Why You Need This:

In this video, Clay emphasizes the importance of having an open mind and following the drills precisely. He explains that the course is based on motor learning and biomechanics research, promising faster improvement by mastering a few key techniques. The course is structured over four weeks, focusing on controlling the clubface, path, and eliminating major mishits, culminating in tying all elements together. Clay also shares his expertise and credentials, assuring viewers of the effectiveness of these proven methods.

What's Covered: Introduction to the Straight Driving Masterclass.

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Video Transcription:

Hey, it's fantastic to have you here today. If you want to hit it consistently straight and more solid, this is the course for you. Now, in this video, I'm gonna go over a little bit of a, an ask I have of you to get the most out of this course, and then we're gonna go over what we go through in each week of this course and how it's gonna help your driving.

So first, here's the ask. So everybody always has something in their mind that they think, if I could just get this down, that's the solution to all my problems. Whether it's, you know, if I could just clear my left hip. Properly, like great players are doing, or maybe I need to change what my wrist is doing at the top of the swing or tuck my elbow a certain way, but we all have something in our mind that we're thinking is gonna be the solution to our problem.

And then we go on a search for something that verifies that. Well, I can guarantee you that this course and really any course that matter is never gonna be exactly what you want it to be. And in fact, I'm gonna ask you to do some things that are kind of crazy. They're gonna sound a little bit odd to you.

And I want you to suspend your disbelief and actually just go about it with completely open mind. Say, Hey, everything that I know about driving it straight, I'm gonna take the next few weeks and I'm gonna forget about all that. And I'm just gonna do the drills exactly as they're laid out and see what kind of results I get and let the results speak for it.

Don't let me talk you into it. Let your own results on how you're seeing the drives fly in the air, how consistent you get. Speak for themselves and let that guide your practice. So that's what I'm gonna ask from you on this entire course, and I guarantee you that if you do the drills exactly as they're laid out to a T, you will drive it a lot straighter.

You'll drive it a lot more consistent and driving can be a weapon in your golf game. There's a few things I wanna go over that to make you feel a little bit more comfortable with that before we get started, then we're gonna jump right into the drills. So piece number one is, who am I to be teaching driving?

I got a few things that I think are handy for me teaching this now. I hate to brag on myself or talk good about it. This is not my nature to be honest with you, but I'm a very good driver of the golf ball. It's by far the best part of my game. I've always been very good and I used to use, um, a little piece of software called Arccos, which I think is hands down the best for tracking your stats and seeing what parts of your game you're good at and not good at.

And I found through there that I drive it about one stroke gain for a PGA tour player. So that would be kind of around the top of the PGA tour. And I'll be honest with you, the rest of my game is not as good as that. If I did everything like I did driving, I would by far be on TV and I wouldn't be here teaching this course.

Uh, but I'm a very good driver and I just wanted to let you know that. 'cause sometimes it's tough when you're taking a video course and you're not really sure if the person is really great at what they're teaching you. And they could be teaching you theory, something that sounds good, but they haven't been able to put it in practice themselves.

With myself, I'm definitely a great driver of the golf ball and it would hold up. I know if you do the things I'm gonna teach you in this course, you're gonna drive it well too. I've also lost it at times. So there's been times where I felt like I couldn't miss a fairway. If I tried, I got up to the t, I'm ready to just hit the ball down the middle of the, the fairway and move on to the next shot.

'cause that's where kind of the action happens. And then there's times where I felt like I couldn't keep it on the map to save my life. I mean, I'm hitting balls outta bounds and doing all kinds of crazy stuff. Maybe I, I bought into a bad philosophy, or I was testing something out, or hadn't played in a while.

Well, every time that I did that, when I followed the drills that I'm gonna lay out in this course, I've got it right back on track. And I felt like driving was a weapon again. Now. One of the things that, that I've done that's a little bit unique is I've really dove deep into what's called motor learning or how you would acquire a new skill.

That's a, I've become good friends with Dr. Tim Lee, who has a PhD in motor learning. He's written multiple textbooks that they teach him in colleges all over the world, and I've also met a lot of other great people that are experts in motor learning. I've read dozens of books and dozens of research papers, and the reason I'm bringing this up here is because I'm gonna ask you to do some things that don't seem right.

For example, in the very first drill. We're gonna talk about hitting snap hooks and slices, and you're gonna be thinking to yourself, I don't wanna do that. I don't wanna snap, hook a ball on purpose. I don't wanna slice it. I just wanna get to the part where we're hitting it straight. Well, there's a reason for that.

If you wanna learn a skill fast, I have to learn the parameters first and then start to dial it back in. And the research shows that you should learn anywhere from three to 10 times faster if you do it that way. If we go straight to hitting the straight shots and hitting it down the middle of the fairway and don't get the what's called variable practice in first.

Specifically learning how to control the club faces where, where we'll start, it's gonna take a lot longer. So my goal is for you to be able to sit down here and do these drills and for a player beside you getting lessons or doing something else, if you're practicing the right way, you two can practice the exact same amount and you're gonna get three to 10 times faster results and that player's gonna get, that's why I developed all these drills based on motor learning.

Another thing that I did is fairly unique. Is I've really consulted a lot learning what's called the kinetics of the golf swing, or the forces or the physics that you're putting into this club, and I'm gonna teach you a handful of things if you feel like it's tough to square up the face. There's a couple of things that you have to do when you're swinging the club that'll allow it to square more passively and to take the hands out of it.

That's gonna be a common theme. You gotta get the hands out of it. Now the hands are active, but we gotta eliminate the manipulation. So meaning that the face feels like it's wide open. And then at the last second, I gotta try to. Squared up at the the last little tiny bit of a second. I wanna feel like that face is squaring up the whole downswing and I'm fairly passive and it still flies nice and straight again.

I'm gonna train you how to do that. That's one of the things that I think is a little bit unique about what I'm gonna teach you. Now, one of the other things I've done that's a little bit unique is I've always looked at the game through studying technique from a little bit more of a science-based. You know, theory.

So when I work on technique and there is a handful of techniques that you just flat out have to get to hit this driver, well, I'm gonna go over all those in this series over the next few weeks. There's a handful of things you have to do. Well now when I look at technique, what I did is I compiled the best players in the world.

So I have 50 major winners. I got driver swings from face on and down the line, really good clean video where I knew where they're lined up. And I would use that as a filter for ideas. And sometimes I would hear an idea that I'm like, wow, this is good. This could be the one thing that helps everybody improve.

And I would go through and look at all 50 of those players and see how many of them did that move. And a lot of times I would see a very popular player on TV or several popular players and I'm thinking, wow, I've really found something here. But when I get into the 50 players and I start to really.

Measure that I would see that it wasn't more than, say 15 or 20% of those players did that. Now that's not really good enough. That's just because a lot of good players are doing something similar. Doesn't mean that that's a good thing. You also wanna be able to look at higher handicappers, and as I'm going into scratch and 10 handicap and 20 handicap, I should start to see if I find a technique that's really good that the top players are doing, I should see people that are struggling do those less.

So really when I find a good technique, not only do I want it to sound good, not only do I wanna have proof that it works through my own teaching, but I also wanna be able to see that the best players are doing that. And as handicap goes up, less and less players are doing that. That's probably the strongest correlation to knowing if something's truly a fundamental or if it's just a fad.

And I'm not here to teach you fads. You don't wanna learn fads. I don't wanna just teach you the hottest thing that's popular right now, and then you turn around in six months and this is kind of worthless because it's not the hottest thing anymore. I wanna teach you time. Tested proven fundamentals that'll work for you today.

They'll work for you next year and they'll work for you 20 years from now. So that's the way I do the technique. And like I said, I did find a handful of techniques that if you don't get these right, it's gonna be very difficult to drive the ball consistently straight, hit a lot more fairways and hit it solid and we're gonna go over all those.

It's not very many that you really have to do, but you gotta master those. Now I've also been lucky enough to become good friends with Dr. Rob Neal, who's, uh, has a PhD in biomechanics. I learned some of those physics that I was talking about earlier from him. Also learned a lot of that from Sasho McKenzie, Dr.

Sasho McKenzie, who also has a PhD in in biomechanics. And one thing I did that's a little bit unique is I actually was able to get hands on. I paid Dr. Rob Neal to get access to his data of over a hundred PGA Tour players, where they measured their swings on track man to see how their club is moving through the ball.

There's a lot of theories. A fade is more consistent. A draw is. More consistent, whatever it is. Everybody has their own theories, but I looked at the real data of the best players in the world and saw what they're doing, and I gotta tell you, it's pretty daggone shocking. I'm gonna give you a little sneak peek to it.

To drive it straight. You have to hit it straight in this course. I know we're gonna start out again with some crazy drills where you work to really be able to hook the ball and slice the ball. That's so you can pick up the skill quickly. But from there, what we're gonna learn to do is hit it absolutely as straight as possible.

And if you watch players like Scotty Scheffler, who they talk about on tv. Hitting big slices all the time or big fades, and you visualize this ball just really slinging from left to right. If you watch him on the range and see his TrackMan data, you're gonna see that he is very straight. The ball hardly curves at all.

It goes dead straight in the air and barely falls to the right. Another player that prefers a draw, again, total opposite shot shape, but that ball's gonna go very straight in the air and then barely fall to the left. You have to be able to hit the ball straight. And that's what this course is gonna be all about.

So we wanna see very little curvature on the golf ball. I'm gonna show you exactly how to do it. I'm gonna show you how to learn it as quickly as possible. So now let's dive into what this course is. Well, week one, we have to get control of the club face. The club face is gonna determine about 80% of the start direction of the ball.

So if my face is open or pointed to the right, that ball's gonna start to the right. If my base is face is closed, that or to the left, that ball's gonna start to the left. If I don't get control of this face, I have no chance of doing anything else I wanna do with driving. So we're gonna learn how to control this face.

We're gonna talk about some of the physics with it. We're gonna talk about the technique with it, but most importantly, we're gonna get control of it by hitting shots and just following the drills. The cool thing about this, it's a lot more fun to practice This way. You'll learn that you have better control of this face than you think you do.

And then from there, once we get the extremes, we'll dial it in and get that shot. Flying as dead straight as possible. Just like the best players in at your local club or on the PGA tour, the best players hit it, the straightest bar none. I have all the data to prove it. Over 2,800 driver swings I've looked at.

And it's shocking how consistent all these best players are. They're basically all doing the same technique, which is the technique I'm gonna show you. Week number two, we're now gonna pair that up with path. So the direction that my club is swinging my inside out. Am I outside in? Am I swinging to the right or swinging to the left?

I mean, just the direction the overall head is moving, that's key because that's gonna tell me if I can start it in the right direction and then shape it in the right way or hit it dead straight again. What I found is that good players swing very straight. The good news about this is I've also seen that recreational players are very consistent in their path.

Meaning that their path doesn't alternate from going way to the right and way to the left from swing to swing. But we're usually off track. We're not swinging it straight enough, so you already probably have the consistency of the direction you're swinging time and time again to swing it. Very consistent.

You just have to learn to control the face, and instead of swinging outside in or inside out, we just have to learn to hit it squarely. That way we can start the ball if we're playing a draw down the right center of the fairway and draw it to the middle of the fairway. If we're playing a fade left center fairway, fade it to the middle, or what I would prefer is hit the ball as straight as possible.

I know you're already getting a little bit worried, you said, well, clay, you know, I've heard the straight ball is the hardest ball in golf to hit. And that may be true to hit it perfectly straight. We're probably never gonna hit any that are perfectly straight, but I want very little curve on there. And what I found through testing with my own players and, and all that, is that the straighter you can get the ball to fly, the more fairways you'll hit, the more consistent that you'll be.

Again, don't take my word for it. Not only have I used this to improve my game, I went from about a plus two handicap to a plus four handicap several months after starting this exact type of training when I'd been stuck at a plus two for years and years, over a decade. So once you learn how to do this, you get a lot better.

So you're gonna pick up two strokes, three strokes, four strokes in a matter of weeks or months, versus it being years or decades. I've also repeated the same process with many players in-person lessons. We have clinics and we work on people. I've yet to see a single person that hasn't improved if they follow the drills exactly as I have them laid out.

So week two, we're gonna get the path under control. Now, week three, we're gonna talk about a little known mistake that causes all your big mishits. So when you have that snap hook to the left, or you hit a ball outta bounds to the right or left, we're gonna talk about how there's one thing that you can actually measure and track your improvement on.

You'll see it gets a lot better. Pretty dagg on fast. That if I can improve this, it makes it almost impossible to hit the ball outta bounds. PGA Tour players only get one penalty stroke per tournament. That's four rounds. They average about a quarter of a penalty stroke round. That's a big part of playing your best golf.

If you go from a 20 handicap to a scratch, you're only gonna need to make about two and a half more birdies around, but you're gonna have to knock out a lot of double bogies. Almost all those come from penalty strokes. Same thing if I'm a scratch, wanting to get to be a tour player. I need to be able to never get penalty strokes.

And there's one thing that's gonna make a huge difference on that. We're gonna train it, we're gonna see results with it. It's gonna be a lot better. Plus it makes it feel a whole heck of a lot more solid when you do this thing correctly. Then finally, in week four, we're gonna tie it all together. This is kind of the, the building of what we've worked up to this, and we're gonna get all the pieces going in together.

And the good news about this is if you ever fall off track, you'll no longer have to guess what's making your drives. Go offline. You'll know right away. By doing this several week course, you're gonna get a feel for what you're doing in your swing, what the club's doing, and as soon as you start to miss hit 'em and you hit any balls outta bounds, you'll know exactly how to fix it.

That's my goal for you. I promise you that if you suspend your disbelief, you take a few weeks here to do something that doesn't seem like it's gonna work. Once you go through the drills, not only will you see it go better, it'll feel better. It'll go straighter. But you'll also have measurable improvement that we'll do throughout this entire course.

I can't wait to get started. I can't wait to share this with you. This is my favorite part of the game. Let's go ahead and get started. I.