AXIOM Compression Drill
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THE drill that will give you the consistency you desire with effortless distance you didn't realize you could achieve.
All right now, it's time to take what you've learned and put it into action. And the first thing that we're going to focus on is getting you to compress the ball. The reason nothing will help you improve faster, lower your scores, and have more fun than learning how to properly compress the ball. And this drill that I'm going to teach you today is not only going to help you do that, but it's also going to give you something to fall back on when your swing starts leaking a little bit of oil in the middle of the round so that you can instantly dial it back in. This drill is extremely valuable because not only would allow you to progress very quickly, but it also allows you to work at your own pace. So if you're not quite ready to go to putting a lot of speed into the swing, don't worry.
This drill is very progressive. It's going to start with very, very short shots. And then we're going to build up all the way to a full swing. As you work through the program, as you work through the Axiom compression drill, you're going to be able to instantly be able to self-diagnose swing floss so that when you hit a bad shot, you're going to know not only how to fix it, but you're going to know what it feels like to do it right. And we're going to work on the three fundamentals you just learned on the back, swing down, swing and release so that you can quickly put all of these things together and start seeing real results today. But first we need to understand what is compression? What does that really mean? Well, here's the best way to describe, have you ever been on a hole and you've hit a shot that you absolutely nuked over the green and you didn't even care that you made a bogey and you hit it way over the green because it felt so amazing.
It felt like the ball almost melted on the face that is compression. Compression is when you strike the ball properly in the center of the face with a proper angle of attack and proper face angle. So it feels like the ball just nukes and launches off the face with no effort. That's what this drill is all about. I'm going to teach you how to get compression, starting with very small swings and building up speed so that you can always start compressing the ball because at the end of the day, compressing the ball is the major difference between being a very, very high level ball striker and a pretty clunky ball striker. You don't want to be hitting it all over the place on the face. And consistently you need to learn how to hit it in the center. And this drill helps you start doing that immediately.
So if you're hitting the ball all over the face and it's very inconsistent, this drill is exactly what you're looking for. One of the key things that compression does is it helps you hit the ball the same distance every time it does. You absolutely no good to hit a seven iron 165 yards on one shot. If you hit it 145 on the next, you don't know which ones kind of come up, it's like a box of chocolates. So what compression really does is it removes doubt. That's what we're really getting to feeling confident over the ball so that you know, that the ball is going to go the distance that it needs to. You know, it's going to carry that bunker, that water hazard and get on the green compression is what allows you to feel confident over each and every shot. I'm certain you probably have a hole on your golf course that you play most frequently, that just sets up right to your eye.
You know, you're going to hit a good shot, whether it's a par three that you just step up there and say, yep, I know the club to hit here. It's always going to be in the center of the green, or there's a tee where you just feel comfortable with the driver and you know, you're going to make a good swing. And the ball is going to be end up in the fairway. That confidence is what golf is all about. And that's what the Axiom compression drill is all about. It's removing that fear and doubt because, you know, if you hit the ball squarely on every shot, yeah, it might be off directional wise a little bit, but it's always going to be near the hole. Cause it's always going to have the right distance. That is the key to lower scores and much more enjoyable golf.
The first checkpoint to the compression drill is just making a small takeaway movement. We're going to start very small so that you have a way to always start compressing the ball. Every time you go to the course, before you warm up, you're going to hit these little shots just to get you dialed in. So at first we're just going to go parallel to the ground. That's it. If we check our checkpoints here, the club's going to be parallel to the ground from down the line. It's going to be more or less pointing parallel to the target line and the club's going to be slightly towed up and your arms are going to be straight during this time. You're also initiating that pressure shift. You want to make sure that your body isn't just rigid and you're just trying to use all arms and upper body.
We've got to get some rhythm and flow. So you'll see, as I go, even during this little takeaway, you'll see my pressure beginning to move. If you look at the pressure trace you see on the screen of Justin Rose, you can see how his pressure moves clockwise around his foot. Even on these little tiny swings, we want to have that same feeling because that's giving us a sense of rhythm and tempo and being in sync with our whole body. So make sure that you make this takeaway move and use your whole body to do it rather than just trying to use your arms and being all stiff and tight. It's not important that you try and match a specific pressure trace. It's more important that you get the fluidity and the movement going because when you're typically going to start falling apart is when you start getting rigid and stiff and you feel tense.
I'm certain, you felt that on the course. If, if you've had a shot that has a little bit of pressure on it, or perhaps you're in front of people and you get a little nervous and tense, and then we, we can't play to our potential. So don't try to perfect this pressure and try to match it exactly to Justin roses or whoever else is you're really just trying to get this direction and fluidity this fluid movement, this athleticism and back in your swing. And that's what we're really trying to wake our body up. And when we first stepped on, the course is getting some stuff moving. That's what you're trying to do because when you start to really fall off, you're going to find that your lower body starts to get really stiff, really rigid. And you're going to have no sense of feel in your lower body.
So think of this initial part of the drill of getting your Axiom pressure shift going is kind of like using your mouse to wake up your screensaver on your computer, your screens falling asleep, your lower body is falling asleep, and you got to shake the mouse to wake it back up. That's what we're doing here. We're starting to just kind of wake everything back up and get us moving fluidly and athletically again, as you know, by now with the Axiom, we don't have a transition in the typical sense of trying to turn back clockwise one direction and then a 10th of a second, try to all of a sudden change directions and start rotating counterclockwise. That's a little bit difficult and the pros aren't doing it. So why should you, we want to have this feeling of this continuous flow of movement of that clockwise pressure shift.
And that's what we're trying to get a feeling of when we start doing this drill. So at first, even though you're only going to halfway back, we can still keep that pressure shift going, even though I'm only going basically to the end of the takeaway, my foot is driving that motion, getting my hips moving. So you don't have to think, okay, now I'm in this position. Do I, you know, you need to make sure it's in a reasonable spot. We'll refine the takeaway later on, but we get it in a reasonable spot. And then just keep that pressure shift going. You can see, as I do this drill, my hips are still getting open. Even though I'm making a little swing. My hip movement is still going as if I was making a full swing at impact. That's your primary goal is to make a continuous movement from parallel to the ground on one side, to parallel to the ground on the other.
So if I put this all together, this is what I'm checking for. And when we look at our check points, if we look at the release at this point as I go back and I keep my pressure going, I now want to see the club parallel to the ground and towed up or slightly towed in on this side. And you can see I'm not turning my head to go look at the ball. I'm letting the club release, letting my forearms turnover in conjunction with that Axiom movement. So now I'm starting to have a nice continuous little movement instead of a chunky stop here. Check all these pressure points, move. It's all about making this a continuous flowing movement. When you go to hit a ball, that's what you want to feel. So you make some practice swings, parallel to the ground, make sure your foot's always working.
Don't let that foot stall out. Cause then all of a sudden you're going to hang back and you're going to start just trying to hit all with your arms and hands. So little tiny swings, nice little perfectly struck right in the center of the face shot there. That's what we're looking for. Even though that ball only flew about 40 yards, that movement started getting me waking up my body. I shook the mouse on my computer and my whole body starting to move fluidly, continuously and athletically. And just by hitting five or 10 shots like that and checking my checkpoints. I'm going to start to get myself woken up and ready for the day. Now, if I do that again, we'll go. I'll walk you through the checkpoints in the release. Cause that's where we really want to stop and check and make sure we did things correctly.
So I'm going to make, it's always a good idea to make a few practice swings in between balls, just to wake the body up, get that feeling, going, try to feel what you're trying to do. And then as you step up to the ball, make that same movement. I just went off the center of the face. So let's take a look at my checkpoints. I'm about parallel to the ground. All my pressures on my lead foot, I could pretty much lift my trail foot up. I'm still looking down here. Now. You don't have to hold your head here and force it to stay here, but you don't want to be taking your head up to go and watch the ball flight because wherever your eyes go, your head goes and where your head goes. Your shoulders will go. So if you start looking like this, that's no bueno.
We want to let that club release. And you know that we should have a secondary tilt as our pelvis moves forward. And our head stays where it started. I want the club to release and get wider. Pull my arms straight. I'm not trying to chicken wing it and try to use all arms and hands. So that's your big checkpoint in the follow-through is making sure that your arms are straight and you can see my chest is rotated open, but I'm not facing the target. It's not that much rotation. I'm really just letting the club release and pull me through to a follow through my foot. My trail foot is going to be low to the ground. I don't need to be way up on my toes is a baby shot. So I'm letting it roll to the inside. My knees pointing at 10 o'clock, 11 o'clock hips open.
And you'll also notice we look at it from down the line. My lead hip would be deeper than where it started at address. It's going to be deeper in the checkpoint and impact. As I mentioned at first, these balls are only going to go 30, 40 yards. The goal is to get yourself hitting it properly. Squarely. If you want to hit a specific ball flight, I prefer to hit just a little bit of a draw on my stock shots. So when I go to the range in the morning to loosen up, I start hitting little tiny draws. Even though they're only going 40 yards, you can see the curvature of the ball. So I start grooving that sensation of how much I want to release the club. If I want to hit a fade for whatever reason, I'm playing on a golf course, or I need to hit a bunch of shots left to right then I'll do that while I'm doing this drill.
I'll hold the release off just a tiny bit. So instead of being towed in and fully released, I'll maybe hold it up towards just shy just past 12. O'clock it doesn't matter what shot you want to hit. You're just going to control that with the release of the face, hit 20 or 30 shots to get yourself grooved in for that day, hitting it in the center of the face, and then start adding a little bit of speed to it. You're going to add speed is not by swinging harder. Don't do that. Just make a little bit bigger. Turn your end goal with this compression drill is to get your lead arm about parallel to the ground. So it's going to look like, so we started here where the shaft was parallel, and then you're going to slowly work up. Maybe at first you hit 10 or 20 or 30 shots going just to here.
And then you start adding a little bit more, every five or six balls. You add a little bit more and a little bit more until you feel like your lead. Arm's about parallel to the ground. The reason I want you to stop there is because most golfers, when they're not used to compressing the ball properly, they'll feel that they're making a swing. That's very, very short and compact, like parallel to the ground, but the ball will actually be going farther than what they're used to with their full swing. It's because you're learning how to move correctly and in sync, and you're getting the synergistic benefit of moving your body correctly. And so you'll actually start hitting the ball much further, which a much more compact swing, which is exactly what we want. The more compact swing we can make and still get the same power and distance, the greater consistency we're going to have. So as you start adding a little bit more speed by adding more rotation, like I said, you're just going to slowly build up. I'm just going a little bit longer. Same thing. I'm going to let the club release a little bit more, but a little swing. The important thing is I'm keeping this rhythm going with my body. I'm keeping my Axiom pressure shift going the whole time.
Right? Nice and pure. I hit it really solid. That ball flew about 130 yards. So just a little swing like that. As long as I'm hitting it on the center of the face, I don't have to swing that hard when you're hitting it way out on the toe or way out on the heel and the club face isn't square. You got to swing a lot harder to get the ball to go anywhere. What I want you to do is be efficient. If you're efficient, you don't have to work that hard to hit the ball. That's one of my biggest secrets. I'm only five, nine, a hundred sixty five pounds, but I swing over 120 miles an hour. It's not because I'm super strong. It's because I'm very efficient. I make sure I hit the ball solidly as humanly possible. And this is my drill that allows me to do it.
I slowly build up from these little shots. So I have a chance to get my feel for the day to keep, make sure my lower body's moving properly. That makes sure that my arms are shallowing out properly using this Axiom movement that you've learned. You'll be able to start. Puring the ball on every single shot and slowly build up. Don't go from zero to a hundred slowly. Give yourself a little bit of time each day. If you just take 30, 40, 50 balls, you'll be shocked at how solidly you hit shots. The rest of the day. Now what's really cool about this drill is you can use it in the middle of a round. Let's just say you just hit a bad shot. Gosh, I don't know what happened there. Something just felt kind of wonky. Well, while you're playing partner is over there, messing around, getting ready to hit his shot.
Just go back and make these little nine to three swings here. These little parallel to parallel shots. So you start feeling, oh gosh, I felt like I did something different there. You regroup it. You get that feeling again of your body, working, everything, working in sync. You, you feel that tension in your arms and hands slowly start to fade away because you remember this feeling because you do it every day before you hit balls. And then on the next shot you'll know like, okay, all I got to do is just the simple little feeling. If I do that, I know the ball is going to go where I want it to. The challenge I want to give you is I want you to think about how you're going to start using this drill to play great golf every single day, because consistency is the name of the game.
So your goal is to take 50 balls. And I want you to start tracking out of those 50. How many of them that you hit pure now at first you might feel like you're not doing the drill correctly and that's okay. We're here to help you. If you're getting it off a little bit and you might hit one off a little thin like that, cause you're doing something wonky. That's okay. That's not that we don't count that one as a pure one, but if we'd go through these little drills and we just start making these little moves, that was right in the center of the face. I hit a dead straight, right where I wanted to. That's one track out of 50. As you move up to lead arm to parallel. How many of those you hit pure? You'll see, as you keep doing this drill a little bit every day over the next few weeks, you'll see the number that you hit pure go from maybe five or 10 to 20 to 30 to 40.
And that's your goal. 80% is my goal. You, if you hit 40 out of 50 balls, pure doing this drill and you get to lead on parallel, you're going to start hitting the ball really, really solid and start being really confident over each shot. And as we keep working on this, as you keep getting more comfortable in the next section and we start getting deeper into the fundamentals of the swing, I'm going to show you how to take this drill and go even bigger with it and hit the ball farther than you ever have, but still feeling like you're making a little tiny back swing. I encourage you to video yourself as you're doing this. So you start sketching on yourself when you hit one thin, just look back to the camera and say, oh, you know, I, I hung back and I, I felt my arms takeover there or whatever, so that you start getting used to calling yourself out.
Recognizing when you make a mistake, that's how you're going to progress really fast. And I encourage you to post those videos in the community. So we can also take a look at them and help you out. Give you quick little pointers that are going to help you get this drill dialed in so that you can start peering the ball on every shot. All right. So now I'm going to walk you through me going through this in a condensed version. I'm not going to hit a full 50 shots, but I'm going to show you how I naturally use this in a real real world scenario. I'm out at the course, I'm getting ready to hit, go play golf. And I'm just trying to warm up. So I'm going to make some practice swings. And I just want to make sure, just like getting my body to move just like everybody else. I've got to make sure that my body wakes up. It's really easy to just kind of start swinging alarms. So I just make a few practice swings to get that feeling. And if I hit it solid, I'll just make a couple practice swings again. If I feel good about it, if I didn't hit it very well, I will figure out what I did wrong. That I just try to use my arms, that I do something else in my body fall asleep. But if I feel good, I'm going to step up to the next one and keep going another good one. Do a few more like that. And I'll slowly start to add some speed. [inaudible]
Another good one or three for three so far. We're not the center here now. A little more speed. Another good one again, I recommend at first, you know, hit, hit quite a few that are shorter shots, just hitting these little 20, 30 yard ones. I'm just kind of walking you through it quicker. So this would normally be maybe more like my 20th or 30th ball. And now I'm going to keep going at a little bit more speed. So maybe we're sitting where I'm at close to my 40th ball.
[inaudible]
On the screws, no complaints there. So I'm kind of about, I'd say about 70% normal speed at this point. So I'm really just using these first 50 balls to wake up the body, make sure I'm moving and rhythm and tempo. And I've got everything synced up. Go a little bit longer. No, they're good. One still hitting them on the center. So, so far we're doing good. And then I would just use this to get myself in sync. If I hit a bad one, I would kind of go back down a step, like, okay, maybe I'm okay to about here. But as I tried to go back a little bit further, I start to get a little off what's happening. Am I building up tension in the wrong place? So I would say, okay, there's nothing wrong with just backing it down for a couple. There we go.
Now I got the feeling of it again. And then I just keep repeating this process. There's no way that I'm going to start hitting a bunch of bad shots because I just back it down, regroup the simple feeling on these really short shots. And if I get really off go all the way back all the way back to the beginning, keep grooving that feeling. And then as you get comfortable again, you can start adding smooth pace to it again, just nice and smooth. That's your goal? My goal when I do this drill for me personally, is how far can I hit it with how easy I can swing? That's my ratio. I want my effort level to be as low as possible in my distance to be as high as possible. And this is how I get that feeling. If I just go up to the range of first swing and just whale on as hard as I can. I never going to get a good sense of feeling for the day. So I'm really just trying to see how easy I can swing that day and how much distance I can get out of it and control. Okay.
Now that one I hit a little bit thin and a little bit, right? So I didn't quite get it released. So that's a great one to go back and say, okay, what did I do? Well, I felt that I tried to rip open a little aggressive. Don't need to do that. So I'm just gonna go back and feel my Axiom movement. Get that grooved up again, slow it down a little bit. Take my time and hit him nice and straight like that. Every time.
Roy
Craig (Certified RST Instructor)
Jesse
Craig (Certified RST Instructor)