How to Compress the Ball & Get Shaft Lean Lesson

Do you struggle with casting the club and losing lag? No compression on the ball? This golf lesson will show you how to compress the ball and create a powerful golf swing

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good good well how can i help you well i uh so i started i'll just give you just a really brief history so i i like most people i started to pick up the game and uh with friends and fell in love with it i went and got instruction and you know that you know the quick fix and it was a disaster so then i went to reading books and tried to learn and i couldn't do that and then i was searching the internet and i i really fell in love with the way you were doing your teaching with rst so this this goes back quite a ways but i'm a engineer and you know it's kind of a mental disorder you could you you're you're analyzing everything and you were presenting all this detail which you're really connected with me but uh i i tried to learn from the video and i got the mirror and everything but you know i couldn't do it and i got frustrated and then about a year ago i decided okay i'm gonna get video reviews and uh anthony has been helping me and uh we went we went through the dead drill and i just started hitting balls in in may and it was amazing i i couldn't believe it i actually felt the release i was hitting the ball well and that only lasted a couple of weeks and i fell back into my old bad habits and i don't know what i'm doing wrong yeah yeah okay no problem well trust me that's not uncommon at all um there's very simple explanations for it um but i want to see your swing before i kind of dive in here so uh do you have a place there i can see face on and down the line yeah perfect hopefully uh let me see uh if uh this is a good uh spot or not can you can you can you see all of me i i can if you could scoot back just a little bit more away from the camera that'd be perfect yeah i'm gonna scoot the camera back but okay till until you can see me is that far enough yeah that that's better i can work with that okay uh so whenever you're ready i'm gonna video both face on and down the line okay that's uh down and uncommon miss okay that's fine there let's see the other view uh can you see this yep that's perfect there whenever you're ready go right ahead perfect okay let's take a look at those i'm going to share my screen and let's start with the face-on view here so at setup here you actually looked really good and then you added a lot a lot of access tilt there way too much so that looks like something you kind of overcooked there that you probably worked on but actually where you started was really quite good so you know so you don't need to add all this extra move you can see how much that is it's a lot right so so we're we were pretty good to start there all right all right so on the way down everything is kind of moving laterally too much and so you'll see that your spine is really vertical here yeah and so that's going to make it very difficult to get the club on plane without having to manipulate things with your arms so lower body movement looks good but we've got to understand how to work with the arms and upper body to make this all work together so you'll see at this point see how the space between your right elbow and your body that gap right there yeah that needs to close down and i'll explain why in just a minute but just understand from the surface when we're looking at things that gap your right arm has to come in much closer to your body for your body to be able to transfer energy from your legs to create power so it happens a little bit late in your swing but it's really it's a byproduct of a few things we're going to talk about so then you know here you're losing all of your leverage and this is what's happening when your spine is upright and your right arm is far away from your body you can see how the club shaft i know it's blurry here but you've lost all of your leverage there and so you're going to lose a ton of power you have a wonderful release like there's so much great stuff going on your swing like through the ball it looks beautiful but right before right here one frame back right there that's where we're losing all of our power and control okay so these are it's you've actually got a lot of really good things going on here but we need to fix kind of two basic things i want to look a lot of great stuff here yeah okay so right here when you start to lose it and i'm going to when i say lose it i mean you lose your power lose your leverage right there so your hips kind of stall out they're almost doing all their job that they need to but but because of a couple things going on on the way down and so close to being really perfect it's a wonderful release to the ball really really good okay so let me explain to you what's going on here and and how to think about the golf swing in a slightly different way to help you understand how to create power because you move really really well there's some great stuff truly great stuff going on in your swing but you saw like right about here you were kind of like this you didn't have any leverage left in your wrist right and from here there's just nothing left to do there's there's nothing left to hit with you've expended all your energy and what you want to think about is that you want the club head to be accelerating into the ball and that seems kind of obvious to say that but when you when i explain how that really works that's going to help you visualize the golf swing a different way because what really happens in all great players swings as you know that they've got a fair bit of shaft lean and you can't have shaft lean if you're accelerating the club too soon and in golf we're talking about thousandths of a second right it's it's really negligible amounts but what's really happening is when you're all of that acceleration and a lot of the acceleration in the golf swing that you really are going to effectively use happens like during the initial part of the release of the wrist now what i mean by that is if i was hitting this ball if for me to be fully released it doesn't happen until the club's out here right which means when i'm actually hitting it i've only gotten rid of a small amount of my wrist angle by the time i strike the ball okay that's what allows you to have shaft lean you have most of your wrist angle gone out here so by the time you get to the ball there's just not a lot of leverage left and so that initial boost of acceleration is already gone we need to have the ball back here in order to take advantage of that initial boost so what you're doing is you're getting that club fully released through the ball but it's just happening too soon and then you're not going to have any shaft lean you're going to lose compression on the ball you're going to lose control on the ball so how do we get that that initial bit of the wrist release to happen just a little bit later is really what we need to understand in the swing does that make sense okay so to do that there's a couple things that have to happen and it's really just going to be more of uh it's going to be understanding this conceptually first and then you've got to feel it so when i said that your whole body was kind of moving towards the target in the downswing that's always going to move your arms your arms aren't going to be able to get into your body right they're they're going to have that little gap that i showed you and so when you lose that when you lose this connection to your body everything starts releasing now releasing is a good thing we want it to release we just need to have have it happen two feet later and so when i'm doing this and running away from my arm with my body then i'm always going to start releasing too soon because the moment that that happens you're always going to release so how would i get my arm and my body to have to stay together a little bit longer so i have leverage a little bit later in the swing does that make sense yeah okay so the first thing that i could do would be to fire the muscles in my back my lats to help pull my arm into my body okay does that make sense so if i do this that's going to pull me in there that's part of it now you can't just do that of course that's just part of the equation but right now if you're not doing this you don't understand how to get yourself into a leveraged position so what i'm going to have you feel in just a minute is pull your arm down and when you do this you're going to see that your body is going to kind of want to tilt back you're going to want to drive your hip forward which you do really well but your upper body can't go with it your upper body has got to stay back here because as soon as you're like this you're going to feel way more powerful than like this does it make sense and that's why you're losing that leverage because at some point the club the momentum of the club it overpowers your wrist angle your arms and everything starts releasing your goal is to make that happen at the right time and it has to happen much later so the first thing we need to do is we need to give our body leverage to be able to control that club because there's a lot of inertia on that club i mean a driver ahead effectively weighs about a hundred pounds through impact that's way too much for us to try and control unless we have a lot of leverage and we got to use our body for that so step one is understanding if i pull my arm down i want to do this motion to simultaneously you're already moving your hip well but if i pull my arm down and let myself tilt back instead of going this way i've now got myself into a connected powerful position so that's the first thing the second thing is what do you do with your arm now most golfers start trying to push the club out away from them they're firing the muscle in the back of their arm or tricep because it makes sense like how else do i get the club back to the ball if i don't start firing this arm and the shoulder and this tech and this tricep all these things start pushing the club out to the ball as soon as you do that you're losing all your leverage so what you want is the opposite and this is counterintuitive just like everything else in the golf swing instead of firing my arm to extend it i want to fire my arm to pull it closer so now what's that going to do for me if i pull with my back muscles to pull my arm into my body it's going to give me leverage like if i was going to hit somebody i'm going to use my body i need to have my arm in connected right well i would also fire my bicep not my tricep the muscle on the front of the arm to pull my arm in so now when i'm like this and i rotate with my hips like you do really well what's my arm going to feel it's going to feel connected and powerful but it's the opposite of what you think you should do you think you should start extending your arm early but as soon as you do that you lose all your leverage it's gone so when you think about it the opposite way i'm going to pull my arm down contract my bicep now when i say contract it this is really it's not like you're doing like a hundred pound bicep curl right it's it's whatever force it takes just to hold that club up there so as i do both of these together and i drive with my hips well now look where my arm is now i've got my hand on top of the ball or in front of it and so now as i go to release the club i'm getting that that that first little boost of acceleration where it's really part of the most powerful part of the release is the initial release of that wrist not once it's fully released like once you kind of get to here you're not really as strong as you are from here to here and that's what you're looking for is just that just that first part of it so once you fire the bicep drive here now i'm right where i need to be and now as i go to release it eventually even though i'm trying to kind of hold my arm fire my bicep to hold my arm close to my body i'm not going to be able to do that forever eventually the inertia is going to take over and it's going to pull the club out away from me your job is just to make that happen a little bit later so if you put these two things together this now as i rotate like you rotate really well hey you're going to get your hips a little bit more open because your arms aren't releasing as early as they are now that buys your hips more time time to complete that driving and get more force from your hips and from your your glutes before that starts transferring out to your arms eventually it's going to but when your arm comes away from your body like this i don't care how hard you turn your legs it ain't going to do anything to add power to the golf club anymore but when it's here and i drive now i've got power and you're going to feel that so i'm going to have you do those two things i'm going to have you pull the arm down of the body and contract the bicep now again it's not really what's going to happen like your arm is going to start widening almost immediately at the top of the swing because there's momentum that's throwing the club out that way your job is to counteract that and feel that you're trying to prevent that arm from coming away from your body much longer and you'll see when you do that you're going to have to get into side bend to get your arm down here but now your elbow is on top of the ball now you can compress the heck out of the ball because you've got so much more mechanical leverage than you had before does that make sense yes it does all right let's give that a shot so a little less yeah so now that's great but your hips have still got to be very active just like they were you've got to drive off that right leg yes exactly exactly uh-huh i don't feel it in the arm but it does feel much more powerful here yeah you're not going to feel a lot in the bicep it's really not that much activation it's just you what you want to make sure you're not doing is trying to extend the arm and widen it away from you that's that's what we don't want to do yeah yeah oh wow that was a huge difference in one swing what'd you feel i i i didn't feel i got to tell you it's a lot less effort than i was putting into it before exactly so the difference is leverage right as an engineer you understand leverage is a force multiplier right so in the golf swing what we really we want to generate force and you know as you as you i'm sure you know it's mass times acceleration so what we really have to prioritize in the golf swing is is acceleration we want to get as much acceleration is what leads to that sweet feeling of compressing the ball when the club head really hits a huge burst of speed in a very short span of time that's when the ball feels like it kind of melts on the face the only way to have that type of burst of acceleration is to have a lot of leverage very late in the swing what you are doing is giving up all your leverage out here and that's why that club and your wrist was all dumped but once you had it like this then you feel like gosh anything i do with my body is actually going to add force to this golf club whereas when it's out here it won't and so that's what you felt there is you've got so much more mechanical leverage in your arms and your body and now you can really use the big muscles to just drive the arm forward instead of relying on the smaller muscles trying to extend your arm and release your hands yeah yeah i think yeah that's exactly what i think happened because i was using my arms and shoulders a lot to try and get the club through but that time i didn't hardly feel them at all exactly and that's what you want to feel and that's why this this bicep action of trying to keep the the arm the forearm from moving away from the body is so important you got to use those hips though that right leg's got to work what'd that feel like that felt good i i felt a little out of balance at the end but uh you know the club going through the ball was felt good so what you want to start trying to create with the feeling the sensation for you from what you were doing before to what you're doing now is that you're not really going to feel a ton of acceleration right here because in the real swing this is happening in literally thousands of a second and so because it's happening so fast your brain just can't really process it so what you're really going to notice the acceleration in the club it's more on this side of the ball as everything fully finally releases your job is to just basically try and drive your hip forward as long as you can and maintain those angles until they're forcibly released by the momentum of the club again you're not trying to fight it you're just trying to keep it from you're trying to avoid doing the opposite by trying to push the club away from you're trying to just actually hold it in drive with my hip and then let it release and then you're going to feel more of the speed after the ball but because you actually when you hit the ball the club slows down about 40 percent so the trick to this is you're going to feel because this the birth to speed is truly only in like the last three feet of the swing it's it's it's happening much quicker than our brains can process and then when we actually strike the ball the club is slowing down another 40 percent so what you really feel is nothing because the speed happened really really late really really quick and then you hit the ball and the collision slows the club down so you're gonna when you do it right you're always going to kind of have a a 60 percent feel in your golf swing does that make sense yeah yeah it does it definitely feels like less and it must be why i felt like i got out of balance afterwards because it was going so much faster it took pulled me around that's exactly right and that's exactly what you want so then when you start understanding okay the way that i produce speed and the way that my brain actually processes this stuff are not one in the same that's why the old feel and real thing is is it is a such a hard thing to overcome in the golf swing but what you're going to find is that if you don't post up correctly and use your lip your hips to post up correctly you will be pulled off balance because there's so much more speed when you're not actually hitting a ball way out here in front of the ball so then you start realizing and again your hip movement's really really good but the hip movement is really simple once you start getting a feel for this that you're really just you're driving off this right hip and then posting up on this left leg and that's going to give you the stability you need so you may have to feel that more as you start getting used to the feeling of the acceleration being more after the ball if you will is what you'll your brain will perceive and so i like to take a step and pigeon toe it with my left foot when i do this it's just a good way to get that feeling of that foot pushing the grain ground back away from you because all that club acceleration is trying to pull you forward toward the target and that left foot when you plant it like that will help you stay back because you're used to moving forward and that's why you're going to lose balance right yeah i i take a little a pigeon step that's going to brace and immediately keep stop all this forward momentum right and so then as i release the club i have this firm left side that's bracing me here and that's going to help me keep my balance okay all right that makes sense there you go yep exactly i think i used my upper body too much there and not my hips enough you did okay it's great that you felt that you've got a great kinesthetic awareness of what's happening in your body so how do we correct that so again the feeling not what's really happening but the feeling is that your arms are always staying staying connected to your body and never releasing now of course they do and we want them to and they must but when you're used to what you're used to doing before with kind of getting your arms loaded up and then you still drove really well your hips but then you fired the arms which kills all the hip movement and then the arms are kind of firing through the swing what you want to feel is the opposite so remember when i told you contracting this bicep to hold the arms in close to the body so that any force that we apply from our trunk is going to be directly delivered to that club i don't need to use my arms so you can practice kind of holding your arms more connected to your body at first and then once you get comfortable with it you're going to let them release but that's going to help break the habit of your arms kind of doing this in the golf swing when you start kind of overdoing this connection of keeping this right arm firing bicep firing longer and keeping the arm more connected that'll help you start breaking that habit of you know really wanting to flat fling your arms through the ball okay yeah so now think about this even as you go on your backswing right if you start kind of swinging your arms around the backswing they're going to go right so what you really want to feel is that you're trying to load up this right leg and hip not your arms and shoulders yeah so yeah your arms and shoulders are just you can go to the top in a way i actually like to practice this sometimes with students and i'll have them literally is kind of go to the top like a baseball swing just pick their arms up and turn and just kind of get like your arms totally relaxed take a step and drive and so then you start getting a feeling of how eat how much easier it is when your arms and shoulders aren't tense for them to fall into this position that we've just worked on this go delivery position so if you just kind of practice picking your arms up just go to the top and turn yeah so you there's no point in loading up those muscles right because we're actually trying to not push the club away we're trying to pull our arms in so so if you lift your arms and guess what you're going to load you're going to load your shoulder that shoulder is going to want to push the club out away from you on the way down so instead it's more your body's taking the club back and you're getting a feeling for your arms and a little armsy still so try let's do a couple drills again these are big exaggerations but that'll help you start to get the feel for this because what you don't want is a big arm movement in the swing that just makes stuff much harder to coordinate so we want our arm movement to be really relatively small and the movement from our trunk to be relatively big so as you're going back be mindful of like your arms getting disconnected in the backswing feel like you're kind of like tucking both arm shirts in your armpits at first yep just stuff them in there yeah exactly this again big exaggeration but this will help you feel taking the club back a little bit quieter with your arms yep and it's just it's just going to help you feel your arms don't have to load up so much more and then there's way less work to bring that arm down into the body because that's that's going to happen there you go yeah exactly way better there okay that's good it's a good thought to keep my arms connected yeah again it's a big exaggeration but it's a good drill for you to do right now good yeah that felt pretty good good so as you're practicing this i would hit a lot of kind of like i really i really felt like that one was being driven by my my hips that's exactly what we're looking for we want that it's really this right leg that's going to drop that's where you're going to get the majority of the power from in your swing so as you start practicing this i would kind of exaggerate a couple things i would stuff my shirt in my armpits just to kind of quiet my arms down i'd focus on loading this right hip immediately like as soon as i start the back swing or even before i started like you'll see a lot of guys especially long drive guys it's easy to see could they exaggerate everything so much so you'll see a lot of long drive guys nowadays they start like this and they sit into that right leg and bend this right knee and that's how they start their whole swing because they're trying to really load this thing and get back into it so that they the more you load it the more you can drive off of it in the down swing okay so you want to make sure that that's your number one priority is loading this right hip in the back swing and then from there i would hit a lot of shots you know my arms kind of tucked in there just for now and then just hit a lot of shots like that where i'm trying to not move my arms really at all i'm trying to drive with my right hip keep this arm connected and start getting a feel for me being able to control the loft of the club because you know right now you're still kind of doing using your wrist pretty actively when you're making those swings once you get comfortable with this you definitely want the wrist to release off like that obviously but to get control of it first you want to quiet everything down and so i would calm my wrist down a lot too so i'm not going to try to move my wrist at all either i'm loading into my right leg my arms and body are connected so this arm doesn't have very far to go on the way down and then if i drive this right hip and don't do anything with my wrist well the club face is completely de -lofted it's coming into the ball square my wrist is still bit back i'm just getting that initial force from the release there and then i'm holding that off and then as i get more comfortable with it i can start letting it release more and more but quiet everything down get control with your trunk and then slowly start loosening things up as you get control and you want to add more speed to it okay there you yeah good good exactly exactly exactly like that do a couple more like that for me okay i'll take a quick look at that one uh yeah i'm afraid i'm not getting the side bend i really want yeah i'm gonna that's exactly right i'm gonna show you how to feel that in just a sec well it's pretty close though man that looks pretty darn good look at that yeah so you're losing it just still a little bit right there and so the side bend is the key to that okay i'm going to explain that but everything else looks fantastic so so one of the keys you've got to kind of think about how your upper body works a little bit differently in the swing so you know that your hips are moving laterally they're moving rotationally they're moving vertically so how does your upper body work with this right now your upper body is kind of trying to mirror what your lower body's doing and that's not what it does in the swing because then you're going to end up like this and that's going to move your head forward that's going to cause the club to fall away from you and you're going to lose that leverage too soon so the way that you've got to feel that is that your spine has got to tilt back this way so now look how i can bring my arm my elbow further closer to the target which allows me to maintain leverage longer if i tilt back now of course i'm exaggerating this it's not that big but that's kind of what you're going to feel is that from the top instead of trying to go with your body with your lower body your lower body leaves and your upper body falls back you're tilting back because that's also going to allow you to turn your hip quicker right but if i go this way with it i'm trying to get my hip to turn everything turn all my mass it's just too slow what we want from that lower body is this that's going to be really quick and so that's going to allow my spine to drop down which is going to drop my shoulder closer to the ball which is going to allow this right arm to stay bent longer if my right shoulder stays high my arm has to extend my wrist has to extend just to get the club back to the ball yeah right so if i tilt this way now i i can keep this arm bent forever which allows me to have a ton of leverage really late in the swing and drive a lot of force into the back of the ball so when you're going this way with your lower body your upper body's got a tilt in the opposite direction oh okay yeah that makes yep see how you can maintain the leverage in your heart and your wrist now yeah i'm not using my arms at all okay exactly exactly there you go do that do that again that's fantastic now look at the leverage in your arms and club yeah yeah i could actually feel the pull on my left side it has to lengthen right so this side to relax and lengthen and this side has to contract you see that yeah i never felt that before yeah so that's where we get that secondary tilt but now you've got more leverage in your wrist right so now let's make that that tilt dropping that right shoulder down makes room for your elbow otherwise your elbow just doesn't have anywhere to go so it's always going to start releasing earlier now as you get that right shoulder down now you've got shaffling through the ball and then you're going to have you've got such a great release already and that looks like a tour pro right so that is how you put all of this stuff together in a really simple package does that make sense it does any questions for me no no i just uh i want to i want to thank you for what you're doing though it's uh i really like watching your your videos your lessons you're uh you're you're very entertaining along with teaching so oh thank you teach it so i don't know why this is so hard you've picked a difficult uh thing to teach i i made a mistake with career path for sure for sure i should have chosen anything but but i think we're getting closer to being able to explore my goal i have always had this idea in my head that i should be able to give one person one lesson and they kind of get it like that's a really really really tall ask but and you're already doing a lot of things really well so it makes my job easier but by just kind of giving you some fundamentals that are counterintuitive to what we think we want to do in the golf swing you know by holding the club in instead of trying to hit the ball and so on you can see that you can make huge changes really really quick it's just a matter of understanding how these mechanics work together yeah yeah so thank you you bet do you mind if i share this lesson i may want to use some pieces from it to help some other people oh yeah share it i i and i i want to thank all the people that have allowed you to share previously because i've i've really enjoyed watching them awesome well i'm sure people will learn from yours and i love your i love your golf swing just keep working on that one little thing one last thing i want to mention when you're doing your practice drill there you won't do this in a real swing but i just want to make it clear you know you kind of let that right knee go out quite a bit you'll get a replay of this when we're done and you'll see that that knee kind of went out like this obviously you're not going to do that in a real swing but the big thing is you really want to start paying attention to loading this right hip so that it can go quick because the quicker it can go the quicker your spine and shoulder can fall back and then that's the fast that's how you start producing speed is it's coming from here not from here okay and so this leg going out like this is just going to make it really hard i know you won't do it i just want to be clear about that i i think i was trying to like um move in one direction so i could move back in the other like pre pre going backwards so i could tilt the other way yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah just understand the movement's relatively small you know it's it's loading into it and then driving but it's not it's not a huge movement that's just going to slow everything down i i made it seem to too big yeah awesome richard was a great meeting you hopefully this helps you and i'll uh i'll see you again soon i'm sure all right thanks take care you