Jordan Spieth - How to Hit the High Draw
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Jordan Spieth wins the 2015 Tour Championship and the FedEx Cup at the age of 22. In this video, I'll show you his key moves to hitting a high draw off the tee.
- Shift your weight to the trail side to start the swing and load up.
- Transfer your weight to the lead side to start your downswing.
- Allow for the shift and rotation of the hips to create secondary axis tilt to help shallow the swing.
We are back again with this week's tour analysis, with the $10 million man, 22 year old Jordan Spieth. Congratulations to Jordan Spieth, who just picked up his 5th victory of the year on the PGA Tour at the Tour Championship. This week we are going to be focusing in on how to hit a high draw. I found a couple of good golf swings of Jordan's where I can actually highlight some of the key areas in his golf swing that allow him to drive the ball up in the air and get it turning from right to left, which can help you add a little bit more distance off the tee and also help you overcome that nagging slice. If you wanted to pick up more speed or you want to get more control, let's go ahead and get started now.
Okay. As I said in the opener, we're going to be focusing in on a couple of the key points in Jordan's golf swing that allow him to hit a high draw. I know a lot of us probably want us to talk more and more about all of the attributes in Jordan's golf swing, but we've actually done a ton of analysis on him in the past. Over to the right hand side of the video player here on the website you'll be able to see all those videos that we've done. Lots of good content, but again, we're just going to be focusing on the key areas here that allow him to hit a high draw. Those of you at home who have wanted to hit this shot, or if you've been looking for a better way to help overcome your slice, or even just trying to get the ball moving even further down the fairway, then this is a video that's perfect for you.
A couple of key areas that we're going to be focusing on in this review, we're going to be talking a little bit about axis tilt and how it can affect the swing plane in the down swing. I'm going to mark that, a line down the front of his spine. Go ahead and also mark a elbow plane line here, so we can use this from a down the line perspective. I'm going to show you how that works in relationship to the axis tilt that you see from a face on perspective. Also I'm going to mark the position of the club here and where he's actually aiming. You can see that he's aiming probably at the right center of this fairway. Take a look over here. This is a very commonly taught things for a lot of golfers.
Those of you that are trying to hit draws, you'll hear, "Okay. Set up with your stance a little bit closed." This is going to help promote more of an in to out path. Just be careful with that kind of setup change, because that can really kind of over cook it, depending on how much secondary axis tilt you have down in the hitting area. That will make a little bit more sense to you guys as we go further into this. My big point here though is if you look at his hips and his knees, you can see they're pretty much in line with where he has the club head lining up here, again, right down the right venter. Foot line would probably be a little bit more out to the right.
Let's go ahead get him loaded up the top. Really important, if you're wanting to hit a high draw, you need to make sure that you shift and you lead your trail leg up Jordan does that beautifully. You're going to see him shift, load the trail leg up, and now you can see that he's maintained his axis tilt here at the top of the swing. Okay? Maintain the axis tilt. He's restricted his hips, so he's got a good load into that right leg. Now, the first key move to making sure that you can hit a high draw is we've got to be able to transfer our weight into our lead side. Let's go ahead and take a look what that looks like from a face on perspective. You're going to see as he starts to shift and unload, now he's got a good probably 65 to 70% of his weight into his lead leg here. Let's get him into the same spot here from a down the line perspective. You can see that, pretty much back to square position with the hips and knees.
Now, this is where we're going to start to work on creating a lot of rotation from the body here. The hips are not just doing one thing. They're not just shifting to the lead side, but they're also unwinding. It's a very dynamic move. Now, both of those moves can create secondary axis tilt. They can create an environment to where your spine leans away quite a bit from the target. If you were just to get to the top of your swing and push your pelvis forward, then in turn your spine would start to lean, or vice versa. Rotating your hips really hard would also start to create a lot of that secondary tilt.
My point here is that when you start to see Jordan really clear his hips from this perspective here, so you can see he shifted, now watch when he starts to get the spine tilting, increasing this tilt. Watch what happens to this plane up here. Watch this golf club. Let's go back down to the bottom. I'll show you how it works up through the takeaway, works on the plane line, gets up into a good position at the top, and then in a downward move you're going to see that this club comes underneath the plane line. Virtually the hands are in the same position. You can see how this club head is starting to droop underneath it. Now, this is a derivative of secondary axis tilt. This is what starts to shallow the golf swing out. This is what changes the angle of attack. This is what gets the path to become more from the inside out, but in order to do that properly you need to make sure that you're shifting your weight back into you lead side and you're controlling the rotation from the lead side.
Let's get him back down here into the hitting area. You're going to see, so it still stays underneath the plane line. This is an in to out draw here, and then you're going to see the ball start out to the right, just a little bit of where we had it originally aimed. We would call that just a mini push draw and very good control though down in the hitting area. He's got a great release, got very good hands down in the bottom of the arc. You can see now down at the release point of the swing. Let's look at how much the tilt's increased. Actually, let me back up a frame here. Maybe even one more frame. There we go. Here we are right at the impact zone. You can see now how much the tilt has increased in the golf swing, which now in turn, because it's shifted to a little bit flatter, now he's going to be bale to really hard release it. In turn he's going to have a little bit more speed in it.
That's kind of really the big points of his swing. If you're wanting to learn how to hit a high draw, the biggest thing that you can do to yourself is make sure that you're going to be transferring, shifting, and loading up your weight into your trail side, and make sure that you feel like you're unloading into your lead side with your lower half first. Try to feel like you're keeping your back to the target and your arms up. All that movement from the lower half is going to start to pull the arms and the shoulders down for you. Then when you get down to the hitting area make sure that you feel like you're controlling the area from the left side. Make sure you're using those left obliques to pull the hip away from the target, and make sure you refined your release. You'll be well on your way to hitting that high draw.
I know it sounds like a lot, but just really the kind of the big points are getting into a good setup position with axis tilt, getting good weight transfer into the trail side, and then unloading it into the lead side, and then just releasing the golf club. You'll be well on your way to doing it just like Jordan. Okay, guys? Just a couple videos I want you to check out this week. The golf down swing, that's a great video that shows you the propr mechanics, the proper movements on how to start your down swing. Also, if you haven't seen the VJ release drill, that's a good video that'll start to help you really feel like you can get this club letting go in the hitting area, which will help you obviously get more control as well. It's a fantastic video. Check those videos out.
Also, if you're unclear of what axis tilt is, I'll put another video over here. It'll be called The Importance of Axis Tilt, so definitely check that out. That'll give you a good, clear explanation as to what's going on here. All right, guys. I wish you all the best. Let's make it a great day and go play some great golf.
Christopher
Craig (Certified RST Instructor)