Nothing is better than a perfectly his drive. Your driving ability to the next level with these bits of awesome technique advice.
How to hit a golf ball with a driver for beginners
I have complied a few tips to get you on the path to decent driving- I really learned how to drive the ball once I started taking golf lessons with George. Here's what I learned: 1. You have to establish reasonably solid contact. This is the way that I would start: I would put two tees into the ground parallel from each other to create a sort of gateway through which I would practice making my downwards swing. Initially, it’s good to start on a very small scale course to try to develop some skill. It’s like if you were learning how to drive a car, you wouldn’t start in the middle of traffic on a busy street in New York, you would start in a parking lot and start small. So start by taking some baby swings through the two tee gates, even without a golf ball. A word of caution however, try not to overthink it and over manage your grip on the club and try to steer it through. You want nice, easy and fluid motion and just notice if it is going through the tee gate. Your brain should figure it out if you accidentally hit one of the tees, and you’ll often adjust your swing slightly subconsciously. So just try to relax and use the tees as more of a guideline and feedback, until you can pretty comfortably swing the club between the gateway. Then when you can do this, practice using a golf ball. 2. One of my other favourite teaching methods is a little mallet. If you were to put a tee and golf ball down and then try to hit the ball with a mallet, you would naturally swing back and try to make contact with the ball straight on the back of the ball. So many golfers come down and on top of the ball too much, and it would seem extremely impractical to do so with a mallet. So simply imagine how you would try to hit the golf ball with a mallet and try to mimic that same motion using your driver and tap the ball forwards. 3. Another great technique to practice using a driver is to place two clubs on the ground, with both ends pointing down the course, to create a sort of lane-way for your downwards swing. Again, you don’t want to over think this and awkwardly try to steer the club down, however this is a great practice technique to learn directionally where to swing your club to get the ball to go in the direction that you want it to go. Another word of caution though, one of the things that any golfer is prone to, but especially new golfers, is a certain amount of anxiety that you are not going to make any contact with the ball, let alone solid contact. So because of this, there is often an attempt to simply forcefully hit the ball with the club head, instead of trying to create some motion and some flow. A great technique to overcome this specifically is to actually swing and toss a club 20-30 yards. Many might be hesitant to do this, but it’s a great way to learn to swing instead of simply trying to hit golf ball.
Golf Driver Grip: The first step to driving like a pro
We want to try to help you today with an important subject what is the best golf driver grip, aka, what is the best grip to use for driving the furthest. Let's talk about driver groups period what are the two things that we really have to be able to do? So, talking about driver grips. What are the two things you really have to do? Number one you've got to be able to create Club head speed. We're going to show you something close up in a minute that will allow you mobility in the wrist. Certainly the wrists aren't the only source of clubhead speed but believe me: if your wrists are tight and they're not mobile, and you can't create some whip-like motion, you have got to be extraordinarily strong to create a lot of club head speed. It's a major component of clubhead speed. So, mobility of the wrist in order to create clubhead speed is definitely number one. Number 2 of course is the ability to square the clubface. Nothing's going to rob you of distance more off the tee or make you a less effective driver of the ball than leaving the face open and slicing it to the right, which is what so many golfers do. We're going to delve right into some of the things that you can try to get right in your grip that are going to give you that mobility and that ability to hit straight shots. Ok, so what kind of grip gives you the ability to hinge your wrists and also the ability square the club? Well simply put, it's a grip that's more towards the fingers. Be sure to hold the club a little bit diagonal across the hand and not straight across. Keep the thick fleshy part of your hand (under your pinky & on the hand closest to the end of the club) sitting directly on top of the club. This will help you to push down. A pitfall to look out for, that so many people fall for, is stretching your hand to get it across the club once your thumb stretches out the tendon between your thumb and your wrist Titans and it tends to lock up. So either is stretched and or a group that's too much in the palm are disastrous for golf grips, especially the driver, where you need speed. So, a totally relaxed hand position is best where are you can just let the club fit in under that muscle pad. Practice holding the club out in front of you with the club going diagonally forward in your hands (dont hold the club like Zeus holds a bolt of lightning) with your thumbs resting on top of the club in a natural position. Remember, do not stretch your hands. Another little benefit of this is that when you grip the club more down towards your fingers your hand will naturally wrap of the club a little bit more. This causes an angle between your hand and your arm in your wrist and that joint at the base of your wrist is well on the side of the club that is a natural consequence of the of the good grip. When you see that sort of a look it is so much easier to close the club through impact, giving you a little bit more dry and a little bit more snap. So pay attention to your group those two factors are extremely important. I hope that helps give you a good sense of your lead hand and what to do with it and why it's so important. We didn't really talk about the trailing hand comma but it's going to be slightly across the base of the fingers. And you want to get that life line between the two pads of your hands matched up to the back of your forward thumb. So that your hand is on the back of the shaft of the club and is in a position to push through well. Getting your leading hand grip correct is key, because it is very easy to get that trailing hand on there.
How To Crush Your Golf Driver Swing
This next section is a great one: how to crush your drives.
Want to know how to crush your drives? We'll look at a few things that contribute to Club head speed. Ill also go over an interesting mistake that I've made in my swing over the years, which I have discovered recently, that is help me with this. I think my discovery will help you as well.
So, there's two main components to distance and how you can crush that ball. The number one is speed in the club. That is the main component we will go over in this section. The second component is a solid hit. That means a centeredness of clubface contact, and with the driver some more specifics about the angle of attack and eccetera.
For this section let's kind of take for granted the things we see in terms of swing, grip, and some of the basic fundamentals. Let's look at one area that will really help you create speed. It's an area where I see a lot of people make mistakes, and it's a place where I've made my own mistakes over the years. I found out about my own faults after analysing some videos I've taken of myself, and cant wait to share my insight with you.
Let's get started by looking at body motion and how it affects the club. First, let me say this before we cranking here: I don't care how fast you think you can turn your hips or whatever, that alone is not nearly enough to hit the ball a long way. It's only when the entire body works in unison to create exponential clubhead speed that you really can see the wanted results. So let's have a look at a couple of great players, how they start the club, how their body moves as they start the club, then will circle back and kind of get to the meat of it, which is how to create speed in the downswing.
So there is Jason Day and you can see as he starts back, if you watches trunk more than his arms, you can really see that it's that pivoting motion there that is causing his arms to rise off the ground.
There is nothing snatched up in the air about the arms there.
And just for a classic, the late great Payne Stewart. Here is a really nice view of how the coiling of the body causes the arms to react. His arms don't fly up in the, air minus the coil, as he got started.
Ok so, once we've got this sense of how the body influences the arms going back the thing we really want to focus on here in this video is how you store power coming down your swing, then a little bit about how you release it at the bottom. Let me show you some images of a couple great players doing that. Then let me show you myself hitting a couple of drives side-by-side. You’ll see me hitting a drive and a practice swing, along with something really interesting I found out that I was doing wrong. I've subsequently found out that almost everybody I've tested this on makes the same mistake too. Check it out: So, before I show you myself let's look at someone who really, really does this well. John Daly, obviously one of the most gifted/furthest hitters there is (bear in mind his ultra,ultra flexible, so that does make a difference). I want you to look at his legs there on the left: they’re in motion there, however his trunk is wound up like a coil, extending all the way up his arms and to the club.
The clubhead actually keeps going back and if you look up this clip you will see how long it takes for the clubhead to react to his legs and hips moving first, then his body uncoils, into a downswing. Be sure top look at his arms- they don't do anything as he changes direction and finally they get pulled in position.
That swing creates an enormous amount of power. Here he is from another angle.
You get the picture, look at how soft is left shoulder and left arm are. Look at how they stay through the transition. Look how he can change direction without a suspicion of trying to jerk that club down. He is so patient up top, and that's stores a ton of power. Fred Couple is obviously one of the greatest. I think anyone would like to swing like Freddy. Freddy is another great example: if you look at his stance all the way up in his back swing, see how patient he is with his arms.
His lower body moves first and his arms stay right there. It's that amazing posture that gives him the critical kinematic sequence of lower body, then trunk, than arms, and then finally the club. Now it's put me up there hitting a drive, and a full-forced practice swing. If I put both of the frames but at the same spot in the swing and play them synchronized at the same rate you'll see that they change direction at about the same time and about at the same rate give or take a couple of frames.
A few years ago I was struggling with my driver and so I came in and filmed myself trying to fix a few things and take a video of myself hitting, and also taking a practice swing. I did this particular test with no sense of what might happen, and I'm telling you, when I synchronized them I was still at the top of my practice swing by the time I was already on my downswing when driving.
I found it unbelievable to see the difference between the two. You can see clearly how strong the urge is for me to yank my arms down and basically just fire at the golf ball. I was pretty shocked by it. I have subsequently tested this on a few other players, including some really good players, and to one degree or another this tends to hold true. So, this is a lesson for all of us. You could probably do this with yourself, if you had the right app on your phone. The moral of the story is: Don't rush your arms coming down. I'm telling you, when I did that test and I fast-forwarded to when I had both swings near the bottom of the swing, I had just as much speed coming for the practice swing as you do from the real swing, so that had it netted me anything yet.
However, it really cost me the ability to create this really great sweet sequence and probably cost me some power in the end. So hopefully that is a good mental picture for you. Hopefully you're getting a sense of how the body can load power out into the club. Let me touch on one thing here that's really, really important: you've got to transfer energy out to the club. It's fine to load it. I see a lot of people when they first worked on this, their arms just say ad infinitum (far back in their backswing). Their arms don't catch up in the swing so the speeds doesn't transfer out to the club head. Let me give you a good visual picture, this is something you can do in the comfort of your own home- if you're at your house. This has really helped some people in a nice simple way. Treat your arms as if they are big heavy ropes (without a club in your hand) and just let your arms react to your body and dangle. Picture your hands dipped in water, or paint, or something like that. Then imagine you had to use your body to spatter water (or paint) across the ground in front of where the golf ball would be. That is an excellent mental picture of how to transfer energy out to the golf club. So: arms respond to body, and use your body to stabilize it and snap the water off or spackle the imaginary water or paint onto the ground. That same motion will see to it that the club is popping to at the bottom of your swing and you're really getting the energy that you need. If you do these things you will really, really see a difference in your club head speed, your ball speed, and the distance you hit the ball.
Check out this additional video for some more driving info:
Learn more at https://georgegankasgolftips.wixsite.com/sports-blog and if you ever end up on Colorado, check out my post about when I went golfing in Estes Park, CO with my family..