Phase 1 Follow Along
Learn how to practice your golf swing productively and follow along with a pro in this practice session. You'll learn how to enter your scores into our AI ScoreTracker so the system can guide your progress.
Welcome to the first follow along video for phase one in the C4 program. What this is all about is teaching you how to practice effectively and efficiently. Because the worst thing you can do is practice wrong because not only do you ingrain bad habits, but you literally go backwards. So you want to make sure that you're practicing the correct way. And that's what this is all about. You're gonna follow along with me exactly the way that you should practice.
So I've got my seven iron here and what you're gonna do first is to break up your practice sessions into sets of 10. And that's how you'll enter your scores on the site as you'll see in just a moment. But what you're gonna do is just take outta your pile of balls that you're gonna hit for the day. Take 10 balls.
This is my focal point. I'm not worried about the rest of those piles of balls. It's not quantity it's quality. In fact, you'll see, as you enter your scores in the score tracker on the site, that there's actually a limit to how many shots you can enter per day, because practice needs to be productive and going out there and pounding a thousand balls mindlessly, without focusing on what you're doing, is completely counterproductive. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna cordon everything off into, into sets of 10 so that we can focus on what we're trying to do. And in phase one, it's all about learning how to hit the ball dead straight. To do that, we're hitting our five checkpoints that I covered in the phase one view. So I'm not gonna go over that here. We're just gonna start going through and getting some practice reps in before we actually start hitting balls and checking our checkpoints.
We know all the checkpoints by now, flat wrist, shoulders, square hips, open, left leg straight, right foot rolled in. And we're gonna just kind of hold off that follow through right now in phase one, to make sure that we've got the clubface square, becuase if we stop, we can see, well, is the club phase open? Is it shut? So this is this trick to learning how to hit the ball very straight is learning how to control these impact conditions.
So then as you go to start hitting balls, these are gonna be very, very short at first. And the great thing about phase one is you can do this in your backyard with whiffle balls or foam balls. You don't have to be hitting real balls at first, if you don't have a chance to make it out to the course. Of course we want you hitting balls so that you get over that little white devil phobia that we all have after we're doing our drills. So this is important to move up to real balls when you can, when you can get out to the range.
So now I've done some practice SWS reps here and just working on getting that same feeling, that same position over and over again. And then I'm gonna hit one. One last thing before I start two questions that you guys ask me all the time, uh, one, where do these balls go? Don't worry. They're going on our land. They go down to the racetrack and we pick 'em up with our lovely labradoodle, Briar. And the second thing is no, that's not a green screen. Those are the lovely San Juan mountains of Colorado. So now they've got those two things outta the way. Let's go ahead and hit a couple here. And as I'm doing this, I'm gonna talk you through practicing, what you need to be thinking about what you need to focus on and don't expect to hit every shot. Perfect. The goal is to get you to hitting 8 out of 10, consistently straight hitting it into our little grouping pattern, getting the ball to start on the same line over and over again so that we get used to getting into those impact conditions. So as we're going through this, I'll talk you through the mistakes that I make, the things I do, right. And we'll go from there.
Okay. So now all I'm doing, I'm checking my checkpoints, looking where the club face is. Obviously, if I go past the impact position, if I don't stop right at impact, cuz I have a little bit too much momentum. The club face should be starting to close a little bit. My left wrist is still flat, elbow down the line here. My shoulders are square. Hips are open weights on this lead leg. I can pretty much lift my right foot up and the ball happened to fly where I wanted it to. So that's a good thing.
Now of course, this is, this is a little bit shorter. You're gonna be hitting these balls 10, 15 yards. Um, so they're gonna go a little bit longer. This isn't long enough off this tee box here to see where the ball stopped, but you wanna see them all flying of the same direction, same trajectory, same line and ending up in a grouping, a couple yards on either side of your starting line there. No more than that. So that's 1 out of 10. We're going for here.
Another good one. Now I Dropkick that one, just the tiniest bit and you might have caught that on camera. And this is something I want to talk about here real quickly when you're doing these follow alongs and you're starting to hit these balls with the little nine to three swing or really nine to six, as we're stopping at impact, you're not gonna have time to make a full weight shift. You don't have all the momentum you don't have all the time. So it's okay when you're doing this to either preset your weight a little bit more on the lead leg and not quite shift so far back in your back swing, or just be a little bit more aggressive with your weight shift. But the truth is you just don't really have a lot of time for a weight shift. So the weight shift's gonna be pretty small, pretty minimal during this phase.
But if you find yourself hitting it fat, and of course, when we go to our scores in a moment, I'll show you know, you can select that you're hitting it fat and then the system will recommend videos based on your trends of how you're striking the ball, whether or not, uh, what you need to focus on. But the first thing that you're gonna pay attention to just getting starting with that pressure a little bit more on the lead side, or just being a little bit more aggressive with your pressure shift back to the lead side.
Here we go. That one was better. So I've got 3 out of 10 so far here that are acceptable. Another good one. So I'm just repeating it. I'm checking my checkpoints each time. Now I'm gonna go through this really quickly in my head because I know what these checkpoints are, but I just start feeling like okay, as my foot rolled in, are my hips open is my pressure on my lead side, that I have the face square as the ball, which is now starting to be my guide. If I did this right, the ball should be coming out very much on the same line every time. Now I'm gonna do a couple incorrectly so that I can start to show you the tendencies that you're gonna see happen. So you've seen, uh, the first five have been, you know, pretty much right on the same line.
Now I'm gonna do one incorrectly. Now, what did you see there? So you can see that the ball went a little bit, right? And from the face on view, the club face was a little bit open. And then as I got, as it carried past the impact position a little bit, it wasn't closed a little bit. It was actually still a little open or even square. That's showing you that you're not letting the club face get down to a square position. And when we get into the release phase in phase two, that you would be holding off the release and that's what creates those dreaded slice balls. So to fix that, we gotta go back and just do a couple practice swings and make sure you've get that club phase squared up at impact and check it. If you've got an impact bag, use the impact bag to stop yourself right at impact. And you can always back it down a little bit. So I'll hit this one even shorter. This is the tricky part. When you're trying to hit these really short and you don't have enough weight shift or enough time to get the weight shift. So I'm gonna put a little bit more weight on the lead side of it. Address and make a short swing again. There we go. So I'm just checking as I can stop it closer to impact whether or not that face is square. Once I've got that down, I'm gonna go back, make a little bit longer swing. There we go.
So each time I'm just going through my checkpoints. Did the ball come out straight? Did I hit it clean? Did I hit it in the center of the face? If I hit one off the toe, which I'll do here, watch what happenes. So now I hit that one off the toe. I get a rebate on that one. And what happened there? If I held my follow through, you'll see that my shoulders were open. You'll remember the video, moving the fulcrum on the site, that if you're trying to rotate your shoulders to hit the ball, you'll start wiping it off the toe. So those types of things are what you wanna start paying attention to. If you're hitting it off the toe, put that when you're entering your score in the system so that you can see the system can see, oh, you keep continuing to do the same thing. Here's how you fix that issue.
If you're hitting it off the heel, I'll hit one off the heel here, the old dreaded shank, what did I do? My right heel popped up my knee, moved into the ball. My heel moved into the ball, which moves my pelvis into the ball, causing me to lose my posture, my elbow and the arms don't have room to bring the club down. So of course the club is gonna work out toward the ball.
So again, when you're making these mistakes, hitting it off the toe fat, thin, whatever, hitting it too high. If I start to flip my wrist, enter that in your scores, which we're gonna do now. So let's take a look at how you enter your scores. You can do it right on the range, right from your phone. Let's take a look at that.
When you are entering your scores in shot tracker, you will see your previous shots here, your tendency and the membership average over time. You'll see, hopefully over time. As you do more sets that your tendency, your scores will improve. And of course you can track your history with all your notes here, but let's add a shot real quick. So let's just say that I got 8 out of 10 there and 10 to hang back and hit some fat shots. So I'll put a couple notes in there. I'm also gonna enter some positive notes. Golf beats us up enough as it is. So I want to reflect on the stuff that I'm doing really well. Uh, and which is everything else is really solid. Um, you know, I'm con my shot shots are coming out straight and
I have a solid impact position. So give myself a little bit of reinforcement there. And then my tendency though, when the shots that I do miss tended to be fat, I tended to hang back a little bit, uh, no bonus challenge, no bonus challenge in, in phase one. So we just select no there and hit submit. And so, as I do that, it'll say shots were added. I'll see that in real time that my history was updated here. And then I will see that my progress through phase one will be updated here. And in real time, my shot tracker will be updated as well. So that's how you enter shots in there. And as you enter these shots, it updates the entire system. And as you enter enough shots and the system learns enough about your tendencies, you'll start getting recommended videos based on those tendencies.
All right. So now that you know how to use the system to enter your scores, the system can start tracking your trends and start recommending the right videos, that the perfect time for you with what you're struggling with right now. Now I'm just gonna go through a normal practice routine where I'm not gonna talk through it so much, but you can kind of get into the rhythm and flow. I'll still talk through the faults and mistakes that I make if I make any, but this is what you want to be doing. When you're practicing, you're gonna be focused on what you're doing. You're gonna be concentrating on what you're doing, and that's why we break it up into a set of 10 balls. So you don't have to think, oh God, I'm gonna hit a thousand balls here and just rattle through them. We wanna be really focused on each set of 10. And that's again, of course, how the system is gonna score you is on each set of 10. So now I'm gonna focus on what I'm doing and have a normal little practice session here.
Okay? Chunk that one a little bit. I was late with my pressure shift. My hands felt a little tense, totally normal. So I'm just gonna practice getting that out of there. Put a little bit more pressure on the lead side, as I'm doing these drills. There we go. Kept my head down. Pressure shift was better there. You could hear the quality of the strike was a lot better. We got one outta two. Another chunky one. So I'm laid on my pressure shift. And again, this is gonna be one of the most common things that you're gonna struggle with when making these little swings, because we don't have all that time to make a normal pressure shift. So again, just gotta remind myself to put a little bit more pressure on the lead side to start out, and then we get a good strike.
Here we go. These are all coming out the same line, same trajectory you see, they're gonna fly very low. You'll notice as kind of part of my practice routine. As I set up, I'm setting up my normal setup, and then I'm just kind of moving a little bit more weight into the lead side, helps ensure that cleaner strike. Still checking my checkpoints. I know that my shoulders are nice and square. The ball's coming out nice and straight pressure shift. I'm getting that right foot to roll in. Making short little back swings.
Perfect. So I got 8 outta 10. I botched a couple early on. So I'm just gonna go and enter my scores. 8 outta 10. My tendency was to hit it a little fat, which again is gonna be common. I'm gonna give you some recommended videos. The system's gonna recommend videos based on the shot tendencies that you have. And if you're hitting it great, don't worry about you don't have to select anything. You're just, you're hitting pure every time. That's awesome. But that's what we wanna see. We wanna have a very focused practice session, 10 set, 10 balls at a time. That's a set. Now you can go back, enter your scores after each set. So you don't forget what your score was. And then go back, rake over another set of 10 and whatever you were struggling with. Try and practice that.
So like I mentioned, I was hitting a little bit chunky. If you're hitting it off the toe and turning your shoulders, you wanna practice kind of keeping your, your shoulders. Once you turn 'em back a little bit, keep them pointing back back here at the camera, in my case, as you're doing these shots, if you're hitting it off the heel and you're, you know, losing your posture, you're gonna work on keeping that those hips getting deeper as you come through and keeping that foot, that heel rolled in, down on the ground. But the system will recommend the videos for you based on your tendency. So it's important. You enter your scores every time, and this will help you hit the ball very, very straight, very consistently, very, very quickly.
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