This video focuses on mastering the control of shot shape in golf, specifically alternating between hooks and slices. It builds on a previous drill that exaggerated extreme ball movements and now aims to dial it back for more realistic, effective shots. Clay emphasizes the importance of mastering extreme ball flights to find a balanced, straight shot. He teaches various methods to achieve the desired ball flight, focusing on club release, body positioning, and grip adjustments. The video underscores the need for consistent practice and understanding of how different setups impact ball flight.
What's Covered: Drill on dialing back exaggerated hook and slice swings into controlled, realistic draws and fades.
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Video Transcription:
Hey, it's great to have you back here today. In this video, we're gonna start to get more control over that shot shape. Now, in drill number one, we really exaggerated getting those balls to hook. I wanted them going low, left and hard, and we wanted to slice doing the exact opposite. Feeling like they really have that banana ball slice on there.
If you haven't gotten 10 in a row, hooks and 10 in a row. Slices. Don't start this yet. Go back and repeat the other drill. I promise you, if you take a little bit more time, maybe I have to repeat that one, but if I struggle to get the ball to draw, or I struggle to get the ball to fade, most likely for most people, they're gonna struggle to get it to draw or to hook.
Go back and repeat that. Get 10 in a row before you move on. If I can get that 10 in a row, then as I move on through this course, it'll go lightning fast. If I skip that and I say, well, I was only able to get about half of them, right, but I'll go and do the next thing. The next pieces are gonna get slower and slower, and you're not gonna get the results you want.
So definitely go back, go slow, get the first piece down. Now from here, we need to be able to toggle between these feelings, so we're gonna alternate between a hook and a slice. Now there's two differences here. Number one, I'm gonna start to make this a little bit more like a real golf shot. So in the first drill, we really exaggerated this and we got that ball to just shoot into the ground.
Dead left when we hooked it. I don't want to do that for this one. I wanna do a little bit less of that until it's a nice draw or turning over from right to left. I don't mind if it draws five yards or 40 yards. We can still hook it to some degree, but I at least want it to get airborne and I want it to have the correct curvature.
I don't want just try to hook it and just drive it into the ground way left. 'cause I have the face so closed. So it's starting to turn a little bit more into a real shot. Now the reason that we did those extremes in drill number one. Is that I have to get the full picture. I have to know what it feels like to completely slam the face closed and completely have the face wide open so that I can feel these extremes.
This's what's called, uh, differential practice. So if I go way to the extremes and I have these big, massive hooks and slices, now I know somewhere in the middle of that is dead straight. The problem that I see is maybe you've been slicing your entire life. Or maybe I have one shot shape that's really a predominant shot shape, and I simply don't know how to close the face enough to get the other shape.
So a lot of times I'll see with players, they slice their entire life. They've never trained on how to really close this face, and when they try to find that middle, that straight shot, it's difficult to do because it's either a slice, slice, slice, or a straight ball, more slices, a couple more straight balls.
The improvement would speed up a whole heck of a lot more if I could learn to hook it. I already know how to slice it. And now that I've felt both those extremes, I can start to work toward the middle until I get straight balls. So that's why we're doing that crazy practice. And we're gonna start to begin the process of dialing that in today.
What we're not gonna do this week is we're not gonna worry about starting it on the correct, uh, part of the hole. So next week when we get into path, we're gonna talk about hitting those draws. So say this is the middle of the fairway here. I'm gonna start the draws. Start a little to the right of that and then draw back.
So what would be a good draw this week? I'm not worried about if my ball starts a little left and then draws, or it starts a little right and then slices. It wouldn't be necessarily great on the course. I'm just looking at the curvature of the ball. I just have to get the ball to curve the right way. So if I'm trying to hit a draw and it starts way left, and then draws another 20 yards left on the course, that wouldn't be any good.
That would be way too far left. But. Doing these drills, that would be good. I'd just have to get control of the face first. If I can control the face, I can do any of this other stuff that I wanna do further on in this course. So let's start out here. We'll hit our draw again, needs to get airborne. Needs to turn over from right to left.
Has to be somewhat of a decent shot. Now we're not gonna gut get 10 in a row. I'm not worried about getting it perfect, but I at least want to get 10 total shots for fades and draws. Or excuse me, 10 successful shots in total for fades and draws. And we're gonna alternate back and forth. We're gonna hit one good draw, and then we're immediately gonna go to a fade, hit a good fade, then back to a draw, and we're gonna go back and forth until we get 10 successful ones.
That's the baseline minimum for this drill to work, or for this day, or this week to be complete. So I'm gonna line up straight here, and I'm gonna go back to my hook swing. I'm gonna exaggerate it here at first to give you a feel on too much. So I'm gonna go back here. So the club in straight it to the inside, the face is down.
As I release it, the shaft is getting back to to square here. It's not gonna be leaning forward like this. It's getting back to square. And then when I go over here, my hands have gone out. My club isn't pointing over this way, so I don't have my club face closed and pointing way to the right. I've gone ahead and released that shaft back down the fairway.
So again, if I release that shaft down the fairway like this, when I'm looking for down the line. If I went back to impact, that would be like this club leaning backwards and way close you can see it. The club face is pointing directly back to me if I release the face, but I keep the shaft pointing out there what impact that may be.
A little bit square. So I'm really feeling like I'm letting the shaft turn over this way. I don't want it to be pointing out here. I'm turning it on over. So I'm gonna start out with this hook and I'm gonna overdo it. At first. I'm really gonna smother hook one to give you an example of one that's overdone.
So there that would've been good in week one. That ball didn't get in the air, but I exaggerated those feelings and really got it to turn over. I smothered it low and left. That was okay for the first drill, but for the second drill, I'm just gonna dial back off that a little bit. Now. People ask me all the time, well, how do I know how to do the right amount?
I like to start with the finish. So I found that the most fine tune is how I'm gonna finish out here. So if I had this face all the way down to the ground in my shaft, almost pointing to the left over here, so my face is dead to the ground, my club shaft is pointing way to the left, meaning that I would've really smother hooked it.
If I do a little less of that and I get my, my shaft a little bit more straight and the faces may be only 45 degrees closed, that's not gonna hook as much. So start with the finish. Get the feeling of what you're gonna do out here. So in that first one, I went ahead and released the shaft all the way, this way or felt like it and my face was dead to the ground.
This ne and that overdid it. I over hoked it. This next one, I'm gonna feel like I'm a little more out there. And instead of my face being dead to the ground straight down like that, my face is gonna be at about a 45. And I'm gonna try that out and see what kind of ball flight I get. So lemme go ahead and hit another one here.
All right. That time, blocked it straight out to the right, so that time I swung inside out, but the ball did not draw. Whatever it is, whatever I had the feeling of that face did not square up enough. It was too open this way. That's okay. Those are the two mo most common mistakes you're gonna have, either, number one, you're still gonna overdo it, or number two, I'm not gonna do it enough and it's just gonna block out and it's gonna go straight.
So that one wouldn't count either. I felt like the face was 45 degrees closed, but in reality it was not closed enough. I need to just go ahead and feel like it turns on over a little bit more. So if my first swing was like this, my shaft released way over here. Uh, I rolled my forearms over each other. My forearms were touching.
My face is to the ground. The second one, I'm a little more out here. The face is just a little closed. That wasn't enough. Draw somewhere between those two is the perfect amount to get a draw. That's where I would start is where you're releasing the club. Let me hit another one and I'll try to hit a good draw and I'll talk about if you still can't draw it, where I would go from there.
So here, I'm gonna feel like instead of releasing it there, I'm gonna do a little bit more. I'm really gonna let that turn on over. I'll see if I can get a little, you know, five or 10 yard draw, something like that.
There we go. And that one turned over from right to left. It started down what would be the right side of the fairway and kind of drew back to the middle if it didn't draw enough. I try to make it more extreme. I get the face to turn over more. I get the shaft to go more left when I'm releasing it. If I start to not get enough draw, uh, sorry.
If I don't get enough draw, that's what I do. If I get too much hook, I do a little less of that. So it's like a, a volume knob. I'm teaching you the pieces. That make the face turn over and the face tape more square. Now you just have to dial in that volume knob. If I go too loud, it snap hooks. If I go too quiet, it slices or fades, or just go straight and I just gotta go back and forth until I figure out, okay, that's about the right feel, hit that draw.
Now, some of you that may have struggled to hit a draw your entire life, that may not quite be good enough. So no matter how much you feel like. You're releasing the club out here and turning it over, it still fades a little bit. That's when I would go to this second step. If you're able to draw it right away, don't go to the second step.
Just focus in on that. When I'm hitting it. Well, when I'm driving it. Well, what I'm feeling, and I wanna give you the feels of what this should be like. Most players are gonna have, I feel like I'm releasing the club, and it's like the release is what dictates the ball flight. So if I wanna draw it, I feel like I'm releasing it more This way.
The face is turning over. If I wanna fade it, I feel like I'm releasing a little more hands in. Face stays open. It's almost like if you're throwing a ball, if you're pitching in baseball, you're almost feeling where the ball's gonna end up in the catcher's mit. So by the time I release this club, the ball's already gone, but that's a repeatable feeling.
So if I feel like I'm tossing this ball and. Turning it over, I'm almost visualizing what's happening out here. That's the best way to visualize it. So when I'm hitting shots and I'm gonna be consistent, I need to feel how I'm releasing the club or how I'm letting it go out here. That's repeatable. If I start to feel what I'm doing back here, it can get a little less repeatable, but sometimes we need to do that to really get it extreme, uh, result or a different result.
So lemme go ahead and hit one more and I'll tell you what I felt on this one. So I'm gonna feel like I swing through. I let the face turn on over, and I just feel like I'm throwing the club down the fairway as the face turns on over, I feel everything out in here is where it's gonna allow me to hit it straight.
Let's give it one more shot here,
a little thin on the face. Started pretty straight, drew, probably five yards or so. But another good shot, an acceptable shot. Now if I'm still struggling to get that ball to turn over when I do that, 'cause now I'm starting to dial it back. I'm sure week one you can get it to Snap Hook, but now we're talking about less curvature than that.
If I still struggle, I'm now gonna work back further in the back swing to get more extreme. So if I tried to hit a draw and it wouldn't draw for me, I've tried this out, it still won't go, then I'm gonna go back to Impact. I'm gonna pause at Impact. I'm gonna look at the club face and if it's still open like this.
So this would be square. If it still looks open, I need to do something to close that face at impact. Impact is the only part I'm hitting the golf ball, so if I'm gonna make it draw more, I need to close that face more. So what I would do is I would feel my release and then I'd go back to Impact and feel like the face is closed there.
Also, I don't wanna ever feel like this face is open, so I'm gonna pause here at Impact. Make sure the face is closed. And then pause up here and make sure it's closed. That's what I'm gonna do if I'm really struggling to get it to draw. Now, you'll notice a couple tips here. If I get in front of this, I let my right shoulder get on top.
It gets very difficult to get the face anything but open. If I feel like my right shoulder stays a little back and I let the club fly away from me, then I feel like it's easier to draw this golf ball. So I'm gonna feel like here I get a little bit more tilted away from the target and I'll let that face release on that away from me a little bit.
Or I feel like I'm throwing it more out to the right and letting the face turn on over. Let's give that a shot and see how that works. So this one should curve a little bit more. Again, I'm going to impact, okay, that's closed and then I'm going up to here. That's closed too. Lemme get that feeling.
There you go. And that ball drew. I probably double what the last two did. So my two tips for you, if you get off track there, number one, instead of focusing just on this, go to impact and make sure the face is closed. And number two, I don't wanna slide in front of it with this right shoulder. I wanna feel like I stay a little more tilted back.
I'm more behind the golf ball. And that way when I release it, I have more time to let it roll on over, right? If I'm up here. It's like I can't really get the face to turn on over. It feels like it's pinned open, so I'm feeling like I'm back here and it's closing all the way through. Now finally, if you're still struggling with it, I would go back to the feel we had, which is the most extreme, and I would go before impact and work on the ball back here.
So when the club's parallel the ground, I'm gonna go here. I'm gonna make sure the face is closed there. Right. So you may find that when you're doing these drills, the face is pretty open and then you're struggling to square it up. The most extreme feeling you would have is closing the face here, then closing the face at impact, then closing it more.
And if I felt that, like if I felt like I start closed, close it there and then keep on closing it, it's gonna hook even more. So lemme go ahead and hit a big hook here. Again, I wanna stay a little more behind the golf ball when I'm doing this, but I'm gonna feel like it's closed more, closed, more closed.
Let's give that a whirl. There you go. And that ball really started to hook to the left lower, much more hook on it. And as I did, as I went further and further back with my feelings of closing the club face, the ball started to draw more. The fourth thing, which would be the most extreme, would be now to go ahead and change your grip.
It could be that you're struggling to get the face closed, no matter what you do. And taking that grip and turning a little bit more to the right is gonna help that whole process to happen again, start out with the easiest thing. When I play golf and I'm hitting it, well, what I'm feeling is how this face, how the club releases through here.
If I wanted to draw more, I do a little more of that. If I want it to fade more, I do a little more of that. If that's not working and it's still not turning over, I go back to the ball. If that's not working, I go back and before the ball. Yeah, if that's still not working, then we go stronger grip before the ball closed through.
The ball closed. Even more closed there. That's the progression I would work through to hit those draws, but whatever you do, so if you hit your first one, you draw it. You don't have to go through all this progression. Just start with filling the release. If it doesn't work, just keep going back the way I just trained you if you hit the draw.
Now we're gonna go to our fade side again. I'm gonna start out with my release. I'm gonna go to here. I'm gonna feel like my hands are more in. Going this way instead of the club shaft being releasing that way, it's gonna be more to the right and the face is gonna be more open. So again, most people would not have very much trouble with this.
So I won't go into a ton of detail here, but I'm gonna feel this for my fade swing. So hands are in club, face is open, shaft is pointing a little bit more out to the right. That's that release I'm gonna feel
at that time. No problem. Probably overdid. It got up in the air, but it had a lot of curve on it. I find most people don't have trouble slicing it once they learn what's causing it. So I'm not gonna go into a ton of detail on how to slice it more. 'cause I'm guessing that you're probably gonna have a pretty easy time doing that same progression though, if you do have trouble hitting the left or right shot.
If I'm not getting it to fade enough by just focusing on my release, I go back to impact. I'm not quite as close of the face. The face is a little more open. If that still doesn't work, then I'm going over here, shaft out, toe up. If that doesn't work, then I may have to change my grip to make it a little bit weaker.
What we're doing with our grip, and you'll hear this all the time, is like, what is a fundamentally solid grip? And you'll hear people go into like a 45 minute discussion on a perfect grip. The reality is on the PGA Tour, the best ball strikers in the world, you're gonna see grips anywhere from this like Matt Fitzpatrick, Paul Ainger.
Incredibly strong grips are turned way to the right. You're gonna see grips that are really weak. The left hand is turned way over this way, the right hand is on top. Very weak grip like that and everything in between. The reason that you see so many different grips on the PGA tour is because different players release the club differently.
Some players really like turning it over and releasing the club a lot, or having that feeling of doing that. If they have a really strong grip or a grip turned away to the right and I really release the heck out of it, all of a sudden it's gonna hook. If I take a really weak grip, hands on top and I release the heck out of it, look how the face is square and then I go to here, it's not gonna be as toe down or turned down to the to the ground.
So your grip is really a byproduct of how you release the club and how you release the shaft. Strong grips, very strong grips to the right are not gonna roll the forearms over as much 'cause they'd snap, hook it. Weak grips are gonna have to roll the forearms over a lot more to straighten it out, and I think that makes sense.
So we're gonna repeat this until we get 10 successful shots. I'm gonna hit a draw soon as I hit a good draw. I'm gonna go to my fade soon as I hit a fade, back to the draw, and I'm just gonna alternate, draw, fade, draw, fade. The reason I want you to do this, rather than going straight to hitting it.
Straight with very little curvature on it. And you may find yourself wanting to do that 'cause you may make one of these swings where you feel like you release it a little more and you hit the best drive of your life. Go through and hit the draws and fades. I have to learn how to release this face more to draw it and how to hold it a little more square to to fade it.
Or anytime in the future when it gets off track, I'm not gonna know how to fix it. So I want to be able to hit a draw, a fade, a draw, a fade on command. Again, I don't care where they start. I don't care if they would've been in the fairway. I just care about if the ball curved the correct direction. As we're doing these drills now, you notice me mentioned a couple things as far as technique, what you're gonna feel for more of the draw.
It's easier to get this face to turn, turn over and close down if I'm more behind the golf ball. So you imagine if I'm in front of the golf ball or my right shoulder comes way over top and I've slid in front of this golf ball. And I hit it here. Well, what would happen if I squared my body back up? The club would be way back here.
Right? So basically it's saying I have to square the club base up earlier in my swing. The more I come in front of it. So if I start to go more vertical with my spine, my right shoulder starts to come more on top of the ball or cover on top of the ball. My club goes more out. I'm gonna feel like I'm gonna fade it 'cause the face doesn't have time to to square up and turn on over.
The opposite of that would be me feeling like I'm more behind the golf ball. This is where you hear about the right elbow, tucking in the right shoulder, getting tucked in. If I really exaggerate getting way behind the golf ball and I feel like my shoulder right shoulder's way down here, well now all of a sudden I have all this time to turn the face over and release it again.
If I squared back up, that would be the club face way up here. So essentially the more on top of it you get, the less time you have to square it up. It's way easier to fade it. The more behind it I get and the more tilted this way I get with my whole body. I'm gonna really exaggerate here. So if I wanted to really snap, hook one and close the face as much as possible, I would be back here like this.
I would get a, a really strong grip and it would give me all kinds of time just to smother hook that, that golf ball. So if I went ahead and did one as extreme right, I can really hook it when I'm back there. If I really wanted to slice the heck out of one, I won't do it. 'cause there's water to the right.
I don't wanna just hit one in the water. But I would do the opposite. I'd be more on top of it. I'd be more right shoulder in front, and that's the feelings that you'd have. So what you find with tour players, this is getting into the handful of techniques that you have to master if you want to be a great driver of the golf ball somewhere tilted away from the target is gonna be pretty neutral.
When good players get to impact, if you were to pause them right at impact, what you'll find is that their spine angle. It's tilted anywhere from 18 to say 24 degrees away from it. So tilted away from the target. This way it's almost impossible to hit it straight. If your spine is straight up and down, it gets more and more difficult to hit it straight.
If you go way this way, you're gonna want to draw it for sure. 'cause you have more time to release the face on over somewhere. Tilted away from it is one of those fundamentals that you have to have. So when you find that nice tight little draw, you're probably gonna notice that you feel like if I had my hands like this.
If I took my fingertips and put 'em on my right knee with my right hand and my left hand would be up here by my pocket, that's about how my body's gonna feel. You'll notice when you're doing these drills that if I do this and then I grab the club and I'm set up kind of in this position, that makes it way easier to hit it straight or a slight little draw.
That's one of the fundamentals that you have to get. If my spine is too vertical and when I hit the golf ball, I'm like this straight up and down. It's gonna be almost impossible to hit the ball straight. You'll be able to slice it with the best of them, but it's gonna be very difficult when I get to this draw side if I'm not able to tilt behind it.
So if you struggle with the draw side, this is one of the fundamentals. You have to get set up to the golf ball of your left hand, drop your right fingertips onto your right knee, and then from there you're in position that you should be in to be able to hit a draw. Another thing that's very important.
If my right shoulder is coming way on top and it's coming out like this, there's really no option but for me to be able to slice it because now the club is so far behind me. Yeah, I might be able to manipulate the club and slam it down and draw it, but the only way to to hit it well is to get that shoulder to kind of tuck under.
Again, when you put your fingertips on your right knee, you're gonna see this shoulder gets back lower than the left shoulder. You won't see anybody on tour with shoulders that don't look something like this. You won't see anybody with level shoulders when they hit the golf ball. It's always gonna be more from the inside.
Now, if you're a good player and you've already learned to draw it, and you felt this good things and you already get behind it and you already release the heck out of it, you can't overdo that and start to hook everything. Somewhere in the middle there is gonna be the best. So if I'm hooking, hooking, hooking, and when I get to my slice, I, I struggle.
I don't wanna feel quite as tilted back. I don't wanna feel quite like that. Right? Shoulders is under. I wanna feel a little more on top of it. Again, the reason we have this process of closing the face and drawing, opening the face and fading, is that you can find the middle ground. If I can toggle back and forth between hooks and draws or hooks and and slices.
Then I'm naturally gonna position my body to be able to do that. So really this whole course is about finding the extremes and then we're gradually gonna dial it into the middle to be able to find that neutral, to be able to hit it really nice and straight. But I've gotta find the extremes first. I gotta be able to hook it.
I gotta be able to fade it, and then I gradually dial in from there. If I can only draw it or I can only slice it, it's gonna be very difficult to learn to hit it straight. 'cause you're not gonna know what feelings to tap into. So I'm gonna hit my 10 shots in a row, and then finally at the end, if you wanna do a little bonus work here, I'd hit five or 10 drives to where you try to hit 'em as straight as possible.
Let me go ahead and hit one. I'll just swing kind of mindlessly, see what the ball flight does here. We'll go from there.
I messed up in it one, almost straight as. I can hit one. Let's say that it drew, I haven't hit that one again. I've kind of gotten dialed in with my feelings here, but let's say that that ball drew a little too much. If I wanna straighten it out, I'm just gonna feel a little bit more of my slice swing. I'm not going full slice, but I'm gonna do 10%.
Again, it's like that volume knob, whatever I felt like to slice it. I'm just gonna do a little bit more of that. If it overdraws, if I start to over slice it, then I'm just gonna dial it the other way. I'm gonna try to feel a little bit more of what I felt like when I was drawing the ball or hooking the ball.
If I overcorrect it and overdo it, I just dial that knob back a little bit more. So we talked about the most extreme dial on the knob. The volume to a hundred would be strong grip clubface, close clubface, close clubface, close shaft release. That's your big snap hook. Well, if I wanna dial it back a little bit, I may say, let's just close the club face a little.
Let's have the face feel just a hair close. Let's release it a little bit, but not a ton. And you're just getting the feel for that. So think of these as dials, volume knobs. I can turn 'em up or down. I have to learn to crank 'em to a hundred both ways before I can fine tune it. If I don't crank it to a hundred, I'll never know where the middle is.
So best of luck. Hit a few balls at the end. See if you can get 'em to fly straight. That's gonna be a precursor to what's coming in the future. And then in next week, we're gonna dial it in. Get 'em to start on the correct side of the hole before they draw or fade back.
