– So, if you're watching this video, it most likely means you're
struggling with early extension or you're struggling to
stay down in the shot, stay down, getting forward shaft lean, being able to release. You see all the pros in this
beautiful side bend position, coming up through the ball beautifully. And it's getting a little bit frustrating and I can definitely sympathize with this 'cause early on when I
first started playing, I struggled hard with early extension and whenever I got it out of my swing it made an enormous difference
in my ball striking. So, what I want to do, is I want to go over one of
the simplest fixes I've seen for early extension that
I can't tell you how many times a player has
been able to eliminate. If not all of it, most of it with just this one simple thing. And it's almost so simple that it's seems a little bit silly to even do a whole video about it, but sometimes the simple things can make the biggest
difference in the golf swing. So, what this is going to
entail is very, very…
Like I said very simple, is the height of our
setup in the back swing or in the back swing and the down swing. So, if you followed any of my videos here on Top Speed Golf, you know
that I love to explain things in extremes and that's
what we're going to do. So, I'm gonna go ahead and just go with the main problem that I see with players getting early
extension into impact.
And the main problem I see, is basically we're getting into what we call an athletic setup which is going to bent
knees, kind of in a squat. Almost like we're doing a squat in the gym and we're set up almost
in a squat position. There's a lot of different variables of this where maybe I'm
leaned over a little bit more. Maybe my knees are bent a little bit more but the main issue here is we're too low. We are out of position in the
setup and the setup is one of the biggest predicators
of early extension. I have maybe seen it one or two times with all of my students whether they be in person or online, where they've set up poorly
and didn't early extend. It would have to be a severe compensation and they were definitely
not good ball strikers yet. So, very important to make
sure that we understand that setup is going to be
the key for this simple, simple adjustment for
eliminating early extension.
So, by setting up in this position, what we're essentially
doing is setting up very low and we're not really leaving anymore room to shallow the club bed
and gain a little bit of covering in transition. So, covering the ball would be making sure we're getting a little
bit lower in transition. So, if we're already
down here, the only place for us to really go is up, in the swing. And this is the most common thing I see, that athletic stance set up and then coming up through the shot. So, I'll see if I can do one here. It is almost intuitive
when I'm set up incorrectly to stand up through the shot, so I can kind of square it up. And again, remember I probably
hit that one pretty straight because I used to do this all the time and I figured out how to time it up. But I can tell you you get
under any kind of pressure, if you're not having a good day, this just completely ruins
the entire experience of being out on the golf course because when you're early
extending, any miss can happen.
And if you're anything like me,
the snap hook is a huge one. So, what we're gonna do, is
explain this in extremes. If I am standing straight up and down, just as tall as I can stand. Let's just say I set up as tall as I can. Like if I was just standing
straight up and down waiting in line or anything like that, just standing up as
tall as I possibly can. If you're gonna see again,
this is a very extreme example. I can only stand up so tall
until I can reach the ball. So, this is as tall as I can stand up, so I can guarantee you I'm
not going to early extend in this swing because I don't
have anywhere to extend to.
I've taken all of the
variables out of this. So, I'm gonna go and make a swing here. This is gonna feel very, very difficult, but again I'm gonna get as straight up and down as I can and
we're gonna make a swing. So, you can see there that I
actually had to lower to go down and hit that ball. Very, very weird thing. But, like I said, extreme examples are
sometimes the easiest to see. Now, the other example, as you can probably guess, is if I got down as low as I possibly can.
If I'm gonna try to
actually hit this shot well, I'm gonna have to do something in order to get this
club head on the ball. And that's most likely going to be, to try to early extend. So, obviously that wasn't good. It's a very difficult thing. But, as you can see from the extremes, when I was taller, it led
me to get down into my shot, stay down through the shot. Very, very important. And again, this is a very simple fix because all we really have to do, is change our setup in order
to give ourself the chance to eliminate this early extension.
So one of the best things that we can do, is when we're setting up,
we learn how to hinge over from our hips correctly, which would be just making sure
that our legs are gonna feel like they're almost straight up and down. So what I have players do, is I have them stand with
their legs straight up and down and I have 'em lock their
knees completely out. Then from there, we barely, barely relax the knees. This is gonna be really nice tall legs. From here, my legs don't change at all and I'm going to hinge over just slightly 'til my shoulders are
gonna be just over my toes. This is just kind of a general
rule of thumb for the setup. Now, if I can stay here, this is gonna give me a nice, tall, neutral setup. Now, when I go into the top of the swing if I can maintain my height here, then it's gonna be a lot more intuitive for me to go down and into the shot.
So, let me go ahead. I'm gonna lock my knees straight out, barely relax them, lean
over just a little bit. Now, I'm in a nice tall legged setup and I'm a nice and away from the ball. So now, I have the ability to
not really extend in the shot. So, not hit perfectly, but definitely not too bad. I kind of threw off my face
control a little bit there, doing those other demonstrations, but 200 total distance, with the seven iron's not too bad, especially since we didn't early extend. That's another thing
with not early extending, you can get so much more
energy into the ball. So, if we have this basic
understanding of saying, hey, I get taller in my setup, I'm going to at least
leave room for myself, not to early extend. But if I get low in my setup, the only thing I'm gonna want to do most of the time is early extend
so that I can create some room to hit this shot.
So, what we wanna do, is get into that really,
really nice setup position, get comfortable with
that and almost even feel like we're lowering a
little bit in transition so that we can start eliminating
that early extension. So, there we go. I left myself enough room, not bad shot, little, little, little push draw, came
back towards my target. Exactly what we want to
make sure we're doing this. Now, this simple fix to
eliminate early extension is basically just the first big piece. This is what we have to start with if we wanna start eliminating
that dreaded move. The second piece is, making sure we understand
how to shallow the club out and get forward shaft lean at impact. In order to get forward shaft lean, we have to square up the club correctly. So, there's a couple things here.
If I'm going to eliminate
my early extension, if I lean the shaft forward, I have to be lower in order to do so. So, if I early extend, that shaft's gonna wanna stand up on me and I'm not going to be in position to stay down through the shot. So, it's vitally important to make sure we shallow the club out, square it up so that we
can have forward shaft lean from the setup position
that allows us to lower. So if we can get that second piece, which would be shallow and square so that we can stay down through the shot. Now we have the recipe, the two-step recipe to
eliminate this early extension. Now, to get this club to
shallow out and square up, I'm gonna have our owner
and head instructor, Clay Ballard, go over the anti-roll method with you in this next video.
So, we're gonna play a
preview of that lesson at the end of this video, that you can see that
whole lesson by clicking on the iCard that pops up in the preview. If you don't see that, iCard, that's fine. It'll be in the link in
the description below. And he's gonna go over
exactly the correct method to shallow this club out and square it up, but make sure to pair that up with that nice tall setup
so that you have room to not early extend. All right, we'll see you
here in the anti-roll method. – [Clay Ballard] So,
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 gonna teach you this right now in 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 down swing. 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 gonna notice
that when I do 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. And my logo of my glove is
pointed out in front of me.
Now, from there..