- Welcome back!
Adam Bazalgette, two-time PGA Teacher
of the Year Award winner down here in Naples, Florida.
Wanna talk today about a really important topic,
how to hit a driver straight.
Stay tuned!
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Well, how to hit a driver straight.
We're gonna look at what it takes to hit a driver straight.
There's three things you have to do.
I'll show you those.
And then we're gonna look at a little drill
that has multi-faceted if you like,
and think will get you on the right track
and at least give you something
to sort of sink your teeth into.
Okay, let's get started.
So let's try to tackle this subject a little bit now.
Let me just say to you.
Hey, there's no easy answer on this one.
There actually is an easy answer.
There's a direct answer, but there's no shortcuts.
Let's put it that way.
Now, the fact is, no matter what I say
or what you read, if you're gonna hit your driver straight,
you have to have solid contact
pretty near the middle of the club face.
Next thing you have to have is
the direction your swing is going in.
The swing path right around impact has to be pretty true
to where you're trying to hit it.
And of course, the final thing,
and this is a biggie, club face has to be
nice and square to the target
and square to the swing in that case.
If you don't do those three things,
it doesn't matter what else you do,
it's just not gonna go that straight.
So that's a little challenging.
Gonna try to give you a drill that'll help you with that.
Let me just say one other thing.
When you're developing your skill as a golfer,
when you're trying to learn to be a decent golfer,
let's take someone at the ground level.
The first thing you've gotta do
whether it's a wood or an iron,
is hit the ball reasonably solidly.
Until you can hit the ball fairly solidly,
you can't make any real progress.
The next thing, and maybe this surprises you to hear it,
isn't so much hitting it straight,
it's learning how to build some speed
and some power so you can get the ball out there
a decent distance, shorten the golf course up,
and start playing some more regulation kinda holes.
That's the next real skill.
And then the final skill,
is bringing your directional cone more together.
Now, obviously, they relate to each other a little bit,
but the tour pro, believe me, has mastered the solid hit.
They've got plenty of distance.
The final thing they're always working on
is honing in their directional control.
So I mentioned this just to say,
hey, you can't work on accuracy
in a vacuum of solid contact and decent speed.
You've gotta be able to do it in that context.
But for the purposes of this video,
we're gonna assume that you've mastered it.
We hadn't mastered, at least have reasonable contact
and speed and you're really interested
in how you can groove the direction of your shots.
So, let's have a look at a drill here
that I think will help you.
So let's have a look at this drill
from a couple different angles.
Now, number one this is just an alignment rod
that's perpendicular to the direction I'm trying to go in.
This is something, by the way,
you can practice at home with the grouting in the tiles
or the edge of your carpet or whatnot,
but just lay a club on the ground there.
And what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna place that
about where the golf ball would be,
and I'm gonna begin to map on a small scale,
even though I'm coming from the inside,
what it's like at the bottom to be going
directly perpendicular to that.
And as I'll show you in a second,
to get the face square to that.
Now let me just interject one thing here,
I've been talking golf and struggling playing golf
and you name it for decades,
so I've been around this thing
and really seen some of the things that work and don't work.
Believe me, it's a game of a stick and the ball.
At the end of the day, if you're gonna be a good golfer,
you have to have feel for the club,
where the club is.
I'm not saying you play golf by consciously manipulating
the golf, but you have to learn skill with the club.
And that's where it begins.
Learn to control the golf club a little bit.
It's a fallacy to think that just by putting
some tip in your head like turn more or shift my weight
that magically you'll gain control over the club.
You likely won't.
Your subconscious might over time
create some skill in spite of yourself,
but learn to control the club.
And learn to feel it, and learn to get
more skilled with the club.
Let's have a look from another angle.
Now as we look close-up from this angle
let me just say to you,
if you were to smack your left hand with your right hand,
your right hand would consistently and easily square up.
You wouldn't hit with the heel one time
or the fingers another time.
So you have this kinda built in there
and that's really what you're trying to do
with this club this way.
One very important thing though as you do it,
you've still got to apply pressure to the ball.
So when you come in and you rehearse this,
rehearse a more bent right wrist as you square it up
and a more bowed flat left wrist
and that will give you consistency
and speed and control over the club.
So as you rehearse coming to square,
you make sure you feel like you could apply
pressure to the golf ball.
And again, I can map that club face against
that stick there a little bit.
Once I've done it a little bit, I'll play around.
And I'll come in let's say a little closed,
a little open, and then back to square.
And I can start to map out with that,
what's gonna be a nice square position at impact
and what's gonna consistently let me
put pressure against the ball.
Okay, so let's say we've mapped it out a little bit now.
I'm starting to get a feel now
for coming in flush to the stick
both in turns of direction and club face.
I've got a sense of what my hand should do.
Course now we gotta hit a few golf shots.
Now, let me jump in here with something.
This is Dr. Scholl's foot spray.
You can get it at any hardware store.
I shouldn't say hardware store, drug store.
And it is fantastic for mapping out contact.
I said at the beginning of this video
no matter what I think or you think,
there's three things you've gotta do
if you're gonna hit the driver straight.
We've talked a little bit about swing path
and club face now, but you still have to hit
the ball in the middle of the club face.
It just isn't gonna work if you don't do that.
Now, I've played golf for 40 years,
taught golf full-time for nearly 30,
I literally have watched millions
of golf shots fly in my life.
You probably have a parallel in your career
if you've been around a long time and done it for a while.
And what that's given me the ability
to do amongst other things,
I can tell pretty much from the sound
and the way the ball's flying,
pretty much where on the club face
that player hit it.
Toe-to-heel, low-to-high, it's just not that difficult
when you've watched as many shots as I have.
You likely though, don't have nearly that much experience,
so this is the key.
Get this foot powder.
Give it a little spray there, and just spray that face off.
Every few shots wipe it off and repeat.
But you'll get beautiful print marks on that,
will tell you exactly where you're hitting it.
And I'm telling you, even if you don't know,
exactly why it's off-center,
starting to train your eye and just getting
feedback will do wonders for your mind
on this critical, critical component.
So, I'm gonna rehearse it a couple of times
here after talking there, getting my feel.
I'm gonna start with a nice small swing here.
Out she goes.
A little bit too much to the left.
Have a look at the contact on that club face.
Pretty good heel-to-toe, a little higher than I would like.
So that gives me instant and complete feedback on that.
And again, I just fiddle with it and keep mapping it out,
ratchet the speed up and take it down, et cetera.
We'll talk about that in just a second.
And I'm getting feedback,
and I'm training and building skill there.
And as I say, I love that you can do this at home.
Okay, let me give you a couple of closing thoughts here
that I think will help you put it together
or at least help put it into practice.
I was lucky enough in my early years
at David Leadbetter to see a lot of tour pros
up close and personal practicing their games,
practicing their techniques.
Faldo, I guess, stuck out to me the most
in the way he went about things.
But what I noticed was that these top players
when they're working on an element of their swing,
and we've been working on this drill,
they'll work on it on a small scale as I've suggested.
And then they'll ratchet it up and try to hit it
on a little bit bigger scale.
We've talked a bit about that.
But they will come back to the small scale frequently.
Whether that's size of swing or pace of swing
or whether it is, something that allows them to feel
what they're doing and get it back to a small scale,
kind of rediscover, if you like,
or re-hone that skill and then back up to the big scale.
Most people, and I've watched these for decades,
they may do a few drills,
but once the blood gets pumping
and they're really whacking some balls,
they're not coming back to small scale.
They're whacking until the bucket's done.
Don't get caught into that trap.
Have the poise to keep coming back
and getting the feel back.
Second thing is, once you've grooved something a little bit,
once you've put it in there,
you don't need to think about it that much.
You don't need to sit and grind
in your mind and try too hard.
A lot of this stuff we're talking about here is near impact.
That happens very, very quickly.
The brain is amazing.
With enough training and enough storage
and a clear enough picture of what you're doing,
if you just maintain that nice, clear intention
and that sense of being outside your head,
trying to feel what you're doing.
You will be able to do it,
or at least you'll gain skill in doing it.
And you'll learn how to do it well.
So don't make the mistake of thinking too much.
And if you're like, trying to over-control and try too hard.
Hope this helps you.
Well I hope you found that helpful
with how to hit a driver straight.
If you like the video,
please subscribe to the channel.
Would love to get you more free content.
Plenty more coming your way in the future we hope.
ScratchGolfAcademy.com is my website.
You have full courses in every aspect of the game
including the driver there.
Hope you'll check that out.
Thanks again!
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