Perfect your golf impact - 4 of 4

Welcome back to the Perfecting Your Impact Video Series Number Four. I hope everybody has made some really good progress through the first three videos. In today's video what we're going to be doing is we're going to really be kicking it into high gear and adding a lot more speed through some more leverage with lag. Lag is a big component of speed in the golf swing, so if you're ready to really start to ramp your speed up and you've got good control of the club face and you've worked through the other three videos, let's go ahead and get started now.

                Okay gang, so here we are at week number four. I know we've put in a lot of hard work together and we've gotten 3,000 reps accomplished working from an impact position, then adding a little bit of weight shift to the mix. Then obviously we added a little bit of rotation and a little bit of ground leverage last week. I've seen a lot of great progress. I've had some students send in some videos. We've seen some good comments posted up. People are starting to get more compression, starting to feel some of that effortless power that they've always wanted.

                This week we're going to add a little bit more of that. We're going to come up with a drill here that's called a 30-60-90 drill that's going to teach you how to develop lag in your downward move. Lag is such a big component of the golf swing. It's a big component of speed. If you look at what a tour player does, tour players typically with a six or seven iron move the golf club between 22 and 24 miles an hour through the takeaway, into the backswing and then in the downswing it's still moving 22 to 24 miles an hour. Then three feet prior to the golf ball it speeds up to about 96 miles an hour.

                You can see there's a big increase of speed. That's what this drill is going to be designed to do. I encourage you, if you're not overly comfortable with either your impact position or if you feel like you've got too many moving parts at this point to just pump those brakes again, take your time, make sure that you get comfortable with it and then slowly work your way up into this new drill. All right, so let's take a look at the 30-60-90 drill and the objectives behind it.

                Still our focus point here is to be able to get that 1,000 reps so you can see that there's been a level of progression throughout this entire process. What I mean by 30-60-90 is we're just going to be talking about the total percentage of risk that you're going to be trying to achieve at each one of the positions of the golf swing. All right? If I were to have my wrists in a fully set position here or fully cocked, much like I were hitting it with a hammer and trying to hit a nail into the wall, you can see here that I've got a pretty sharp angle between the club shaft and my forearms.

                We would call that about 100%. What we're going to be trying to achieve is not getting everything fully set very early on in the golf swing. We want to allow the weight shift to move your wrist percentage to 90%. Our drill is going to look like 30% into the takeaway, so we're going to call club shaft parallel to the ground this week is 30%, okay? Club shaft parallel to the ground, 30%. As I work up to the top of my swing where my lead arm is now going to become parallel to the ground, okay, and the right arm starts to flex to help add some elevation to the golf swing here, as my lead arm gets to about parallel, the club shaft should be vertical, okay? Butt end of the club down to the ground.

                You can see that this would be 60% of my wrist set. This would be 100. We're going to work to go 30, 60 and then as we start to feel our lead arm working to that parallel position, we're going to shift our weight into that lead side. You're going to shift and allow the momentum of the golf club moving in this direction and the weight shift going in the other way to help increase your angle to 90%. We're going to go 30, 60. We're going to shift and because we're not moving at full speed here you're not going to see a drastic increase in my angle. This is only going to happen when we start to work up into full speed.

                Let's go ahead and do that now. I'm not going to go at 100% speed here. I'm going to go right around 40 to 50, but I want you to see my weight shift is now allowing the angle to increase. Okay? I got a little steep on that one. I got a little out in front of it, but the idea is that we want to use the other three videos and add this little component in. You can see that we're taking the club back a little bit further. Now we're focusing on making sure that our wrists to get fully set early on and we're allowing our body to help increase that angle so that when you get down to the hitting area what you're going to be looking for is that the club shaft should be at least parallel to the ground when your lead hand is approaching in front of your trail thigh here.

                You can have a little bit sharper of an angle. Don't go too drastic here. That will be too much lag. You'll never be able to get rid of that angle in time and then you'll have a messy ball striking situation on your hands. That's generally what we work on with tour pros is we try to help them get rid of lag. It can be a double-edged sword for those of you players that didn't know that.

                Your focus point here is as your hands are getting pulled down to the hitting area and you're posting up on that lead leg, just like we talked about last week, is that at least have the club shaft about parallel to the ground. If you can achieve that then you've got tons of angle there. You've got tons of leverage to be able to fire and get rid of and that's going to help ramp your speed up pretty drastically. Let's go ahead and take a look at this again, 30, 60. Okay, club shaft parallel. I generally drill this a couple times so I can feel where my arms are, my hands are.

                I'm trying to keep my wrists really supple as I get to that 60% spot. Okay. Then you can see that I shifted my weight as my arm got to the top of the swing. Start very slow, okay? Feel these positions and make sure that you have 30, 60%. Make sure you feel like the wrists are really relaxed. Your trail hand needs to be very, very relaxed on the golf club. If you go to a fully wrist set position up here early, now you're putting yourself in a position with your thumb and your lead hand can start to push the club and then you'll lose that lag and you'll also start to use that trail hand that we never really want to use that much anyways.

                Again, let's look at it from speed here. Okay, so you can see I'm starting to get a little bit more club head speed. Okay, so you see the increase in angle now and now my club's really starting to pick up the speed. What you want to do it is make sure that you start out slow, okay? Make sure that you spend your first maybe 100 to 300 reps at about 40 to 50% of your normal speed. Once you get comfortable with it, you're checking your impact positions on camera or in a mirror with an impact bag if you need one, but make sure that you're checking yourself on camera to see that you're hitting your weight into your lead side like we worked on.

                Make sure that you're getting this angle to start to increase. Then what you'll do in your next 300 to 500 reps is you'll slowly ramp up that speed and then you'll finish off almost feeling like you're at full speed. Again, going back to what I was saying before, the ultimate goal is to feel like you're swinging about 80 to 90% of your normal energy and the golf ball is going further. You have much more control of it because we trained what that lead wrist is supposed to be doing down in the hitting area. Okay gang? It's time to graduate now.

                It's time to get out there and put it to use. I encourage you all to start posting up your results in the comments. I've seen a lot of great videos come in. Post up your results. We love to see that kind of stuff, we love to be able to help you along the way. Now let's get out there, let's perfect your impact, let's add some speed to it and let's play some great golf next season.