- Welcome back! Adam Bazalgette, two-time PGA Teacher of the Year Award winner
down here in Naples, Florida. Wanna talk today about a
really important topic, how to hit a driver straight. Stay tuned! (electronic and strings music) Well, how to hit a driver straight. We're gonna look at what it
takes to hit a driver straight. There's three things you have to do. I'll show you those. And then we're gonna
look at a little drill that has multi-faceted if you like, and think will get you on the right track and at least give you something to sort of sink your teeth into. Okay, let's get started. So let's try to tackle this
subject a little bit now. Let me just say to you. Hey, there's no easy answer on this one. There actually is an easy answer. There's a direct answer,
but there's no shortcuts. Let's put it that way. Now, the fact is, no matter what I say or what you read, if you're
gonna hit your driver straight, you have to have solid contact pretty near the middle of the club face. Next thing you have to have is the direction your swing is going in. The swing path right around
impact has to be pretty true to where you're trying to hit it. And of course, the final thing, and this is a biggie, club face has to be nice and square to the target and square to the swing in that case. If you don't do those three things, it doesn't matter what else you do, it's just not gonna go that straight. So that's a little challenging. Gonna try to give you a drill
that'll help you with that. Let me just say one other thing. When you're developing
your skill as a golfer, when you're trying to learn
to be a decent golfer, let's take someone at the ground level. The first thing you've gotta do whether it's a wood or an iron, is hit the ball reasonably solidly. Until you can hit the ball fairly solidly, you can't make any real progress. The next thing, and maybe
this surprises you to hear it, isn't so much hitting it straight, it's learning how to build some speed and some power so you can
get the ball out there a decent distance, shorten
the golf course up, and start playing some more
regulation kinda holes. That's the next real skill. And then the final skill, is bringing your directional
cone more together. Now, obviously, they relate
to each other a little bit, but the tour pro, believe me,
has mastered the solid hit. They've got plenty of distance. The final thing they're always working on is honing in their directional control. So I mentioned this just to say, hey, you can't work on accuracy in a vacuum of solid
contact and decent speed. You've gotta be able to
do it in that context. But for the purposes of this video, we're gonna assume that
you've mastered it. We hadn't mastered, at least
have reasonable contact and speed and you're really interested in how you can groove the
direction of your shots. So, let's have a look at a drill here that I think will help you. So let's have a look at this drill from a couple different angles. Now, number one this is
just an alignment rod that's perpendicular to the
direction I'm trying to go in. This is something, by the way, you can practice at home with
the grouting in the tiles or the edge of your carpet or whatnot, but just lay a club on the ground there. And what I'm gonna do
is I'm gonna place that about where the golf ball would be, and I'm gonna begin to
map on a small scale, even though I'm coming from the inside, what it's like at the bottom to be going directly perpendicular to that. And as I'll show you in a second, to get the face square to that. Now let me just interject one thing here, I've been talking golf and
struggling playing golf and you name it for decades, so I've been around this thing and really seen some of the
things that work and don't work. Believe me, it's a game
of a stick and the ball. At the end of the day, if
you're gonna be a good golfer, you have to have feel for the club, where the club is. I'm not saying you play golf
by consciously manipulating the golf, but you have to
learn skill with the club. And that's where it begins. Learn to control the
golf club a little bit. It's a fallacy to think
that just by putting some tip in your head like
turn more or shift my weight that magically you'll gain
control over the club. You likely won't. Your subconscious might over time create some skill in spite of yourself, but learn to control the club. And learn to feel it, and learn to get more skilled with the club. Let's have a look from another angle. Now as we look close-up from this angle let me just say to you, if you were to smack your left
hand with your right hand, your right hand would
consistently and easily square up. You wouldn't hit with the heel one time or the fingers another time. So you have this kinda built in there and that's really what you're trying to do with this club this way. One very important thing
though as you do it, you've still got to apply
pressure to the ball. So when you come in and you rehearse this, rehearse a more bent right
wrist as you square it up and a more bowed flat left wrist and that will give you consistency and speed and control over the club. So as you rehearse coming to square, you make sure you feel
like you could apply pressure to the golf ball. And again, I can map
that club face against that stick there a little bit. Once I've done it a little
bit, I'll play around. And I'll come in let's
say a little closed, a little open, and then back to square. And I can start to map out with that, what's gonna be a nice
square position at impact and what's gonna consistently let me put pressure against the ball. Okay, so let's say we've
mapped it out a little bit now. I'm starting to get a feel now for coming in flush to the stick both in turns of direction and club face. I've got a sense of
what my hand should do. Course now we gotta hit a few golf shots. Now, let me jump in here with something. This is Dr. Scholl's foot spray. You can get it at any hardware store. I shouldn't say hardware
store, drug store. And it is fantastic for
mapping out contact. I said at the beginning of this video no matter what I think or you think, there's three things you've gotta do if you're gonna hit the driver straight. We've talked a little bit about swing path and club face now, but
you still have to hit the ball in the middle of the club face. It just isn't gonna work
if you don't do that. Now, I've played golf for 40 years, taught golf full-time for nearly 30, I literally have watched millions of golf shots fly in my life. You probably have a
parallel in your career if you've been around a long
time and done it for a while. And what that's given me the ability to do amongst other things, I can tell pretty much from the sound and the way the ball's flying, pretty much where on the club face that player hit it. Toe-to-heel, low-to-high,
it's just not that difficult when you've watched as
many shots as I have. You likely though, don't have
nearly that much experience, so this is the key. Get this foot powder. Give it a little spray there,
and just spray that face off. Every few shots wipe it off and repeat. But you'll get beautiful
print marks on that, will tell you exactly
where you're hitting it. And I'm telling you,
even if you don't know, exactly why it's off-center, starting to train your
eye and just getting feedback will do wonders for your mind on this critical, critical component. So, I'm gonna rehearse
it a couple of times here after talking there, getting my feel. I'm gonna start with a
nice small swing here. Out she goes. A little bit too much to the left. Have a look at the
contact on that club face. Pretty good heel-to-toe, a
little higher than I would like. So that gives me instant and
complete feedback on that. And again, I just fiddle with
it and keep mapping it out, ratchet the speed up and
take it down, et cetera. We'll talk about that in just a second. And I'm getting feedback, and I'm training and building skill there. And as I say, I love that
you can do this at home. Okay, let me give you a couple
of closing thoughts here that I think will help you put it together or at least help put it into practice. I was lucky enough in my early years at David Leadbetter to
see a lot of tour pros up close and personal
practicing their games, practicing their techniques. Faldo, I guess, stuck out to me the most in the way he went about things. But what I noticed was
that these top players when they're working on
an element of their swing, and we've been working on this drill, they'll work on it on a small
scale as I've suggested. And then they'll ratchet
it up and try to hit it on a little bit bigger scale. We've talked a bit about that. But they will come back to
the small scale frequently. Whether that's size of
swing or pace of swing or whether it is, something
that allows them to feel what they're doing and get
it back to a small scale, kind of rediscover, if you like, or re-hone that skill and
then back up to the big scale. Most people, and I've
watched these for decades, they may do a few drills, but once the blood gets pumping and they're really whacking some balls, they're not coming back to small scale. They're whacking until the bucket's done. Don't get caught into that trap. Have the poise to keep coming back and getting the feel back. Second thing is, once you've
grooved something a little bit, once you've put it in there, you don't need to think
about it that much. You don't need to sit and grind in your mind and try too hard. A lot of this stuff we're talking
about here is near impact. That happens very, very quickly. The brain is amazing. With enough training and enough storage and a clear enough picture
of what you're doing, if you just maintain that
nice, clear intention and that sense of being outside your head, trying to feel what you're doing. You will be able to do it, or at least you'll gain skill in doing it. And you'll learn how to do it well. So don't make the mistake
of thinking too much. And if you're like, trying to
over-control and try too hard. Hope this helps you. Well I hope you found that helpful with how to hit a driver straight. If you like the video, please subscribe to the channel. Would love to get you more free content. Plenty more coming your
way in the future we hope. ScratchGolfAcademy.com is my website. You have full courses in
every aspect of the game including the driver there. Hope you'll check that out. Thanks again! (clicking noise) (clicking noise) (clicking noise)
