Every golfer wants to know how to create more lag in the swing to hit the ball farther.
With this one simple drill, I guarantee you will have more lag in 5 minutes than you ever thought possible.
"...my clubhead speed was around 80 mph....I have been working on the downcock pump drill...and my speed has increased to about 100 mph and added many yards to all my shots!"
Nigel M. | July 2, 2011
All the work you have invested incorporating the instruction from the preceding RST videos and articles should be putting you in a consistent impact position resulting in penetrating golf shots.
But it should also have set you up to increase your swing speed while using less effort than in the past.
How? By ensuring you sequence your swing correctly, which creates lag like you see in all powerful golf swings.
If you are still "casting" the club and losing your lag, like you see in the pictures below, here is a key principle you need to understand that will help you overcome this hurdle:
Rotating your shoulders and upper body fast at the start of the downswing feels powerful because it creates a lot of centripetal force.
However, that centripetal force produces an opposite effect called centrifugal force, which forces the club head to move and release away from you too soon, destroying your lag.
So, the less you spin your shoulders at the start of the downswing, the more your club head stays lagged, waiting those crucial few hundredths of a second longer to release.
You will see this principle demonstrated in the video and then learn the Downcock Pump Drill, which will help you slow your transition and increase your lag simultaneously. To see how your own lag and transition compare to elite standards, try a free AI swing analysis.
Check out the video now because the drill is incredibly simple and will transform your game, especially if you are a club caster!
"Absolutely my favorite drill on this site. I'm puring iron shots..."
Courtney H. | July 6, 2011
Video Transcription: Downcock Pump Drill
One of the most common and frustrating experiences for golfers is losing power. As they come down in the swing, they lose their wrist angle. We call this "casting" — similar to how you would cast a fishing rod. The last thing you want to do in the golf swing is cast it.
As you start down, what most amateur golfers do is throw the club right from the top, so by the time they get to impact the club head is passing their hands. You get a lot of chicken wing action if they are really trail-side dominant. They are scooping the ball. They never take a divot, they hit the ball extremely high, and it does not go anywhere.
What you need to realize is that lag is the most important component of the golf swing for generating power. Everything that we have done to this point — building a proper backswing, proper setup, learning impact alignments — is to make impact more consistent and controllable, but also to give you more power by teaching you how to maintain lag.
I have a drill for you today called the Downcock Drill that is going to change your perspective of the swing. The last thing you want to think about from the top is that you can just start moving as fast as possible to try and generate speed and power. It does not work that way at all.
Sequencing is everything in the swing, and we are going to discuss the first piece of that sequence, which is the Downcock Drill.
As you get to the top, what I want you to do is go to the top and pause. Just stop right at the top, loaded up on the trail side. Then as you are shifting over to the lead side — not pushing off the trail side — using your lead leg, I want you to take the club with both hands. Let the trail hand feel like it falls back on itself and the club is going to hit you in the shoulder.
It will not actually hit you on the shoulder unless you lighten up your grip too much. You should be holding the club quite softly at this point anyway, but not so softly that you let go of it.
If you do this drill correctly, you should be able to bring the club within a few inches of your shoulder. This is the opposite of "go to the top, push off the trail side, pull with the lead shoulder."
All of those pushing motions create centripetal force, and the opposite effect is going to be centrifugal force. That means something farther away from the center is going to release and fly out in the opposite direction.
As you spin your body, the club head is going to fly outward, so as you come into impact you have no lag remaining. There is nothing left to hit with. You must learn to maintain lag through approximately 60 percent of your clubhead speed.
If you come into impact and you have already lost this wrist angle, you are done. You have nothing left to hit with, so you are going to start developing that scoopy, flippy motion.
Instead, you want to come down into a position where you are maintaining more lag. What you want to do is start practicing downcocking to get yourself into a position where you are preserving that wrist angle. It is going to feel very different. For real-time coaching on your lag and transition mechanics, try a free AI golf lesson.
As you go to the top and pause, you should feel poised and relaxed, but your hands should feel soft. You are going to feel like you go from a very wide position on the backswing to a very narrow position on the downswing. It is going to feel dramatically different.
Go to the top wide, increase the wrist angle, feel the club shaft getting close to your shoulder so you feel very narrow now as you are pulling your arms back in front of your body, letting the club drop close to your shoulder. It looks like this.
You are not going to go all the way down yet — you are just going to start working on getting some lag to start the downswing as you are shifting over. Versus going to the top and starting to rotate, getting the club thrown out away from you.
Start slowly integrating this into half-shots. Go to the top, pause, downcock, release. Go to the top, pause, downcock, release.
It should feel that you start having significantly more wrist angle coming into impact. As you work on the transition videos coming up, this will help you really get into great impact positions and start being able to control the ball and compress it, and hit it farther than you ever have before. If you are a club caster, this drill will change your game forever.
Watch part 2 now to see how you're moving your body in the opposite direction of the pros!
You can create lag like this using the simple Downcock Pump Drill covered in the video.
Casting is common because most golfers try to move really fast at the start of the downswing in an effort to create speed. Ironically, that's how you destroy it!
"Casting" the club
Downcock Drill
The club is near the shoulder
Wrist angle - bad (above) and good (below)
