How to Maintain Club Head Speed as You Get Older
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You don't have to start hitting it dramatically shorter just because you're getting older. This video tells you exactly why you've lost a ton of clubhead speed as you've aged and more importantly, how to get it back.
- Rotation, Leverage and Width are your speed makers
- As you get older, you will lose the ability to rotate your body as fast
- You must learn how to use Leverage and Width to produce speed
It's no secret, given that I live in Florida and have a golf academy at the Ritz-Carlton in Orlando, that I give a lot of lessons to a lot of older golfers.
And it's also no secret that a lot of my students who have been with me for a while, who are in their 60s, 70s, and even in their 80s.
Still hit the ball over 250 yards in the air off the tee.
That may sound crazy, and it's not just through one simple thing.
That's including equipment fitting and launch monitor fittings, using our track man and so on, and so forth to help optimize every single part of their swing.
But more importantly, it's that we've built the right components into their golf swing.
That allows them to still swing with a great amount of speed as they get older.
Without losing any very little club head speed and still being able to hit the ball a long ways further than many people do in their 20s and 30s.
So what are the keys to this?
Well, the first key is understanding what's costing you.
Club head speed as you get older, and without a doubt, with every single golfer that I see who, as they get older, starts to see this precipitous drop-off.
When they hit their 50s or their 60s, and all of a sudden they're like, Gosh, I used to hit my 7-Iron 160 yards and now I can't hit it 120 yards or 130 yards.
If that's you you need to listen up because this is almost definitely what's going on in your swing.
As you've learned from other videos on the site, there are three main keys to producing speed in the golf swing.
The one that's costing you is that you're almost definitely using too much rotation that in your golf swing to try and produce power.
Rotation as we get older is going to go down.
It's a simple fact of life, we can't do it much about it.
You can stay fit, it's gonna help.
But as we get older, these muscles just aren't going to be able to fire as fast and as aggressively from our torso and our legs.
That we could do in our 20s and 30s.
So what most golfers do is they get as they're younger and strong and fit, and they go to the top.
They don't have any back issues, they really spin their body as hard as they can, use their right side, really hard, aggressive.
And then all of a sudden they find out that gosh.
As they get older and they're not as fit and strong, and they got a couple back issues or hip issues.
Their speed just drops off like a falling off the side of a cliff.
It's trying to overuse rotation that's causing this problem.
If your golf swing looks like this, every time you swing and you're spun around, you're trying to really push hard with that right shoulder.
This next part of the video, that's going to show you how.
Davis Love, who's almost on the Champions Tour, had the highest recorded clubbed speed on the PGA Tour this year in 2014.
And how you can do the same thing and not lose any clubbed speed as you get older.
Now, for the second part of the video, what are the key components that, as we get older, we want to maintain in our golf swing?
To not have this precipitous drop-off in clubbed speed.
Well let's first revisit what I said those three sources of clubbed speed are in other videos.
We have rotation, as I talked about earlier, that one's going to cause us some problems if we rely on that.
We have leverage and we have width and leverage and width is what I want to talk about.
Leverage and width are the two most important factors in your golf swing for clubbed speed, no matter what age you are.
As you're younger and you can really power through with your body.
You can get away with kind of overdoing the rotation side and get away with it to some degree or another.
But as you've seen, it's caught up with you.
Leverage and width are awesome because we can swing with tons of leverage and width no matter how old we get.
Because it doesn't take the same muscular effort, and it doesn't take the same toll on our spine and our hip and our knee and our feet, that rotation does.
So this is why the golfers that I have, who are in their 60s and 70s and 80s, still hit the ball a long ways.
Is because we prioritize leverage and width.
And so what are those things?
Well we've talked about them in many other videos.
Leverage is obviously just the angles that we create in the golf swing, the right arm, the right wrist.
these are two very powerful angles.
Most golfers, as they start with rotation, and they prioritize rotation over anything else in the swing.
As they start down, they start to lose these angles and they lose leverage.
And so the only way they can hit it harder is to spin or rotate harder.
And, of course, that just creates more club head throwaway, and so the problem just becomes compounded and it's just like a dog chasing its tail.
The harder I spin the worse I throw it the more speed I lose I just can't win.
Now, of course, if we swing correctly, like in the videos, like reshaping your swing for lag, for instance.
How I talk about working each arm independently and prioritizing leverage.
So then then you have all of this extra angle here that you can release at the bottom instead of prioritizing rotation.
Now we're going to be able to be like Davis Love.
As we get older.
We have lots of leverage that we can release at the bottom.
The second thing that Davis Love does really well is he has a tremendously wide golf swing.
Now, part of it is genetics.
He's tall, with long arms that we can't fake.
You can't if you have really short, stubby T-rex arms.
There's only so much width you're going to get in your golf swing.
But I promise you, no matter what your genetic makeup is, you're going to have enough width.
Waste on just your body build to produce tremendous club head speed, probably much, much more than you're doing now.
And if you're relying on rotation, you're going to pick up a ton of speed as you begin to prioritize width.
How do we do width?
Again, lots of videos on the website for this.
So, for instance, it starts right from the takeaway.
In the backswing, we want to keep that right arm straight as long as we can in the backswing.
I always challenge people in the clinics and we come to Florida I say I want you to I'll bet you a million dollars you can't keep this right arm straight at the top of the backswing because they're doing this right away they don't realize how narrow they're making their golf swing and so by the time they get to the top they're like this and go my right arm straight pay me my million bucks it's not straight no matter how hard you try it wouldn't be natural to swing the club like this so everybody folds their right arm they just do it too soon we want to try and keep that right arm nice and wide and straight so that the club has to travel on a much wider arc the further that club club head is away from the center the piece that's rotating which is you the faster it has to go to keep up so think of this like a little kid on a merry-go-round the kid on the mid on the merry-go-round who's sitting in the center and he's turning he's not moving very fast but the kid on the outside of the merry-go-round that's holding on for dear life and about to go to the hospital he's flying but they're moving at a fixed ratio to each other but the further that kid is away from the center the faster he's gonna fly off and go to the hospital the club head the further you can get it away from you the more it has to accelerate to keep up with the slower moving center part the problem is again we've prioritized this center moving part it can only move so fast you can't beat leverage and width that's the simple reason why every club you have in your bag is a half inch longer than the other until you get to the woods obviously because for every half inch that you pick up you're gonna pick up about two miles an hour club head speed just a simple math of it so if you make if you grab your seven iron instead of your eight iron you want it to still be the length of a seven iron if you come into impact and you make this really narrow swing it's not gonna move as fast as the guy who's got his arms out and releasing out away from him it's a simple matter of physics so we want to make our swings nice and wide as we go back so nice wide top of the backswing keep our hands kind of out as far away from our head as we can get them relax as you start down you don't start spinning with rotation coming down you want to keep your arms nice and soft so that as we've got this nice wide swing we now have leverage the harder you spin the more you're gonna throw it from the top so as our arms stay nice and relaxed and we come down I have these angles that I've created and now just like in the VJ release drill boom I want to release that club at the bottom not by spinning my body but by letting it release and slowing my body down I'm gonna actually post up and push off the ground with my left leg and that's gonna force the club to snap even harder so prioritize leverage and width as you get older don't rely on rotation you won't be able to keep up with your speed you're gonna get frustrated with the game and keep moving up a set of tees every time your buddies want to go to the tips you can still play the tips you just have to prioritize leverage and rotation or excuse me leverage and width and de-prioritize rotation and your golf swing you'll be able to maintain speed no matter how old you get
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