(club hitting ball)
- Hi, Adam Bazalgette here, founder of Scratch Golf Academy.
Today's subject, how to shallow the club
and hit longer drives.
I'll show you what that means.
It's a term you've probably heard a fair bit of.
I'm gonna give you a couple drills that I think will
really help you put it into practice.
And if you do it, you will hit longer drives.
(intense music)
Well just briefly, if you're new to the channel
or if you watch the videos and haven't
subscribed before, I'd really appreciate it
if you'd hit that red subscribe button.
Helps me build the channel, helps me bring you
more free content.
Next to it, as well, is that little bell,
you'll wanna hit that, then you'll be notified
every time a new video comes out.
So, go ahead and do that if you would please,
and let's have a look at this whole business
of shallowing the club.
(club hitting ball)
So, what is this business of shallowing the club?
What do we mean by that?
It's pretty important, let's have a look at the
pros first, then we'll start to break it down.
- There's Ricky Fowler on the left,
Charles Howell on the right,
two great drivers of the ball.
What we call shallowing the club,
let's look at both these guys and their backswing.
If you look at the plane there which is
pretty darn good on both of them,
in each case the club comes done in a flatter plane.
Now, I've picked two guys that do this a good,
good deal to make it more obvious,
but you can see it comes down in a flatter plane,
and when the club's coming in more level to the ground
and flat that way, that's just a term we,
or that's a term some of us are being shallow.
Steep is coming down this way.
So, not every great player gets it down quite
as shallow as they do or quite as flat as they do.
Some players, let's take Rory McIlroy,
trade a, most people trade their driving ability with his.
If you look at Rory on the way back there,
and you look at him on the way down,
it really isn't dramatically different.
It's slightly, slightly more behind him,
but the angle of the shaft isn't different,
but that's okay, it's perfectly, perfectly acceptable
and in a nice approach to the ball.
Well out here, the beautiful mediterra 15th hole
on the north course, you'll need to get the club
in a good position to hit a decent drive from
the back tees or you're gonna be losing the ball.
But let's have a look here for a second
why does shallowing the club help you hit it further?
Well two things, really.
First off, and let's not even call this a reason,
that's the design of the club.
You start redesigning the club in the downswing
and swing it on a totally different angle,
probably not gonna be that good.
But here's the two reasons why getting that driver
nice and shallow builds more distance.
Number one, when the club is further back here
on the downswing, it is three dimensional,
it is further from the golf ball than when it's up here.
This isn't as much distance, so the longer you can
keep it back there, the more whip and more speed it
has as it comes in.
And number two, now picture doing this with your hand.
If there was a coffee table in front of you,
if you come from the side of your body,
you sweep and go more up and out.
If you come from out here, you hit more down,
so you need to hit a driver level to slightly
up there if you're gonna really maximize
your distance.
That is almost impossible to do when you're steep,
the club goes down too much on the ball.
So those are our two big reasons, compelling reasons
I might add.
Let's have a look at our first drill then that
I think might help you get the feel for it.
So, believe it or not, here's our first drill,
hitting some balls off your knees with a driver.
If you want, you get a towel underneath you so
you keep your knees clean.
Let me whack one here and I'll show you from
this angle why this is so helpful and how to
translate it to your regular swing here.
Let's have a little rehearsal.
(club hitting ball)
Decent shot, let's have a look.
So, why does this foster the feeling of being shallow?
Well, my hands are so near the ground if I don't
keep everything pretty much in a circle fairly close
to the ground, not gonna hit two good shots in a row,
lucky to hit two good shots out of 50.
So, you can start to get this feeling of this almost
circular swing around your body, and kind of feed off that.
Now, let's have a go here and then we'll talk about
how to apply a little bit.
It's an old ball by the way.
It's about a one in 20 chance I'm gonna
be finding this one, but let's have go.
(club hitting ball)
That was a good drive right there,
it's not gonna make it over.
The feeling, though, you don't wanna hit like
a lot of shots like that in a row.
You wanna do that, then maybe make a practice swing
about belt-high to feel it, and then just drop it down here.
And again, you'll start to get the sense the club's coming
in much more level to the ground.
You can even do this at the house or in the basement
or something.
Get the towel down, work your way up,
swing from here then there, and just go back and forth
until you start to build some feel.
It's kind of fun as well.
So our second drill, and this is much a proof to you
that you can do it as it is a drill.
Take a towel, grip it with both hands in this instance,
and just make a little golf swing there,
not super hard to do, what's the big deal.
Well, play around, see if you can hit yourself
behind the legs, see if you can take it back and
swing over there.
Of course you could, of course you could swing
this way steep.
It's as easy to do that with a golf club.
Now listen, if you lock in and mentally you've gotta
hit a good shot and solid contact, you can forget it.
You won't change it that much, you have to
playfully relax, allow for some silly hits,
maybe just swing at the tee for a couple minutes.
The one caveat to this drill is if you're gonna
swing more there to feel a shallow swing,
don't whip the club back there,
take it back correctly,
take it back normally,
then just swing one out in that direction.
Play around with the golf club a little bit
without the ball first, then with it.
Add some speed, you can shift this thing around.
Now sometimes, let me just say this,
when you start to feel something really new
and change something, you can get a bad mixture of
some of your old tendencies with some of the
new feelings in the golf club, and run into some problems.
Let's have a look at a pro, and look at the body motions,
and then we'll show you how to combat that pit fall.
So in my experience of working with golfers,
the golfers that get steep on their downswing,
which is many players,
usually the steepness leads either to some
raising or sometimes some excessive side bend
this way, just trying to mitigate it a little bit.
So sometimes when a player first starts to get
the feeling for how the club should shallow out,
or at least stay on a fairly level plane,
then they have a little bit too much of that
old backup body motion, and they start to dropkick shots
way back there.
It's okay for a little while when you're just
trying to get used to it,
but most of time, let's say this,
most of the time it's not that they're too shallow,
it's that their body's out of position.
So, the cure I would say for that,
don't back off on the shallowness.
Now obviously I can't see you on film,
but I'm assuming this,
don't back off on getting shallow.
Just feel like once that club's gotten shallow,
it isn't easy at high speed to feel exactly
where your body is or re-manipulate it
without losing flow in the swing.
So once it's shallow, just get the feeling that you,
the bottom section of your swing is chased around,
and chased more level to the ground and less up this way
just a little bit 'til you get the feel of it.
So, there's my shallow feeling.
And again, you gotta release a driver,
you can't just place it in position and hit it
any good at all.
So, once this is here, again, just feel like you
can chase that club through a little bit
until such times as you're getting fairly clean
hits and you're not drop kicking it.
So, let's see how I do.
(club hitting ball)
Well, I hit it in the hill, but it's a,
I didn't drop kick it, it's a reasonable hit.
So, there's Adam Scott, driver extraordinaire.
Let's look at him first hitting maybe,
it looks like a wedge or a niner on there,
on the picture on the right.
And let's look at him as he comes down
pretty much, back him up just a touch there,
pretty much straight up the left side.
Let's check it out with the driver
of course he's a little bit more behind the ball
at address.
And as he goes to hit it there, hips not so different,
upper body definitely a little bit more back on the ball.
This helps him hit it a little bit more with an upward hit,
but it's not dramatically different, and if we look
at him at the finish, or close to the finish,
let's say, we'll get them both close to the finish.
They are, again, a little but different,
but not dramatically different.
So, subtle differences for the driver, not drastic.
Well, I hope you found that helpful.
Would really appreciate it if you liked the video,
that you hit the thumbs up button.
Again, helps build some momentum for the channel,
helps us bring you content.
Hope these are helpful thoughts to you.
Feel free to put any questions or comments,
if you'd like, down in the question box down there.
I'll get to those.
And of course, you know, the big theme here is shallowing
the club, it'll get you more distance.
Hope these thoughts will help you.
(funky music)