Increase Lag in Golf Swing | Drills | Create | Improving Tips 2021

This is one of THE BEST drills for teaching you how to increase your golf swing lag for more distance off the tee!

If you want more distance with your irons and more distance off the tee, you must have more lag in your golf swing! Lag is responsible for 66% of your clubhead speed, yet most amateurs completely throw it away at the start of the downswing.

So what we’re going to do is basically set the impact bag about two feet behind the ball, slightly inside the target line so that it comes into play here. If you’re getting a new impact bag from the site, just stuff it with old towels, shirts, blankets, whatever, just something to make it nice and soft, but fill it up there.

As you’re coming down into impact, your goal is that you would not hit that bag. What you’ll find is that … let me move the ball out of the way here … most amateurs are going to do that. They’re going to come down and they’re going to keep hitting the bag. At two feet behind you, for most people with a mid-iron, I’ve got a 6-iron here, you should be able to come into impact and miss the bag. Now, for a lot of you, that will seem impossible. For those of you who are a little bit more experienced with it, you can move it a little bit closer, but just barely two feet is plenty, that’s about the perfect amount. We don’t want it too close, or we’re going to come in too steep.

So now the key is, what you’re going to do is you’re going to hit balls with the 6-iron, just hit little half, three-quarter shots. You’re going to have to start from a little bit of an early set position because we’re going to have to get it up over the bag, but you can just start from about here to make sure that you got your takeaway above the bag, and then just hit little three-quarter shots back and through, making sure you miss the bag. What you’ll find is you’re going to want to start to do this, and you’re going to want to clip the bag. Make sure that you start to miss it.

In order to do that, here’s the key, is what a lot of you are going to do is you’re going to say, “Okay, Chuck wants me to miss this bag, so I’m going to move it way out in front, and now I miss it. Look how easy I miss it by. I can move it another foot closer.” You’re not necessarily maintaining the lag, you’re just sliding out in front of it. That’s the wrong way to do it, and ironically, when do you that, whenever you move your body further out in front, you’re going to lose more lag, and here’s why. This is one of the most common problems I see in a golf swing, when Paul does our online lessons, or when I do them, or when I see somebody in person, without fail, they learn to stay centered really well, but then they do this coming into impact. They get their head way out in front.

What happens is the golf swing works in opposite pairs, so when I move this way, the club is going to move this way because there’s two things. One, just momentum is going to want to keep myself balanced. I’m going to throw the club out this way. And then for two, I’m going to do that because if I didn’t release it and cast it early, I’d completely miss the ball because I’ve moved the bottom of my swing arc forward. The bottom of your swing arc is basically this left arm fully extended out, here’s the bottom of my swing arc. This is where my divot’s going to be, at the deepest point, my ball slightly behind that. If I come into impact and I slide forward, well now the bottom of my divot’s out here. If I didn’t cast it, I’d completely miss the ball.

So now we’ve got to understand is there’s a couple of things that become a little bit more tricky to work on. When I go back, what actually happens in a good golf swing is that my spine actually starts to go backwards slightly. Now, we talk about keeping centered, it’s not that we want you to go out and start leaning back to hit the ball, but for some of you who tend to slide way out in front, it may actually feel like that. But when the body and the hips and the core rotate properly, the spine will actually tilt slightly back and cause axis tilt, if you hear that term used, the spine will tilt back, and what this allows me to do is conserve this angle. You see, if I go this way, momentum’s going to throw it this way, in the opposite direction. But if I go this way, notice how much I can keep that right wrist angle bent as I come down into impact. Now, I’ve got a lot of what we call axis tilt, and I’ve got a lot of lag coming down into here.