This simple drill will help to dramatically improve your ball striking. It will quickly make hitting fat shots a thing of the past, and enable you to compress the ball far more effectively, launching the ball on a better trajectory and with more club head speed, thus generating much more distance with every club.
This is the second of four drills that will help you to feel how to use your speed arm in the golf swing, ingraining the correct movements in order to quickly deliver significant and permanent improvements to your game.
Once again, apologies to our lefty friends, but for simplicity this drill is described for the right-handed golfer.
This drill refines the movements you’ve been working on in Golf Swing Drill 508a – Downswing: The Speed Arm Axe Drill, and gives you another tool to help you feel and ingrain the correct movement of your right arm (the speed arm) in the golf downswing.
One of the key problems faced by amateur golfers is striking the ground before the ball, destroying their club head speed, the quality of the strike, and their consistency.
They probably don’t realise it, but the average amateur golfer strikes the ground about 4” (10cm) before the ball! There is a direct correlation between where your swing bottoms out and your ability as a golfer – the further forwards the swing arc, the better the player. For the best ball strikers in the world, the bottom of their swing arc is some 6” (15cm) after the ball!
It’s should be clear by now that, to play this game really well, you need the bottom of the swing arc to be after the ball, under your left shoulder, so that you can hit down and through the ball with a pure strike and an efficient transfer of energy to the ball.
It’s all very well using the right arm for power, it’s natural and instinctive to do so, though most amateur golfers get the movement very wrong and create speed in the wrong place.
But if you swing hard with your right arm, the club will want to bottom out more under your right shoulder, and you’ll hit it “fat”. The harder you swing, the worse it gets, and the shot just gets shorter and more erratic!
This drill focuses on how to move correctly in order to solve that problem, enabling you to use your right arm to generate an enormous amount of club head speed while still striking the ball beautifully.
For more information on how the speed arm works in a great golf swing, see The Role of the Right Arm in the Golf Downswing.
The Drill
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…If you don’t generate as much club head speed as you’d like, or you struggle to strike the ball consistently well, sometimes hitting “fat” shots, then this drill will quickly make a huge difference to your golf swing, and to your scores.
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Coming next: we’ll give you another way to feel the correct motion and build more club head speed than ever before, in Golf Swing Drill 508c – Downswing: The Speed Arm Throw.
