5 Best Ball Striking Drills | Golf Monthly

  • 8 months ago
In this video, Neil Tappin is joined by Top 50 Golf Coach Ged Walters to provide his 5 best ball striking drills. He'll help you with your angle of attack and weight transfer to improve the quality of your striking. If you are heading to the range to work on your game, this video is a must watch!
Transcript
00:00 If you're looking to shoot lower scores this year, then one thing you'll undoubtedly need to do is
00:04 strike the ball consistently well, and that's exactly what this video is all about. We've got
00:09 five of the best ball striking drills for you. Now, the advice in this video comes courtesy of
00:14 Jed Walters. Jed is one of Golf Monthly's top 50 coaches. He's got some really simple and effective
00:20 advice on ensuring that you'd strike the ball before the ground. Now, it's also important to
00:24 say this video is coming to you in partnership with KBS shafts. They have a whole shaft range
00:29 from driver all the way through the bag, all designed to help you get the most from your
00:34 equipment. Right, we're here at the London Club. Let's get started.
00:37 This drill is all about ensuring that you catch the ball before the ground. It doesn't matter
00:53 whether you're hitting a wedge or hitting a long iron, that's the same principle all the way through.
00:57 So it's something we all need to work on. Jed, what's the drill and how does it work? Okay,
01:02 instant feedback is what it really is all about. So if I take a tee and I just scratch a line
01:07 in the ground here. So from that point of view there, I've now got a focal point
01:14 from which I can work around. So here with a long iron, that ball position is going to be
01:20 a little bit further towards my lead side and from there it's about making swings and trying to get
01:28 the club to hit the ball on the turf. So I want to be really brushing the line and left of it for me
01:35 away. Yes, and crucially you're not hitting the ground behind the line. That's the number one
01:40 thing that you're trying to avoid and the great thing about this drill Jed, is that you're taking
01:44 practice swing after practice swing after practice swing and you get that instant feedback. Is your
01:48 body working in the right way to deliver the club in the right angle of attack? Definitely. Now
01:52 obviously that will change. So if I took wedge in there, ball position then is going to go more
01:57 central so that can be even more, can be deeper this side here. But the one thing I'm going to
02:01 find is if I was to make a practice swing here and hit the wrong side of this line, then I know that
02:06 our body's back here. Right, okay, well I've hit the ground there. Well there's the line. Hit the
02:10 ground back there. So what I'm looking for is to keep the pressure moving forwards so that I can
02:15 hit the ground more to the left. You can see there I've hit the ground sort of way in front of the
02:18 line there by just keeping the body moving in the right direction. Okay, so then you make a series
02:23 of practice swings and then eventually you get to a point you put the ball on the line, hit a shot
02:27 and then you get the feedback of what you're doing actually in the swing itself. Exactly. Got it. Okay.
02:31 So in the setup, I've got a 50 degree wedge here so centered ball position and then just making
02:42 sure that I get my body working in the right order. Perfect. Hopefully you could hear through
02:50 the mics the quality of the strike there. Absolutely perfect. And you can see this
02:54 divot is starting, I'd say, not quite almost an inch after the line. Yeah, after the line, which
03:00 is exactly what you're looking for. So use this really simple drill. It will really help your
03:05 ball striking. Okay, so this drill is all about controlling the low point in the arc of your
03:14 swing. Something that's so important for good quality ball striking. James, you've got a ball
03:18 on the tee here. Yes. What are we doing? We're getting used to with this one just the difference
03:22 in the line that we could get. We practice most of our golf on a mat, on driving range. It's flat,
03:27 it's the same level as your feet. You get on a golf course and it's above your feet, below your
03:31 feet, it's different slopes. So the first thing we need to do is just make sure that we're adaptable
03:35 and we can adjust. So we've got this one teed up here and I'm literally just going to clip it off
03:40 the tee. Yeah, it's quite as simple as that. So my ball position and everything is going to be the
03:45 same, but now you can see, this is what, good three and a half inches above my feet. So I just
03:50 want to get used to being able to be slightly more adaptable. So if this was a ball above my feet
03:56 situation where I've got my normal ball position, but I'm now just adapting to the lie, I just want
04:02 to clip it away. Beautiful. Good strike. So what's next? So what's next now is we now need to look at
04:12 it from a point of view of improving the ball striking itself. So the ball goes back on the same
04:18 tee. And now what you're going to do is about four inches behind it. And so, you know, it's not a
04:24 million miles away from the length of your club head. Is I'm going to put another tee.
04:27 Okay. Same height. Same height. Now the key with this is anybody who struggles sort of, so
04:36 fat shots, thin shots, top shots, all those kinds of things. Generally it happens because the weight
04:42 of the body is too far back. So we start to scoot, we start to flip. Well, first thing you're going
04:47 to do then is you're going to hit that tee. So we've just got to miss it. So the simple drill
04:51 here is hit the ball, don't hit the tee. Yeah. So that's going to now encourage a little bit more
04:56 of a downward angle. And to have that, I've got to make sure that I'm moving my body in the right
05:00 direction. Okay. Simple task here then, don't hit the tee. Dead simple. So just don't hit the tee.
05:05 Very good. Okay. And there it is. Good contact. Right. But there's a third part. There's a third
05:16 element to this drill. So if I take a third tee and I now put it here, so it's on the opposite side
05:23 around the same distance from the one that's at the back. Okay. So now what we're looking at doing
05:31 is not just missing this tee, but now I want to hit this one. Yes. Because that now is giving me
05:38 the feeling of that downward angle of attack, controlling the low points, more target side.
05:43 Again, we're back to being ball turf, which is everything that good ball striking is.
05:47 Is. Okay. Okay. So now I just want to miss the back tee,
05:52 hit the shot and try and clip this tee that's in front here.
05:56 Yeah. It's a really solid contact and it's a really simple drill that one to just help you
06:05 establish that right angle of attack. So the club bottoms out in exactly the right place. Cause that
06:10 is where really good quality contacts come from. Here's a great ball striking drill for those
06:19 golfers that don't want to get caught thinking too technically about the golf swing. It can really
06:24 help Jed. What is it? So it's about trying to make a comfortable speed swing and stop as fast
06:30 as you can beyond impact. Okay. What it does is it gets the body to organize itself a little bit
06:35 more naturally. We play our best golf when we're in the subconscious, when it doesn't, you're not
06:38 thinking about anything. So that's what we want to try and encourage. So from this drill here,
06:44 it's simply just taking a lofted club at nine, nine here, and we're just going to make some
06:49 swings, which only go maybe halfway back. But the key to it is feeling like the downswing,
06:55 the focus is just stop. What you'll find is when you look at it from face on at this point here,
07:01 I'm not really doing anything other than stopping yet. You can see how my weight's moving forward.
07:07 My pelvis is tucking underneath the torso. So I'm extending, extending to the legs, to the pelvis,
07:13 to the spine. And I've got a little rotation in there as well. And you're nicely connected between
07:18 your arms and your body as well. What I'm looking at when I see this, it's just how good the impact
07:23 position is just by doing such a small and simple golf swing. It trains everything to just happen
07:28 in the order that it really wants to happen. It's almost the brain which confuses it and makes it
07:33 happen in different ways. So you can start off at slower speeds and then just build up your speed
07:38 and you can go flat out speed if you wanted to there. So when you're accustomed to the drill,
07:42 you could be a little bit more and get some real crispness to what's happening there. And you can
07:49 see where those divots are always left of where I'm taking the set up. It's developing that speed
07:55 into it, but just focusing on the stop as quickly as you can. So from a set up point of view,
08:00 you're only thinking about putting a little bit more pressure into your lead foot,
08:04 just almost like that there, just pushing down into the ground a little bit more,
08:08 keeping that pressure there and then just making a nice controlled swing,
08:12 stopping as quickly as you can beyond impact.
08:15 Yeah, and you can see that divot. It's perfect. It's just after where the ball would have been.
08:21 Just this shot of Jed here just shows you so many good things about the golf swing. If you can
08:27 focus on finding that position, the chances are the quality of your ball striking will greatly improve.
08:33 This drill is all about swing direction, something that's going to really help you
08:41 with your iron ball striking. Jed, what's the thinking here? What's the drill about?
08:45 So all great ball strikers have a fairly neutral swing direction. So that's not to say that it is
08:51 always a bit to the right, some are a little bit to the left, but it's
08:57 minute. We're talking a couple of degrees left of target, couple of degrees right of target,
09:01 not excessive, which you would see from people who would slice and hook it. They would maybe be 10
09:06 degrees to the right, 10 degrees to the left. So getting your swing direction more neutral will
09:11 help you control your centeredness of strike and also help you control how your body then wants to
09:16 move towards the target so you can control the ground contact to get those lovely crisp ball
09:21 turf strikes. Yeah, and it sounds complicated, but it doesn't have to be. If you have a really
09:25 good drill that can help you sort of visualize what you're trying to achieve, and that's what
09:28 we're doing here. So talk us through it. Okay, so we're looking from sort of both perspectives.
09:33 Obviously I've got this little station set up here. This is just as a quick visual really
09:39 to what would represent a fairly neutral swing plane of being sort of up and down. But the swing
09:47 direction is literally what the club is sort of doing as it comes here through the impact. So if
09:52 I was like sort of this there, that would be a swing direction quite a lot to the right. That
09:57 would be quite a lot to the left. So this is tailored relative to you as the individual.
10:02 If you were somebody who slices the golf ball, pulls it or slices it, you're coming across the
10:08 ball. Yeah, so you'd have a swing direction, which would be if I put it into sort of a 2D
10:13 visual on the floor, would be a bit like that. So right, okay, well, what you need to do is
10:17 practice the opposite. So we would turn the sticks out to the right. I mean, that's probably
10:27 somewhere in the regions of 40 degrees maybe to the right. So right, okay, your visual then,
10:33 if you were somebody who's coming here, your visual is to swing the club in the downswing
10:37 between the sticks. Yeah, and then suddenly your angle of attack improves, the amount of the face
10:43 you're getting on the ball improves, the quality of the strike goes up. It can do so many good
10:48 things for you, can't it? Yeah, yeah, and then vice versa. If you hook the golf ball, then you
10:52 would just turn them the opposite way and feel like you were coming across a little bit more.
10:55 Now, bear in mind, these are feels. What you're feeling and what really happens are completely
11:00 different. You know, a slicer would feel like they're swinging way off to the right. And when
11:04 you look at the swing direction, it's probably still a little bit left. It's just that, you know,
11:08 if what feels hugely one way might move at eight degrees, but if you were already 10 left,
11:14 then you're still a little bit left. But the important point is it's more neutral. So you're
11:18 going to make your striking better. You're going to make your start lines better. You're going to
11:23 make your overall ball striking better. Yes, this is one for those players who have big shapes in
11:27 their game. So either big draws or big fades. If you want to just rein those in slightly,
11:32 you'll improve the quality of your ball striking. And this is a great way to do it.
11:35 Okay, so this is a ball striking drill aimed specifically at those golfers who have a
11:44 tendency to hang back through impact, hit the fat shots and the thin shots that we all hate so much.
11:50 And it's a great one for the range. Talk us through it, Jed.
11:54 Okay, so on the driving range, you could use the basket of the balls coming. It's simply
11:59 just propping your trail side up. So all your pressure, all the weight goes to the lead side.
12:05 You're probably going to be talking 90 to 95% of your pressure is going to be lead side.
12:10 So that's going to mean, well, I can't go back because I'm up on an angle. That's going to keep
12:15 me there. So I'm going to get used to feeling what it's like to have the pressure forward through
12:19 impact. And it's going to give you the ability then to have a nice downward angle attack and
12:23 give you those lovely ball turf crisp strikes. Yeah. And that feeling of what the correct
12:28 contact should feel like. So Jed, go for it then. Talk us through this drill.
12:32 I've just put my bag on the ground there. And all this is going to do is this is going to help me
12:37 elevate my trail foot. So from here, and bear in mind, you only need to sort of hit lofted clubs
12:43 out. We're not talking about doing this with driver. It's just getting used to doing it with
12:46 like a wedge or a nine iron or something. So just taking, you know, if that was my normal setup
12:51 there, then what I'm going to do now is I'm just going to take my trail foot. I'm just going to
12:55 lift it and I'm just going to rest it on the back of my bag. So now all my pressure is into my lead
13:00 side. So from here, I'm going to keep the pressure into my lead leg. I'm going to flex it a little
13:06 bit more than normal just because it's taken all the weight pretty much. You'll notice then on my
13:11 right leg, I'll sort of really straighten out a little bit. You see from this angle is very
13:14 little flex left in there. Keeping the pressure then pushing down into the left leg. I'm just
13:19 going to make little swings now. So it's going to be a little half swing back and then just down.
13:24 So you see the angle of attack is going to come down. It's going to help me find a low point more
13:28 to the left. So I just need to keep my arms nice and extended. You know, I'm going to swing to
13:33 there. I'm not making a full follow through. I'm just making a nice back and through swing. So if
13:38 I was to click this one now, I'm set. I'm ready. And I'm just going to make a nice smooth swing.
13:45 Yeah. And you've got that little ball turf strike. You will really, really struggle to hit the ground
13:52 for the ball if you try this drill. And I say it is a great one for getting your body in the right
13:57 position. Get the weight moving towards the target so the club hits the ball before it hits the
14:02 ground. Give it a go. So there you have it. That's Jed's five best ball striking drills. If you are
14:07 having issues with the quality of your iron strikes, then give some of those drills a go.
14:11 If you can find a feel that helps you hit the ball before the turf, then you should start hitting your
14:17 irons much better. But that's it for now from the London Club. Thanks very much for watching.
14:21 We'll see you next time.