The #1 Reason Golfers Are Inconsistent and How to Fix it Permanently

Do you find that you can play the first few holes ok and then the wheels start to fall off and you don't know how to get things back on track? Then this lesson is a MUST WATCH for you! After giving thousands of lessons over the past 25 years, helping golfers overcome the "consistency crux" has been my focus and exactly why I developed the DEAD Drill.

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Okay, all right, so tell me about your game, what's going on?

I am inconsistent, okay, very, very inconsistent.

And so I'm a nine handicap.

But I can go out one day and shoot 75, I can go out the next day and shoot an 88.

And it it almost is even within the round.

You know, I typically typically start out better than I finish.

I can sort of feel myself starting to, you know, lose my push line, push from the right sway.

But I don't seem to be able to get it back to where I am, where I, you know, I start, I think, to want more power.

And as as that occurs, it.

It starts to impact my whole game, probably mentally, too, you know, because it, it starts to impact everything, my short game, my putting and everything.

Once it's gone, I seem to have a very difficult time getting it back.

And I, I've you.

I haven't spent the time, probably, you know, I have a number of kids and I, you know, I travel a lot for business and probably haven't spent the time doing all the reps necessary.

To, you know, ingrain all of the things in in the entire dead drill.

But, and I know there's no shortcuts, but, you know, I just kind of like a checkup to see, you know what you're seeing.

And maybe one thing or two things that I can work on to improve that consistency and maybe to get it back, you know, once it starts going haywire out on the course.

Absolutely well, that's, that's my specialty.

So, uh, you know, the bedroom stuff is really there.

Specifically to be able to get you back on track in the middle of a round, that's okay.

And once you understand the the key points of what you really need to focus on, especially the ones that are specific to you, the things that you struggle with.

Like.

So when people talk about their, they're lacking consistency and and it degrades throughout the round.

Almost always it's the exact same thing, I mean, almost all, like percent of the time okay to fall into where people start to get their arms to to take over the backswing the body stops doing as much everything the tempo and and your pace starts to feel quicker because the arms can move much quicker than the body can and so the arms so everything starts to your everything starts to feel quick and then you start trying to hit the ball harder and you start to use your arms more and then everything is impossible to recover from and that's the whole point is that the simple truth of the matter is the golf swing when you're just focusing on how to use your body correctly is incredibly simple it's incredibly difficult when you try to do everything with your arms and hands if you think about how much my arm can move just from the shoulder socket this right this is moving the golf club right then my arm can rotate at the shoulder socket then my arm can bend then my forearm bones can rotate then my wrist can cock and hinge these things alone can move the golf club all over the place whereas your body can't really do much more than than this okay I can almost assure you that your consistency problems are are coming from the exact same stuff and so the cool thing is this is why the dead drill is done the way it is once you understand what you really focus on you're going to know how to get it back so do you have a place in your house where you can set the camera i can watch you make some yeah i think so let me just put it down here okay um and i got a seven iron perfect so i'm gonna i'm gonna record the screen here really tell am i too small too big nope that's totally fine okay okay okay let me see down the line okay is that okay perfect okay okay let me show you what's going on i'm going to share my screen okay all right so from face on got a great setup a couple little things i'll talk about more down the line you are set up a little bit behind the ball too much your head is quite a ways back so you could balance that out by just letting your head come forward just a little bit but that's not a that that's one little thing that will so the hips both the hips and the head yeah let everything come forward just a tiny bit i mean you're almost perfect but your head is just a little bit too far off the ball like okay where the ball would be your shaft is pretty much vertical so you could draw a straight line up from that i don't know if you can see my mouse cursing yeah i can see your mouse that's fine okay so you see where the mouse is is basically where the back of the ball would be yes part and you can see that your head's probably three inches behind that okay so so to make that i'll talk about that in a minute this is a small little adjustment but as i suspected what's really going on is all to do with the arms so even right off the ball the arms have moved quite a bit you can see i know it's a little tough because the the resolution the uh yeah i can see i can see it but you can see your right arm is totally bent already yeah and so because of that you don't make much of a full turn you know you made a bigger turn than this but it wasn't much bigger so this is exactly what i was talking about but we'll come back to it just a second great transition with the lower body so the big issue is just getting your body to be in control during the backswing and i'm going to show you exactly how to do that so right now we've already got a little bit of wrist set the arms have swung deep across the body which you'll see from down the line i'll show you that next okay so one little setup tweak here do you see how rounded your upper back is here yes so when your upper back is rounded like this it makes it really really easy for your arms to swing around all over the place so i'm going to i'm going to help you fix this and also when your back is rounded like this it makes it harder to turn so these two things alone are leading you into the position where you you are now where the arms kind of take over and then it's all just relying on your hand yes the hands are really deep here already your right arm should still be perfectly straight at this point in the swing but you can see it's got you know an 80 degree angle in it already yeah when that happens it just allows the the arms just to swing really deep and so your arms are really flat ideally this left arm is going to be a little bit above the right shoulder and this right elbow is going to move over in front of your body this is this can't happen unless you turn to move the club and i'm going to i'm going to walk you through all this stuff but but this is the issue when the arms are deep like this and the body hasn't really turned the arms are now in control of the entire swing and so that is what's going to cause us problems so let me show you the whole kit and caboodle how to fix this so first things first let's talk about setup because that's an easy one to fix right now your shoulders your upper thoracic back is really rounded like this right yes right so go ahead and set up like this and let your arms hang forward and your shoulders round how you normally would and feel how your arms at your shoulders can kind of move pretty freely yes right now do this take your shoulders and pull them back like military posture for a second yep and pull your head back as well there you go now keeping your shoulder blades back like that let your arms hang down just like they would in a golf setup there you go and feel how your arms can't freely move all over the place as easy right actually yeah i feel like i can hardly get them to wear the grip exactly that's a little bit of an exaggeration but what we're trying but you'll notice i'm not sure if you can see yourself but how much flatter your back is when you're set up like this yes okay when your shoulders round your arms can move all over the place like an orangutan right as soon as you come back into neutral posture your arms are now connected a little bit more to the sides of your rib cage and because your shoulder blades are engaged in the back your arms are now able to move more in sync with your body which means your body turn is what you're going to use to move the club now this is another important piece of this when you round your shoulders like this you can't turn very far like if i round my shoulders just like you have it and roll my chin forward like you have it that's as far as i can turn as soon as i pull my head back and i get my spine in neutral i can make a much bigger turn my spot my chin is back and my shoulders are back now i can make a huge turn by comparison and that's because you lock these to set joints in your vertebrae when you bend your spine like this and so each little facet joint gets kind of wedged up against the other and you can't rotate as freely so just that one setup change is huge so you've got to get to the point where your arms you don't want to pull them back so much that you can't get your hands on the club obviously that's the compromise we have to have them on there but it's going to be a little bit more that the right side is going to come forward a little bit because it's lower than the left but you can see that my back is still flat not rounded like this this makes sense yes okay so that's the first thing dramatically different it's going to feel radically different for sure but this is how you go from being a very armsy inconsistent golfer with a flat swing with the arms swinging around the body to a body controlled move the arms have to be connected to the ribcage and i don't mean connected like glued into the side they have to move freely but if you're way forward like this then the shoulders allow the arms to move all over the place and we just don't want that in golf because it just radically complicates things so proper posture spine and neutral now we can turn and that's the next piece once you have that feeling of your so you're going to get in posture you're going to have your shoulders back again you know don't rip them back like you're trying to do a back exercise just not nice normal relaxed posture but your shoulders are back put your arms across your chest keep your chin back you have a tendency to roll your chin forward i i was gonna say i i have a i have a sort of a bad neck and over the years i've sort of you know become more head forward just in everything in my life you know walking around anything i i have the exact same issue my neck is fused at c1 2 and 3 and my my lost the natural curvature in my neck because of this because i broke my neck and so my neck naturally wants to sit like this not curved back like somebody's normal so i have to consciously make myself keep my chin back and i even it feels uncomfortable because i'm so used to kind of being like this too so i get it so in golf i have to kind of just make myself do it so something more like this yeah so stay right there for just a second or go ahead and take your setup just like you were okay now let me show you that because that probably feels insane to you that it feels ridiculous exactly this is why this is why a video camera and a mirror are your best friend so this is your ridiculous setup wow yeah doesn't look so ridiculous right no huh no it feels like it it feels fun really strange but this is what you look like before right so now you can see a huge difference how your chin is buried in your chest your upper back is very rounded so you've taken your body out of a position where it can rotate freely and so you didn't have any choice but you use your arms so now with your crazy posture that looks like most tour pros right just this little change that your chin is up your chin was buried in your chest before your shoulders are way less rounded and now we have a chance to start the backswing off on the right foot so that's how important just a little setup change that's how important this stuff is because when you're rounded you can't turn and your arms can move freely you want the opposite you want to be able to turn and have your arms be more in sync with your body that's the whole secret to consistency you think about the most consistent stroke you have is your putting stroke right right putting stroke is because you take out all of the stuff that adds variability you take out your wrists your elbows your shoulders and you just kind of rock your shoulders back and forth and the further you get from the green as you start going to chip shots and pit shots and so on you start letting your arms and wrists swing more freely and your wrists set and so on but what you're doing is all arms and as you get further away from the greens you start adding speed and so you can add speed that way but it radically increases in consistency so we want to be take the same concept that you applied your putting stroke I don't want my arms to move any more than they have to right I want them to move as little as possible while I still have the speed that I need without adding any extra variables to the swing so for instance once you're set up properly now you're going to feel that the only reason this club is moving is because your body is turning my arms and wrists have literally done nothing whereas by this point you look like this right your right elbow is folded you can see that from down the line it's just your arm across your body and so this is just a you know the lazy way to swing it's just all arms and then of course you're going to have very inconsistent shots even as good of as you know what's good is that you have a lot of great stuff in your swing you move really well but you should be a one handicap not a nine and that's all because again when your arms swing flat and deep you have to take all of that back out of your swing my arms throughout the entire backswing literally move that much the entire backswing to me whereas yours are doing this right so I'll show you so I'm just going to turn I'm turning I'm turning I'm turning I'm turning I'm turning turning and then my arms have moved there to go back that's all that moves if I come out of my posture so you can imagine somebody moving their arms this much versus somebody moving their arms this much which one's going to be more consistent right so that's what we've got to get you to feel is that you start feeling body centric and that's what the dead drill is there for so that you get set up proper posture and then instead of thinking about your arms doing it all you rotate your hips are going to turn your upper body is going to turn you're going to feel a load in your lower body and your legs and your glutes and your arms aren't going to do much of anything so when you get off on the course that's the first thing you resort to you know I hit a bad shot you know it's because your arms took over you throw the club down and just do a couple of reps with just your body and then you can grab the club and do the same thing but you need to feel that your body is moving that club so if the club's moving during the backswing it's because your body's turning to move it does that make sense yes yeah so get set up for me and I want to get you doing the rotation the backswing stuff right from this correct setup first with the club or not without the club yeah just like just your body so good posture there you go you can hinge there you go nice wow that is just it feels so rad you can hinge forward from your hips a little bit more so you can see the ball there you go perfect now just turn back and just let your weight shift to the right hip socket and turn there you go good again let your head stay down looking at the ball there you go perfect again wow go back to the dress there you go all right let me show you this so feels pretty crazy again right yeah yeah all right all right so this is your crazy golf setup fight doesn't look very crazy now right just look see your spine looks nice and flat and obviously your spine has curvature in it but when you have a shirt on and you know we're set up here it's going to look nice and flat like this your chin is up your shoulders are no longer around it so you have good posture now you can turn really efficiently and then as you go back all right now you make a huge turn now you've made bigger much bigger than a 90 degree shoulder turn like right there is about 90 and you're able to still keep going that's probably 110 degree shoulder turn which is huge and because your spine is now neutral you can make this big turn so now all you have to do so we know that you can turn well going back we just have to get your arm to play nicely with this and that just means moving them as little as humanly possible so so that's a hundred percent of where the the i guess the i i guess i've been always doing that my whole life probably using my arm most people do it's the simplest if it wasn't for people overusing the arms i wouldn't have a job i mean it really is the whole essence of a rotary swing is learning to make everything body centered to move from the inside out i like to think as an oversimplified terms i like to think of the golf swing as like a merry-go-round right the kids sitting on the the middle of the merry-go-round ground isn't moving very fast right because right sitting on the center but the kids sitting just six feet away on the outside edge he's getting flung all over the place but technically they're moving at a constant rate in relation to each other right the golf swing you think the same way if your body's in control of the swing the body turn is not going to have to be that fast because your hands in club are the equivalent of the outside perimeter of the merry-go-round and that's why when you watch somebody like me hit the ball i hit the ball a long way if i don't look like i'm moving fast my body is is the engine it's the part of the merry-go-round in the middle that's moving everything and this stuff is just like spokes on a wheel what you've tried to do is make the spokes on the wheel move the wheel instead of the hub on the wheel move the wheel and so that's where you end up with all this incredible variability you can add every freaking variable under the sun it's all created typically by the arms as long as the body movement and you think about it the entire golf swing the entire back swing is that that's it if i can do that and just get my arms to essentially not move at all then they'll be in the perfect spot at the top like where yours were your club and hands and arms we're back here remember i showed you your right elbow was really low and deep deep this way and your left arm was below your shoulders your shoulder plane right so you looked kind of like this yeah right mine look like they're more in front of my body because i just didn't swing them around i didn't swing them much at all i turned and turned and turned from the inside turning turning turning and my arms barely move and that's the whole secret again it goes back to the putting i don't want my arms moving all over the place the putting stroke stroke because i'm just not going to be able to strike the ball consistently straight so what you've done is you have you have good hand eye coordination you have good overall body movement you've been playing golf a long time so you've just learned that sometimes when you glue it all together and your tempo and your rhythm and everything is perfect that gives you time to get your arms back in front of your body you can score well and on times where you feel like ah it's a windy day i need more power it's a long hole you swing your arms deeper so that just makes them even more tense which makes you have to fire them even more aggressively on the way down whereas the opposite is true when you want to hit the ball harder you need to load your body more to get that to move the club because then you can swing faster without any introducing any more variability you know you're not adding any more angle every angle that you put in the backswing you got to take out right so if you do your right arm if you do this at the top of the backswing and you bend it a lot well it's not like that at impact you have to take that out if you rotate your arms you got to take that out you swing them across your body you got to take that out and so what i'm trying to get people to do is to stop adding all those extra variables in the swing so that your swing becomes very simple and it's just the little tiny body movements that do the entire golf swing for you as long as you learn to do that which is again what the dead drill is for so well your next step good posture you know you're doing drills learning to get your body to do all the work well then you take your left arm and let it swing you're not trying to move your arm across your body you're trying to have your body move your arm does that make sense there's an important distinction yeah my body turned is moving my arm and that if i do that correctly then my arm goes exactly where i need it to so like this get my head back right yeah a little more hinge is that good hinge is good there yep and then this your arm doesn't even need to move up that much it's so so do this for me at first as an exaggeration feel like your arm doesn't move there you go like it doesn't move at all right you're just turning wherever your arm goes is where it goes there you go wow so now let it go up a little bit more not not even that much in between those two it's just a tiny bit of movement more across so it's got to swing across to your so watch me for a second yeah so when you're going back and you're looking in a mirror later here's what i want you to be paying attention to as you go to the top and turn your left arm is going to be almost even with your shoulders you see that yeah this would be below my shoulders this would be way above my shoulders when you're going left arm only it's going to be pretty much in line with your shoulders and your hand is going back behind yeah it's got to swing across a little bit like that i'll video it and i'll show you this is where a mirror will radically speed this up so do that again for me a couple times i feel like i'm almost getting a reverse weight shift there okay you may be so that's why you need to look at it both face on and down the line so i'll come to that in a second let me uh show you so here's what you just did so you see how your arm hasn't swung across yet yeah way over here wow yeah you did a good job using your body to move the arm that's the first key but then you just got to relax your arm and let swing across over here a little bit more ah okay and then you mentioned like you know you're kind of feeling like you're reverse pivot so when you're practicing and you start focusing on just backswing stuff it's really easy to fall into that habit which is why you need to take if you don't have mirrors both behind you here and then i i also i ordered that uh live stream camera the live view is awesome that's perfect so i think you can see face on and down the line because i can do if i was just looking at my arm i can do this and oh it looks good in the mirror this way but i lean my spine i reverse pivoted right that's why it's really important to always watch both because it's easy to fall into that habit of just starting to reverse pivot when you're just focusing on where your arms are off the backswing so now let's get you back up there so now you did this before and now we're there you go now go up there again one more time just like you did and stop at the top okay stay right there now bring your right arm up to support the left arm because it feels heavy yeah but like you're taking your golf grip okay almost do it one more time for me so all the way from the beginning yep turn that a boy now take a look at the difference all right oh wow yeah well that's yeah so there you go over and that is just about perfect the camera angle is going to make see how you see a little gap here between your arms this is normal but part of this is just the camera is sitting a little bit low if the camera was up a little bit this gap would kind of go away and your arm would look like it's more on playing with your shoulders but you know that's a variable you can have a little bit of elevation or i like to minimize as much as possible and i use the right elbow as the reference i want the right elbow to be no higher than the base of the pec any more of that we just don't need that much but you can see from that compared to you know where you started this stuff will start to make sense now that's how much extra your arms are moving than what you needed so when we go from that to this one we have way better posture all right and then as we get this all to work together you can see that your arms just kind of do way less in the swing so we've just really cut all the extra stuff out and from there coming down piece cake but we have to be able to get there first so that's why the dead drill starts out body only make sure your setup is good posture is a huge thing you have to have good posture because it frees up your turning and it makes your arms stay more in sync with your body then you know you're going to keep focusing on getting these body movements down when you feel like those are good you add the left arm once you have that you add the club just like you know again this is the stuff that's on the videos on the site so i would just start upside down check it swing it up there bring my right arm up to support it that's the whole golf swing and you just slowly start getting to the point where that is your whole drill is being able to do that whole thing on the course you know in between shots you're you're going up and getting your arms up where they're supposed to be you're moving them way less and that's how you get get things back together when a round starts to fall apart because i promise you when you start to feel like ah my swing's leaking oil i'm not sure what's going on and you know things are starting to get a little loose it's the arms 100 it's always okay perfect yeah no i appreciate it that's great first time i've ever been in that position i think yeah and it's just it's just moving less i mean that's what i always tell people like the whole reason you're inconsistent or you're struggling with something is because you're just doing too much and it's just the simple truth of it is but it if you've gotten in a habit now you've probably been playing a long time where you've swung this way your whole life that reversing that brain pattern that movement pattern in your brain it just takes reps and that's why you just have to be mindful of these little details like setup posture that type of stuff again remember i mentioned your head is a little bit far back from the wall so just taking a more neutral posture getting all that stuff out and then just doing that drill just learning to turn making that what moves the club instead of your arms and hands and then that's what leads to consistency because you're just taking out i mean how much can your body do wrong there's only so much it can do it's not moving that much you think about you know like how much your hip moves in the back swing it's like six inches right right your shoulders move about 10 to 12 inches but your hands are moving like six feet in that same span right they're traveling on this big wide circle so when you and then the club's moving like 12 feet so you can try and control something moving back behind you really quickly that's moving 12 feet it's pretty tough to do or you can learn to just move your you know your hip and your upper body a few inches and when you do that that's what's controlling the movement of the club then the club goes where it's supposed to because you're just not doing anything extra with your arms if your arms are doing literally almost relatively nothing during the entire backswing here i haven't moved them at all it's a perfect takeaway i've just turned my body and now i'm going to keep turning my body keep turning my body keep turning my body keep turning my arms barely moved they need to be right no problem so you have questions on what what you need to do next to work on your swing uh no i so you're you think um do i need to go back through the whole bed drill thing again or you need to make sure that you have good posture is set up every time that's yes unnegotiable you can't play like this you'll always be armed and then you need to just start stacking these pieces back in it you you turned really well right i don't need to teach you how to turn you're turning properly so you need to then make sure that as you're adding these pieces in like you went right to a great spot at the top when you had just your left arm only and your body turn and brought the right arm up to support it so you can get to that you can already skip ahead to all that right now can you the next step can you do that left arm swing up to the top and bring the right arm to support it with a club that's the next step if you can do that then we can start adding speed we can start adding down swing stuff and so on so everything on that's on the site with the dead drill is like meant to be progressive so you just stack a little piece on stack a little piece on and push yourself to go as far as you can until you screw it up right if all of a sudden you start falling back into your arms being deep and you know you have too many things you're trying to juggle because this feels so different at the top then you just gotta take a piece off and spend a you know spend a couple days practicing that so that you're like okay now i've got it where i can do it with the club my arms don't go deep etc so that's really the key is is constantly challenging your brain but don't going don't go so far that you just start doing it wrong that doesn't do us any good right so that that's the key to practicing that challenge push it but stop at a point where you're like starting to mess it up a little bit and drill at that spot and then challenge you know give yourself a few days doing reps on that and then try and stack another piece on it and once you have the whole thing as one drill which is the depth drill is meant to be the entire golf swing it's not just a takeaway drill right it's the whole thing all the way into the release as one rep that's what we're trying to do is if we can get all the way to the top of the backswing and all the way to the follow through correctly then we just want to groove that we want to keep doing those repetitions and it doesn't have to be hitting balls it doesn't have to be swinging a club this is still putting your brain training your brain to move your body correctly from a correct setup so those are good reps to get in there as well okay um just one more quick question on the on the squat to square do you actually like feel that in your swing or is that you don't okay not at all it's it's more like the golf swing really doesn't have positions per se right things that you're moving through right but in order to get somebody who has no idea what to do with the downswing right you got to imagine you know in over 10 000 lessons i've given in person i've seen everything under the sun for people who are really really great and making millions on tour and i've seen guys who have you know i had them do a throw the ball drill once and i had a guy go to the top and said okay i want you to do the throw the ball drill and hit the ball at the ground and he did this and hit himself in the foot so so you have to kind of balance it out right so when i'm writing stuff into chunks you know to learn that transition move it's just to help people understand you know what that's going to be like what you're trying to do because they do this or they do all kinds of other funky stuff that move happens so fast in a swing that i couldn't possibly consciously think about i'm moving through that but it looks like i'm squatting but it you know it's happening in like a hundredth of a second okay all right makes sense yeah so i'm going to concentrate on that one thing then because i that's that's part of the problem is once you get out there you're trying to change things you know you get 16 thoughts going through your head then you know it just gets so mind-boggling you can't really control it yeah you cannot think on the golf course at all and it's even hard to even think on the range hitting balls and if you do you just need to pick one thing but when you're at home in front of a mirror and when you can control and be in a controlled environment we can really just focus on your body movements that's where your thinking is done you go up to the course like you got to pick one thing and that one thing maybe you know what it might just be set up at first because you can't think set up and backswing stuff but it'll start to all come together as you hit balls but you really need to do the work away from the course that's the more valuable work in front of the mirror okay all right thank you yeah very good i appreciate it absolutely all right man take care all right we'll see you bye bye