- Hi Adam Bazalgette here founder of Scratch Golf Academy
here at the beautiful Club at Mediterra.
Golf swing drills to stop early release,
this is a problem that just plagues people,
I think it's perfectly fixable.
I'll show you some ideas, the ones that I find work
for me in teaching.
Give you three reasons,
show you how the pros do it differently
by giving you three reasons
or three things you have to do to stop this
and some drills to help you out with it.
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Let's have some fun with these early release drills.
So this whole business of lag getting the club
past the ball, hitting but the ball before the ground.
Listen a lot of people find this really, really,
challenging, I don't think it needs to be that challenging,
hopefully I can help you in this video.
Not all pros do it the same, they don't all look like
they have the same amount of lag,
but there's one thing that they all do.
Let's have a quick look at a couple of players
and see what this critical, critical, variable is.
So Davis Love on the Left, Tom Watson on the right
both major championship winners.
Tom Watson eight majors for that matter,
Davis Love great lagger at the club.
You can see he's got more lag than Tom Watson there,
and certainly if we take them right around when they're
getting ready to hit it he certainly has a little bit
more than Watson, and some have even more
and some have even a little bit less.
what they all do though regardless,
they all get the handle of the golf club
right around the end of the glove there,
pass that golf ball before
the club head goes down to vertical
and meets the ground so the club handle must pass
the golf ball before the club reaches the ground.
Of course Davis does that with plenty of room to spare,
just look at that, what a great look there.
I have a free three-part detailed course
solid strike formula really will help you
with hit your iron solidly,
just go down the description box and pick it up.
Okay so when I give golf lessons,
I've been doing that for 30 years,
I'm pretty used to how people going about,
or the kinds of experiences they have when they try
to improve their golf swing.
I really don't see people have much success trying
to tuck their elbow in or just hold lag,
to me it's not that athletic,
it doesn't really work that well.
All the great players and I mean all of them,
to differing degrees,
just showed you a couple of players on
the video a minute ago all increase lag and store energy.
Now one of the little things I'll do during a golf lesson,
little drills if you like I'll have a student stand here
and I'll come around the front,
kind of hold the club with them
and we'll hit some little chip shots 15 yards
or something like that.
It's amazing how much tension you feel
with a lot of people, stiff solid wrists.
Listen you've got to have some grip pressure,
but that should not and cannot,
if you're gonna be good at this,
translate into stiff wrists,
so play around with this factor,
this is our number one soft wrists.
And just get it to where you can feel
the club bounce a little bit
and feel it react a bit.
You may not hit solid shots at the beginning.
I'll try a small one here,
I'm gonna go for a little more softness
than I probably want to have,
so in other words a little more bounce.
Now it wasn't quite as much bounce as I wanted,
I could feel some, solid hit though,
that was a good thing to get these things loose.
Again you can have grip pressure
and still have loose wrists,
if you're stiff and you're hitting at the ball
the kind of thing I feel with people,
so often students when I stand there
you're in trouble right away
so learn to let the lag store, that's number one.
So here's the next one,
can you get the handle passed the ball?
We showed you that at the beginning of the video,
here's a great mental picture.
Picture a light beam, you could extend it up above
the golf club but from this view
what you're trying to do is,
it won't hurt your light beam,
break that imaginary beam,
get the handle passed the ball
before you go down and hit the ball.
It really isn't difficult to do,
as we said in the previous segment though,
if you're excessively bound to trying
to make solid hits not look like a fool out,
then miss hitting a few balls,
you'll hamper yourself.
So get the handle past the imaginary beam of light
and give yourself a little time
to try to arrange solid contact and sort it out.
All right, now as we talk about lagging the club
or adding lag and getting the handle past the ball,
certainly the body plays a role in that,
this video isn't primarily about that
but let's just give it a brief touch.
I think a good image for instance,
if this was a five-pound lead bar with no club head on it,
but it had a handle on it, heavy in other words
and I had to toss this 15 or 20 yards,
you can bet I would recruit the ground
and use my core and my glutes to try
to create some energy there,
in a really natural spontaneous sort of way.
That's all we're gonna say
for this video regards body motion, it does have a roll.
Just for the sake of what we're working on though,
just let it show up as it would
if you're really playing to a target out there
with a heavy Club,
not just trying to strike something underneath you.
So I said earlier in the video,
it doesn't work too well to try
to stick your arm in or hold angle,
I mean it might work for you,
but I haven't seen experientially teaching people golf
that it works out well.
What would be a better thing?
Well that's our third thing,
when you release, release it hard,
don't try to hold angle, try to release with energy,
let's look at that.
So release head just means to me,
transferring energy to the golf club,
going from bent wrists to straight wrists
and it really comes more through the wrists
then it does if you like from the wrist.
So, a good mental image I use in golf lessons a lot,
is if you had a wet leaf stuck to the club
and you had to flick it off,
what would that look like?
You decelerate, you'd feel some pop in the golf club there.
So, let's try that on a small scale to start with
and by the way I'm going to do it
on a miniature scale here,
you just see how easily you could pop
there or there or there.
Human beings can do this,
we get so tied into the ball
and looking at it and trying to hit it,
it's hard for us to make any adjustments.
So let's try it out here,
I'm gonna give it a good hard smack here,
a good hard release of the wrist.
I really felt some energy transfer down into
the golf club there.
Now probably if I was actually playing,
I'd have a little more body motion than that,
the club may not hit the ground quite as hard as that.
I don't care for this drill though,
let's try it again, let it store
and pop the imaginary wet leaf off the golf club.
Got a lot of energy in that one,
little on the thin side, one more.
That's more like it right there, really felt some sting.
Have some fun with this at the range,
don't do it at infinitum,
back off and hit some regular shots
and then back to the drill,
you'll have this thing sorted out.
Well thanks, I hope that was a helpful video for you.
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As always, appreciate your sitting through the video,
hope it's helpful to you
and hope these golf swing drills
will stop your early release.
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