Golf Driver Setup – How to Set Up to the Driver | Hit Long Drives
How to Hit Your Driver for Power and Accuracy
How to hit driver is probably the number one question that golfers ask themselves and their teachers.
Partly this is for reasons of pure ego. There’s nothing in the game that can quite match the satisfaction of seeing a drive soar long and straight down the fairway.
But there are some practical reasons as well.
Firstly, there’s no doubt that being a good driver of the ball makes the rest of the game a whole lot easier. The more second shots you can hit from the fairway, and the shorter the club you can use, the more likely you are to hit the green in regulation. And, if you’re a half-decent putter, this can only lead to more pars and a much healthier-looking scorecard.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIXXAeGKox4]
Secondly, the driver is a club that players often struggle with.
Find Out How to Hit a Driver Consistently by Clicking Here Now
On the face of it, this is slightly odd because there are reasons why the drive ought to be the easiest shot in the game.
Why Hitting Driver is Both Easy and Hard
It’s the only time you can place the ball in a perfect lie, at exactly the angle to the target you prefer. And the teeing area should mean that you are never having to hit the ball from above or below your feet.
On the other hand, the length of the shaft, the distance you are standing from the ball, and the lack of loft on its face can make the driver an intimidating club to use.
The expectation that you should hit the ball a long way with the driver also brings a psychological pressure and temptation to hit too hard that has ruined many a swing.
The good news is that a few tweaks to your set-up can remove much of this fear and soon get you taking full advantage of the miracle of engineering that is the modern driver.
How to Hit a Golf Ball with a Driver
For years, the conventional wisdom has been that to get maximum distance from the large-headed metal driver it’s essential to hit the ball high by teeing it high and positioning it well forward in your stance.
Now, there’s some truth in this. But if you move too quickly towards this goal you’re likely to find yourself making some involuntary and undesirable swing changes.
You may even have a feeling that you’re reaching for the ball in some way and the inevitable mishits that result will quickly destroy the confidence that is perhaps the first essential to good driving.
How to Build Confidence and Hit Your Driver Straight
The aim is that your swing should be the same – or at least feel the same – with every club in the bag.
So start to learn to use your driver by playing the ball back in your stance and hitting slightly down on it as you would with an iron, and swinging normally. Remember that although the loft on your driver is limited it is not zero, and you should still be able to get the ball airborne.
If it helps, choke down on the grip until you are confident of making a solid contact. You can then gradually move the ball forward in your stance to achieve a higher, longer, and straighter flight without any conscious changes to your swing.
How to Hit a Draw with a Driver
At this stage, you will be ready to start working on the Holy Grail of the drive – the high draw. This is much favored by pros as it offers the optimum combination of distance and control.
You can find out more about this game-changing shot by clicking below.
Hitting the High Draw – A Quick Guide
FAQs
How to hit the driver for beginners?
You should play the ball further up in your stance but do NOT try to lift the ball. Let the club do the work. Close your stance slightly to ensure solid contact and a straight drive.
How do you properly hit a driver?
The biggest misconception in modern golf is that you have to exaggerate the upswing from a very high tee. Learn more about true driver contact using the Rotary Swing here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCT_ciBxiCE
How far should a beginner hit a driver?
This can vary based on the golfer. You need to find your optimal distance by learning the Rotary Swing to ensure solid face contact at the maximum speed to ensure you are hitting the driver as far as possible.
Why is the driver so hard to hit?
Golf is a power game. When we talk about maximum driver distance, we need to launch the ball effectively as high as humanly possible with the driver. For the average golfer, swinging between 85 to 105 miles an hour, the higher you launch the ball, the further it will go. The maximum club head speed happens just at the point of maximum golf club release or just slightly after. If you haven’t released the club, you haven’t got maximum speed, which is necessary to improve your golf driving.
“How do I set up for the driver? Is it different than with other clubs?” is something that I get asked all the time.
All the golf magazines and pundits on TV are talking about how you should tee it high and set up with the ball way forward in your stance.
So it must be correct, right? Well, sort of…
I released a Premium video on how to setup with your driver to answer this question, and here’s a key point from it that may surprise you…
WHY YOU SHOULD HIT DOWN ON YOUR DRIVER
The most important thing you should learn so you can hit ALL the clubs in your bag solidly is how to get your release point in the same place like I discuss in the 5 Minutes to the Perfect Release Video.
This means that, at first, you should work on hitting DOWN on your driver.
What???
Hit DOWN on my driver? Are you crazy?!
Not at all…
First of all, most all tour pros actually do hit down about 1 degree or so on their drivers. They do this for control and accuracy.
But in your case, I want you to do this for another reason.
Practicing hitting down on the golf ball will allow you to groove a consistent golf club release without changing all the angles in your golf swing at impact.
What I see more often than not is that a golfer will have a reasonable swing with all his irons and then look like he’s being attacked by a giant squid when he swings the driver.
This happens if you try to go from hitting down 4 degrees or so with an iron to magically hitting up 3 degrees or even more with your driver by teeing the ball high and forward in your setup.
Instinctively, you’ll move your head back during the downswing, creating a lot of secondary axis tilt at impact in order hit the ball that is sitting so high off the ground. If you didn’t make this compensation, you would put a sky mark on your driver!
So, I have golfers like this work on hitting down on the driver at first until they learn to maintain their impact position with the driver.
Then, I show them the adjustments they need to make to be able to move to a more neutral or positive angle of attack to get more distance.
FIX YOUR DRIVING WITH THIS SIMPLE DRILL
- Set up with the ball in the same position with the driver as you would for a wedge, which is the same as for every other club in the bag.
- Tee the ball very low, just barely off the ground.
- Hit shots until you learn to release the driver in the same place as you do all your clubs.
- As you get comfortable and the ball is flying consistently the same way, slowly increase the tee height and start moving the ball forward a half inch at a time until you have the desired ball flight.
When you do this drill, the ball will fly very low and not carry very far, but you should be able to hit the ball very solidly without taking much of a divot (just brushing the grass).
As you get comfortable with this, you’ll discover that your golf swing is starting to feel the same with every club in the bag. That is the goal!
Do you really want to try and learn and maintain 13 different golf swings when you struggle to just learn one?!
Of course not! The #1 goal of your golf swing is for it to be consistent.
Yes, power is important, but there’s no point in hitting the driver far if you hit it all over the place. If you want to score in golf, you have to know exactly where that ball is going to land after you hit it.
But most golfers get so distance obsessed with the driver that they make all these huge setup changes because they hear the pundits talking about it without taking any intermediate steps to balance out the changes.
This is like taking the whole bottle of aspirin for a headache – baby steps people!
Take a look at this sequence of Tiger Woods’ swing with the driver.
You can see just how far he has the ball forward in his setup. If you just jump to this ball position, you can virtually guarantee you’re going to start spraying the ball all over the place, if you aren’t already.
You must understand all the factors that will influence ball flight just from making a simple setup change, and most golfers don’t.
For instance, in this driver setup video, I talk about how you must move the ball to the INSIDE of your original target line if you move the ball up in your stance.
Did you realize that? If not, you’re adding even more compensations into your golf swing which is likely already built on a bunch of other compensations!
Now, if you have to move the ball to inside as you move it further up, you also have to adjust your alignment.
You see, the face is closing throughout the entire downswing and if you move the golf ball up in your stance, the face will be more closed at impact than if the ball is farther back. Make sure you watch the video I linked to above if this isn’t clear.
TAKE YOUR DRIVING TO THE NEXT LEVEL
The rest of this Premium video explains how to blast the ball your maximum distance by making the necessary setup adjustments for the driver.
Want to Hit Your Longest Drives… EVER?
If you’ve got your setup dialed in and just want to know how to hit the ball as FAR as humanly possible, then check out our Bomb Your Driver video series.
This series covers EVERYTHING you need to know about hit to hit your longest drives ever, probably farther than you can even imagine!
How far?
I used these exact same concepts to boost my swing speed to 129 mph and my mishits flew 300 yards!
I’ve hit two drives over 400 yards now and can consistently carry the ball over 300 yards, and all without swinging out of my shoes!
I’m going to teach you not only how to optimize your equipment for ideal launch conditions, I’m also going to show you the “pro secret” to where club head speed comes from – and how to get more of it!
If you’re driver swing speed isn’t at least 105 mph, this series will be a game changer for you!
Check out how YOU can start crushing 300 yard drives here!
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