Instruction
4 drills to achieve Tour quality impact
There’s nothing more satisfying in golf than hearing and feeling that “crack” at impact, like the one you’d hear off the club of a PGA Tour pro. It’s an impressive sound on TV, but for anyone who’s heard it in person, it’s a sound like any other — it denotes a solid impact position with ample club head speed.
People often ask how to consistently achieve such an impact conditions. Thankfully, there are a few drills that will help you understand what it takes at impact to produce shots of that caliber. Below are the best drills I know to produce Tour quality impact, which will help you hear that crack at impact.
Imitate impact
As Homer Kelley told us in The Golfing Machine, you must understand the difference between address and impact. To feel this, pose in the impact position, then pose at the address position; this helps you to understand and feel what each position accomplishes. It’s these visuals that will help you see just how different address and impact really are.
Simulating impact is a great way to feel the weight moving forward, the hands leading the club head at impact and the body rotating open. The key to this drill is to exaggerate your impact position so you can really “feel” the difference. For maximum effect, make sure to hold a few seconds at each position, which will help ingrain the feelings.
Drag the mop
Here’s another drill from Kelley, which I have found extremely effective.
To feel how the club “lags” behind your body, as well as how the pivot of your body drags the arms through impact, go to your kitchen and grab an old mop — or take out your driver and leave the head cover on. Put your mop or driver on the ground behind a golf ball and use the rotation of the body to “drag the wet mop” though impact. What you will learn from this drill is that in order to move the wet mop, you won’t use your hands, but rather the pivot of the body to propel your arms into and beyond impact.
That’s the feeling you should have around impact in order to maintain and deliver the club into the ball correctly.
Using a long club and pain
You understand the position, you have felt the correct pivot with the mop… but how can you use these feelings to hit a ball? This is where your long club and pain come into the mix. Take an alignment stick and jam it in the hole (on the top of the grip) of your 9 iron and set up with the stick out to the left of your body. From here, hit 10-yard pitch shots trying not to get hit in the body by the extra part of the club.
Whenever your pivot stops driving the arms and you “flip” your hands, you will be the first to know as you get beat in the side by the extended club.
Related: This drill was also highlighted in “10 practice drills for game improvement“
The Penny Drill
Lastly, in oder to achieve and maintain quality impact alignments, you should learn to chip pennies off of a golf mat. If you can chip pennies, then hitting golf balls will seem simple. If you “yip” through impact, you’ll miss the penny, or make poor contact with it. It’s a great drill to make yourself commit to the shot at hand and trust that your pivot will guide the club head to the ball.
I would suggest performing the above drills in the order that they appear. This will enable you to learn “impact,” and then how to improve it. Take your time and slowly build up to bigger swings. Remember, if you cannot hit pitch shots with perfect alignments, then you’ll never do so with full swings.
Cheers to hard work!
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Instruction
Clement: Laid-off or perfect fade? Across-the-line or perfect draw?
Some call the image on the left laid off, but if you are hitting a fade, this could be a perfect backswing for it! Same for across the line for a draw! Stop racking your brain with perceived mistakes and simply match backswing to shot shape!
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Instruction
The Wedge Guy: The easiest-to-learn golf basic
My golf learning began with this simple fact – if you don’t have a fundamentally sound hold on the golf club, it is practically impossible for your body to execute a fundamentally sound golf swing. I’m still a big believer that the golf swing is much easier to execute if you begin with the proper hold on the club.
As you might imagine, I come into contact with hundreds of golfers of all skill levels. And it is very rare to see a good player with a bad hold on the golf club. There are some exceptions, for sure, but they are very few and very far between, and they typically have beat so many balls with their poor grip that they’ve found a way to work around it.
The reality of biophysics is that the body moves only in certain ways – and the particulars of the way you hold the golf club can totally prevent a sound swing motion that allows the club to release properly through the impact zone. The wonderful thing is that anyone can learn how to put a fundamentally sound hold on the golf club, and you can practice it anywhere your hands are not otherwise engaged, like watching TV or just sitting and relaxing.
Whether you prefer an overlap, interlock or full-finger (not baseball!) grip on the club, the same fundamentals apply. Here are the major grip faults I see most often, in the order of the frequency:
Mis-aligned hands
By this I mean that the palms of the two hands are not parallel to each other. Too many golfers have a weak left hand and strong right, or vice versa. The easiest way to learn how to hold the club with your palms aligned properly is to grip a plain wooden ruler or yardstick. It forces the hands to align properly and shows you how that feels. If you grip and re-grip a yardstick several times, then grip a club, you’ll see that the learning curve is almost immediate.
The position of the grip in the upper/left hand
I also observe many golfers who have the butt of the grip too far into the heel pad of the upper hand (the left hand for right-handed players). It’s amazing how much easier it is to release the club through the ball if even 1/4-1/2″ of the butt is beyond the left heel pad. Try this yourself to see what I mean. Swing the club freely with just your left hand and notice the difference in its release from when you hold it at the end of the grip, versus gripping down even a half inch.
To help you really understand how this works, go to the range and hit shots with your five-iron gripped down a full inch to make the club the same length as your seven-iron. You will probably see an amazing shot shape difference, and likely not see as much distance loss as you would expect.
Too much lower (right) hand on the club
It seems like almost all golfers of 8-10 handicap or higher have the club too far into the palm of the lower hand, because that feels “good” if you are trying to control the path of the clubhead to the ball. But the golf swing is not an effort to hit at the ball – it is a swing of the club. The proper hold on the club has the grip underneath the pad at the base of the fingers. This will likely feel “weak” to you — like you cannot control the club like that. EXACTLY. You should not be trying to control the club with your lower/master hand.
Gripping too tightly
Nearly all golfers hold the club too tightly, which tenses up the forearms and prevents a proper release of the club through impact. In order for the club to move back and through properly, you must feel that the club is controlled by the last three fingers of the upper hand, and the middle two fingers of the lower hand. If you engage your thumbs and forefingers in “holding” the club, the result will almost always be a grip that is too tight. Try this for yourself. Hold the club in your upper hand only, and squeeze firmly with just the last three fingers, with the forefinger and thumb off the club entirely. You have good control, but your forearms are not tense. Then begin to squeeze down with your thumb and forefinger and observe the tensing of the entire forearm. This is the way we are made, so the key to preventing tenseness in the arms is to hold the club very lightly with the “pinchers” — the thumbs and forefingers.
So, those are what I believe are the four fundamentals of a good grip. Anyone can learn them in their home or office very quickly. There is no easier way to improve your ball striking consistency and add distance than giving more attention to the way you hold the golf club.
More from the Wedge Guy
- The Wedge Guy: Golf mastery begins with your wedge game
- The Wedge Guy: Why golf is 20 times harder than brain surgery
- The Wedge Guy: Musings on the golf ball rollback
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Instruction
Clement: Stop ripping off your swing with this drill!
Not the dreaded headcover under the armpit drill! As if your body is defective and can’t function by itself! Have you seen how incredible the human machine is with all the incredible feats of agility all kinds of athletes are accomplishing? You think your body is so defective (the good Lord is laughing his head off at you) that it needs a headcover tucked under the armpit so you can swing like T-Rex?
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Pingback: Four Drills to Achieve Tour Quality Impact | Honourable Society of Golf Fanatics
Other Paul
Jan 21, 2016 at 9:15 pm
Uh oh. We dont have pennies in canada anymore. Could be expensive to do this in canada with nickels.
Side note. My impact doesn’t look anything like that. My hips are wide open about 40-50 degrees. And my shoulders are open about 10 degrees. Thats what happens when you have a swing powered by body rotation. And its the reason I hit it far and straight (took a year to sort out but i gained 20MPH).
Chris
Jan 22, 2016 at 11:10 am
Well, you obviously should be getting ready for your tour t time then. Let us commoners here enjoy the peace and quiet.
Nick
Jan 22, 2016 at 12:16 pm
Tech like Gears is starting to show that the ave tour impact is closer to 60 degs open for hips and 30 degs for shoulders. Shaun Webb has some good photos on twitter.
Adam
Jan 22, 2016 at 6:53 pm
Well, aren’t you special! Anything else you want to point out about yourself?
Brian K
Jan 21, 2016 at 9:04 pm
IMO, The best way to learn this is buy DST club and practise.
PRINCE
Jan 21, 2016 at 8:56 pm
Another option would be to buy the ‘Tour Striker’ practice club and learn to hit that off a golf mat.
That is my go to drill hitting into a net in my garage; and also I warm-up before a round hitting a few balls.
Jay
Jan 21, 2016 at 5:05 pm
Looking forward to trying these – thanks
RoGar
Jan 21, 2016 at 12:55 pm
Best article in a long time, actual drills that help… Kuddos Tom!!!
Tom
Jan 22, 2016 at 10:14 am
I agree.