normal, about 19.1. The one before that I think
was like around 10 degrees. So you can see by overdoing this, we can really make sure that
we get that forward shaft lean.
So when you're working on this, make sure that that chest is
covering the ball as much as it pos, as much as you possibly can. And this will guarantee when
you hit it solidly that you'll have forward shaft lean,
because if you don't, we're going to bottom out way behind it. So I'm going to do one more here. We're going to make sure
that on the down swing, I'm covering the ball and feeling
like I'm getting down here and hitting the ball solidly. Now, there we go. That was really, really low. So as you can see, if you get really good at this
and you can cover the ball a lot, you can actually get
too much forward shaft lean. That'd be a great problem to have, because now you can tone it down and really start to
control your trajectory. Get forward shaft lean every
time and get that ball speed. Now that's just the first
half of the equation. There's the problem that I see when you start working on this.
When we start covering the ball
with the chest is that this club starts to steepen out. This is kind of the tendency
that's going to want to have happen. So what we're going to need to
do is we're going to need to make sure that as we're covering
the ball with the chest, that we're going to be shallowing
out the clubs so that it can come from the inside. And then the next thing that
happens, the big problem. When we cover the ball, we get a ton more forward
shaft lean than we're used to.
And usually when a player does this, the club face stays wide open. So what I need you to
do once you're coming, shallowing this out, we're also gonna make sure
that we square up the club so that when we do have
the forward shaft lean, we compress the ball dead straight. Now, owner and head instructor. Clay has a great drill
called the anti-roll method.
That's going to show you
how to do both of these. So if you pair that up
with covering the chest, you're going to be able to get
a ton of forward shaft lean, and compress the ball, maximize your consistency
and your ball speed. If you want to see that video, we're going to play a preview of it. At the end of this video, that you can see the whole
lesson by clicking on the eye card. Or if you don't see
the eye card, that's fine. You can click on the link
in the description below, pair those up guys and
compress it like you never have before. – Here's the bottom line.
If you've been taught to roll the club in the early down swing
that causes the shaft to get steep, and that steep club causes all your problems causes you to hit it way
behind the big hitters and way inconsistent with
your quality of strikes. You're in the tall grass and the trees and the hazards all day long. Now the great news is this. There's really only two
pieces that you need to know to fix all these problems. The first one is we need
to learn the proper way to square up the club face
instead of rolling the forearms and getting steep. There's another way that the pros do this. Once you learn this right way
to square up the club face, then you can shallow out from
the inside and everything starts to fit together.
Now I'm going to teach you this right now and what I call the anti-roll method. You may also hear this
called the motorcycle move or the tour twist, but let's walk through
exactly how to do that. Now, what I want you to do is go ahead and go kind of in the last parallel in the downswing. So here I want my hips to
go ahead and be opening up. I want my club to be
parallel with the ground and I want my hands to be
in front of my right thigh. Now, when I take my grip, you're going to notice
that when I do this, the club face is basically
straight up and down. So if I'm looking at it from this angle, you'll see the face is
straight up and down in my logo of my glove has pointed out in front of me. Now, from there..