Green Grass Golf Shop

Hello friends, welcome back into the Green Grass Golf Shop. Today we have some excellent tips and an amazing drill that will help you with your ball striking and distance, and make you much more consistent in compressing the ball with your irons the way the tour pros do it. And please, before we go any further, if you want some help performing or setting up this drill, or just want a free swing analysis, send us a message, check out the GolfLive link in our channel description to book your free first lesson. Now look, I have to warn you, once you dial this in it becomes incredibly addictive. Having struggled with addiction myself, I’ll tell you from experience, this leads down a dark path of ball flights deep into the dark night as you can’t tear yourself away from the range and back to your loving family. It’ll lead to a deep, dark despair, having to refigure your iron distances, because they go so much further and straighter now. And handicaps that dip lower and lower until you finally reach your rock bottom, sacrificing your sweet handicap strokes…back to the course.

First of all, let’s define compression the way we’ll be talking about it today. What does it mean to compress your irons? Now, one thing it doesn’t mean is having the right compression rating on your golf ball to match your swing speed. If a golf professional tells you they can fix your swing and you need a lower compression ball for lower swing speeds to improve your distance or green sign control, run the other way. Report that person to your nearest golf lesson abuse hotline. Help is out there, please don’t suffer in silence. And please don’t take lessons from that medicine man or buy their snake oil. Compression, as we will be discussing it today, means three things when you’re hitting your irons. It means hitting the golf ball first, with a downward angle of attack, and a square club face. This is something that you struggle to do if consistent contact is something you struggle with, then my assumption, first of all, is that your setup might look something like this, like my students look in our first lesson. Most that struggle with compressing the ball and hitting it first will set up in this manner with their sternum way behind the golf ball. A lot of what we call that secondary spine angle from the face-on view here, so that if you don’t make some extra moves in your golf swing to remedy that, the bottom of your swing starts here before the ball, and we’re swinging up by the time we get to it. Or we’re hitting the ball on the ground at the same time instead of in front of the ball like we want to. Or, you know, what I see quite often as well is during the swing, the body tries to overcorrect, meaning the chest fires first to try to get back down to the ball. Hands and clubs go out, which absolutely brings the bottom of your swing more forward towards the golf ball but with that motion, as I’m sure a lot of you have experienced, you’ll kind of swipe across the ball with more of a glancing blow. A great way to check this is to take your golf club here in your setup position, hold it gently against your sternum, and let it dangle straight down. It’s not dangling right over the golf ball like it is right here. If it’s behind the ball or hovering over the side of the ball away from your target, setup is the first thing that you can adjust, trying to feel like you’re more on top of the ball here.

Truth be told, I see a lot that just fixing the setup will fix the swing motion on its own. The only reason that your body is swinging out to in or bringing the bottom of your swing forward like that, the reason you can’t stop it because you set up the way you do. By fixing that, your body will be free to make the motion that it knows it’s proper. You’ll be more free to make the changes we need to be making. Okay, now onto the square club face, of course we always need to check our grip. The way I’ll do that is I’ll hold my club down to my side, with just my top hand grip, left hand for the right-handed golfers. Just let it rest where it naturally wants to fall in my fingers. Find a place that makes it easiest to pick up the club like this. That’s your natural grip position. We take that nice loose grip around to the front of us. Use my other hand to rotate the club square. Make sure that I start with that square face. Take my lifeline on my opposite hand, cover that thumb pointed straight down my grip. Make sure my Vs are pointed in the right direction toward my trailing ear. I can look down and make sure that I can see at least three knuckles on my top hand. I’m good to go.

Okay, so once we’re in our good setup position here, now we can get a feel for our new motion. The best way to do that is with a drill and some physical points of feedback. This way we can make sure that we’re not relying on our field you know, that trusty instinct that got us to this position in the first place, unable to make a clean strike with our irons. It’s one great thing for all beginners and amateurs to understand is if you’re not practicing with a drill or with a purpose, especially with some actual feedback like something in the way of your club or your body if they get out of your desired position, or even restricting you from making that improper movement, you’re not improving, you’re stretching. Trying to rely on your feel alone, you’re not truly practicing at all. Effectively, you’re just doing cardio, more than likely grooving in a swing that’s only getting progressively harder to correct with every shot you take. Now, for this drill here, we’re gonna need, besides our club and golf ball, is a head cover and an alignment rod.
You can even use a tee or something similar if you don’t have an alignment rod. But I’m going to take that alignment rod and I’m going to lay it perpendicular to my target line about two club heads behind the golf ball here. Then the head cover about a ball or so outside of my club head, extending over the alignment rod, lined up with my target line. I’m going to start with these pretty far out, about a club and a half, two clubs back. I’m going to line up that club head cover with my target line, maybe even to the push side of our target, that’s to the right for righties and to the left for lefties. Now for the setup here, I’m going to get into what I call the kickstand position. Line up the ball with my front foot and all the weight on my front foot. My back foot just kind of trailing behind my body, keeping balance, maybe even pushing into my front foot. Stance very closed, but I want to keep my shoulder square to my target. Maybe even line it up with that head cover that we pointed just out to the right of our target. With the swing here, and for most drills, especially just starting out, you want to take short swings to get the feel, like this here. [SWING] Nice short half swings. Focus on keeping the sternum over the golf ball and that weight forward throughout the swing. Now our overarching theme here, hopefully quite obviously by now, is to miss all of our fodder that we laid out. The swing path we want is more or less neutral. Anything coming from slightly inside the golf ball, missing our head cover here. But on top of that, we need to hit the golf ball first by having this rod here forcing us over brings us into the perfect path for our irons. We’ll start with our rod pretty far back, head cover pretty far outside the ball, maybe a few balls outside the club head, and you’re just starting out with this drill. And you can bring it closer to your clubs and your ball as you as you get comfortable missing those every time. And then at the same time, when we get used to these swings here, we can start to lengthen those. So we build all the way up to that full swing. Start with that alignment rod, two club heads back, and when you can miss that every time, start to bring those in a little closer. But the closer this alignment rod is, the more that we’re going to have to start with that club head behind that alignment rod as we get super duper close. But with all of that out of the way, you should be able to make full swings. That alignment rod, maybe a head and a half behind your ball, head cover a few centimeters right outside your club path without hitting either of them. Just like I didn’t do there. Get ready to chase that dragon, baby.

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