In this video, you’re guided through a systematic approach to improve your driving accuracy, applicable for both beginners and tour players. The process involves identifying your natural swing pattern, correcting it by practicing the opposite pattern, and then reassessing until you achieve straight, solid drives. The video covers key aspects such as face angle, swing path, and strike location, and explains how to track and adjust these elements without the need for expensive equipment like a launch monitor. By following this method, you’ll gain better control over your drives, resulting in lower scores and more enjoyment on the course.
What's Covered: Systematic drill for identifying your natural swing pattern across face, path, and strike, then correcting it to produce straighter drives.
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Video Transcription:
Hey, it's great to have you today. This is the week where we put it all together. We're gonna train hitting really straight, solid drives, and I'm gonna give you a format here that you can use your entire life. You follow this format, you'll continue to hit it straighter and straighter and more and more solid.
This is the same way that I would practice all the time, that I would have, uh, players that come in for lessons that I've taught over the years and even up to tour players. So it doesn't matter if you're a 40 handicap or a tour player. This is the way that you're gonna practice hopefully for the rest of your life.
You should, if you wanna get the most improvement out of it. So we're gonna start out by doing three rounds, and what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna make three to five swings just completely natural. So I'm gonna aim toward a target in the distance. I'm really gonna try to be as unconscious as I can and just let the ball fly wherever it flies.
So I have no swing thoughts. I hit it. If it's a banana slice, that's fine. If it's a snap hook, that's fine. If I top it or hit it off the heel, I don't really mind. I'm looking for my natural swing. What I'm looking for here is if you've got outta the cart, I haven't hit, I hit one ball today. You made no swings.
You got warmed up a little bit. You swung your driver. Where does that ball go? That's your natural swing. I'm looking for a pattern of what pops up in your natural swing. So what happens there is, let's imagine that I'm hitting a big slice, that's my natural swing, and I hit three to five balls, and I start to notice that's the pattern I'm getting.
I'm then gonna go and try to remove that pattern and get my natural swing to be a very straight swing. So if I hit a slice. I'm gonna do some training to where I come inside here. I release the face, and after making a few shots, exaggerating that, exaggerating the opposite feeling, I go back and I make my natural swing again.
And I'm gonna notice that it slices a little bit less. And then I keep on repeating that process until I can make a natural swing. And that ball flies really straight and it's hit really solid. Same thing with the strike location on the face. If I'm hitting off the heel, I'm gonna train hitting a few off the toe, go back and make my actual swing again, and then watch that adjust.
I repeat the process. Now. Eventually, if you keep on repeating this, you have all the tools. Week one, we talked about how to release the face, so now I know how to get the face to turn on over or stay a little more open. We also worked with the brick to get my path inside out. Outside in and square, so I know how to adjust path.
We worked on week three on how to spray the face and change the pattern on the face. So you really have all three tools. The only things that matter on where your drive goes are those three things, and the only thing that's different than that, that's gonna have an effect is how fast you swing. A 20 minute distance fix is gonna go over swing speed.
We're not gonna work on that in this course. Again, I would train accuracy separate than I would train distance. I would work on both individually, then bring them together. But that's the only four things, and we're eliminating swing speed for the, from the conversation right now. These three things that we worked on this course are the only things that matter on how you strike the ball with the driver, how well you hit your driver.
So what we're gonna do to get started. Is we're gonna go ahead and hit, I'm gonna hit three to five shots until I can see a pattern and I'm gonna mark down on my sheet what happens with every shot so that I can start to see the pattern develop. All I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go ahead and have a sheet that has my three columns, face path, and strike location.
And after every shot I'm gonna show you how to read the ball flight. So you know what was off on each one of those. For players that aren't used to doing this facing path may get a little confusing. If you follow it the way that I break it down, you're gonna know exactly how to read Facing Path without having a $20,000 launch monitor.
Now, if you have a launch monitor, you can just look at the numbers and it'll tell you, Hey, face was left, or Face was right, path was left or right. You don't have to guess. I highly recommend the Mevo Plus, it gives you good FA facing path if you do the Pro package on much cheaper than the other launch monitors that do that, and it's pretty daggone accurate.
Most of the ones that give you especially strike location, are gonna run you, you know, looking at a minimum of $8,000 up to 18,000. The Mevo Plus with the Pro package and all that, you can get it for less than you know, a couple thousand, 2,500. But we're not gonna get into the radar stuff. I'm gonna show you how to be your own radar so that you never have to have a device down here.
You can just watch the ball fly and know exactly what to do to improve it. 'cause you're not always gonna have a radar with you. So again, first off thing I'm gonna do here, lemme spray this face with my strike spray powder. I wanna spray after every single shot that I'm hitting, and I'm gonna spray it once here, and I'm gonna hit three to five shots until I identify a pattern.
Now, I haven't really hit very many shots. I'm just gonna swing unconscious. If it slices, I don't care. If it hooks, don't care. I'm just gonna hit it and whatever happens, happens, and I'm gonna hit enough of 'em until I can kind of develop a pattern or see a pattern that's happening. So let's go ahead and start out, and I'm just gonna kind of swing freely and let it go.
This is not gonna be a good course 'cause I hit that thing really well. I think doing these drills, they've kind of dialed it in for me. So there's a specific way that you wanna work on this when you're reading your ball flight. That ball started almost directly toward my target in the distance, and drew about 10 yards left.
The direction your ball starts is going to be the direction your face was pointing as you come into impact. So I know that if my ball started directly at my target, my face was dead square. So I would, I would just put far as that. You can put whatever you want. I'm gonna put a check mark there to know my face was square.
I don't needed to work on that at all. My face was dead square when I hit the ball. Now. The ball drew to the left. The only way to get that ball to draw is to have my face closed relative to my path. So basically the, you'll hear us saying, face sends it, path bends it. I know my face was square and it started straight.
If my path was to the right, that made the ball curve to the left. So I know my path was a little bit to the right, most likely. So I'm gonna put down a little bit to the right. And then I look at my strike location. Finally, I hit that one a little off the toe. It felt good. It was slightly toe biased and I know that that makes it draw a little bit too.
So I'm gonna adjust my facing path, what I think the facing path did based on my strike location, I know that hitting it that much off the toe probably made it draw 10 or 15 yards. That's probably what made the entire curvature on there. So I'm looking at facing path first, and I'm saying, what did the ball flight do?
What did that ha? What happened with that? And then I'm adjusting facing path based on what I saw with my strike location. So I would think my path was to the right. I would think my face is square. That would explain why the ball started straight and drew. But then I looked at my strike location and I saw hit it off the toe.
I probably swung really straight and just hit it off the toe and it made it go left. Regardless. I'm gonna put. toe strike on there. So it was a little bit toward the toe. Now I'm gonna repeat this process and I'm gonna walk through this on this drill and the second drill this week. 'cause I think it's important to spend a little time on this topic and to start to see it in action, how I would read these shots.
So again, I'm gonna swing unconscious. I'm not gonna make any adjustments yet. I wanna see what my natural swing is doing and see if there is a pattern in there.
That ball started almost dead straight. It was about five feet, right? I know that if the ball started five feet right, my face was a hair open, we can judge whether or not we want to count that as being open. That was really straight go based on your handicap or how well you hit the ball. If you hit it five feet right of the target and you're thrilled with that.
Which everybody would be, I would just say it's square. If it starts to get noticeably to the right or the left, then mark it down as right or left. So I know my face was slightly to the right. I know my path was basically exactly the same as my face 'cause the ball didn't curve at all. And if I look at my strike location is almost dead center, um, maybe a couple millimeters off the toe.
So there I am square on all three of them. So I'm just gonna put check marks across the board. So right now there's not really much of a pattern developing to make this video a little bit more interesting, I'm gonna try to develop a little bit of a pattern here on purpose. So this video will be easier to watch or, or easier to apply in your own swing.
Right now I've been favoring the draw on the first one, dead straight on the second one, essentially, let's go ahead and hit a couple draw swings here and I'll read those and show you. How I would go about changing this if this was my pattern. So let's hit another one. Oh,
there we go. That ball started about 15, 20 feet, right of the target. Drew back about five yards. Again, all three of these are fantastic shots. If I'm a golfer, that's usually spraying the ball all over and I'm hitting 'em as straight as I'm talking about here. I give check marks across the board. But then you won't improve very much like that either.
I wanna be pretty detailed here. I wanna keep on trying to get it closer and closer to zero. If you're hitting your driver the best you've ever hit in your life, still keep on trying to improve it. That one, I know the ball started about 10, 15 feet right at the target, so I know my face was pointed there, it drew.
So I know my path was to the right of the direction. The face is pointing. I swung a little inside out, or my path was to the right again. You can see here it was off the toe that probably washed out most of the facing path. So I'm not really sure if the toe made it draw or if the face or path made it draw.
It was a fairly straight shot, so it's tough to tell. But again, I'm gonna put right path and I'm gonna put toe strike face on that one was a little bit left or closed relative to my path. So when I'm thinking about face angle, I'm thinking about relative to the direction I swung. So face sends it, path bends it.
I always be thinking about that and I'm gonna hit one more here, trying to do the same pattern just so I get a, you know, you wanna hit two or three with the same pattern in there to really start to work on it. So let's go ahead and hit again here. There we go. And that ball started a few feet right at the target.
Drew a few feet left. Again. I know my face was a little to the right of the flag. I know my path was. To the right of the face. That's what we did draw. And if I'm looking at my strike locations, I'm pretty daggone consistent. To be honest. Today I would be happy with this amount of dispersion, but if I'm looking at this face, lemme get this to where you can see it on camera.
If I'm looking at this face, you'll see that I'm almost toe and a little bit low on the face angle. So all that means is now if I wanna keep on getting better. All I have to do is the opposite of that. So again, my face was closed to my path 'cause it drew my path was to the right and I favored the toe again.
So three good shots, but I, when I'm looking at this pattern, I was either good or off the toe. My path was to the right on two of the three. My path was pretty straight on. One of 'em, I believe. And then my face was either good or closed. So essentially this is a, a good, um, kinda lesson here. For those of you that are over fading it, you may start out slicing all of them and you really do a lot of work on these hook shots.
Eventually, if you keep improving, you're gonna start to overdraw. That's kind of what we're seeing. I'm swinging a little too far inside out. I'm closing the face a little too much, and I'm hitting a little off the toe. All I'm gonna do now is take about three swings. I'm gonna use the brick and I'm gonna train the exact opposite, so I'm overdrawing the ball slightly.
All I'm gonna do now is put it on the fade side of the brick. This is gonna force me to swing a little more left. 'cause right now my path is a little too far inside out. It's gonna force me to swing a little more left. And I'm gonna try to hit the ball slightly for me. I'm low toe, I'm gonna go, I'm gonna try to hit it slightly high and heel.
To be successful here, I need to hit it somewhere on the heelside of the club, somewhere high. I don't care if it's way over here by the hosel or just to off the heel. This needs to be somewhere on the right direction of what I'm trying to work to. And I need to get this ball to cut a little bit because I've hit all either straight shots or draws so far.
So if I wanna get it perfectly straight. I just have to train the opposite. What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna make two or three swings, hit two or three balls where I'm successful at that. Don't move on to going back to your natural swing until you've actually hit a couple successful ones opposite direction.
So I too much draw. I hit a little too far off the toe. I have to hit it off the heel to some degree. I have to fade it a little bit to some degree before I go back. So again, I'm just gonna use my best judgment here. I'm gonna get at least a. Two, maybe three wins before I go back and do my natural swing again.
So I'm feeling those outside. Picking the club up. I'm feeling like my hands exiting to the left. I feel like my face is a little bit open. Here's another tip on this that I think is incredibly important. I'm getting pretty close to being dialed in here and hitting it dead straight and dead solid. Those, to be honest with you, were three fantastic drives.
I don't need to feel this motion and really cutting it to get rid of that pattern. I may feel like I'm cutting it like five yards, like a tiny little fade. If I'm just a little bit off, if I had hit two or three big snap hooks, I may feel very exaggerated to try to get rid of that bias. So I may feel like I'm coming way over here, really getting the shaft out, really getting the face open.
But for me. I know I just wanna swing a hair to the left, have the face a little more open. So if this is square, I might have the face like that much and more open. I don't want to necessarily do this or I'm gonna start slicing it. So again, it's like a volume knob. If I'm way off, I gotta crank the volume all the way in the other direction to improve very quickly.
As I get closer and closer to be being square, to be what I would call dialed in. I just barely tweak the nob a little bit. Anyways, let's go ahead and try it out here. I'm gonna go heelside, little bit of a fade swing. We'll see if I can get rid of that bias and start hitting some nice straight shots.
Overdid. It definitely started the ball to the left. My, that ball sliced a good 20 or 30 yards. That means I had to be swinging way left of that. So my path was too far to the right originally. I definitely got that one to the left 'cause that ball started left and really cut. When I look at my strike location, I was low and on the heel, so I got the heel side correct, but I'm still hitting everything a little low.
Today I'm gonna do one more where I try to hit a little higher on the face. That's a little advanced. We don't really wanna worry about that too much right now. I wouldn't get bent outta shape if you're, you're not gonna hit 'em perfectly on the sweet spot. But I don't wanna hit a bunch of thin ones and just be okay with it.
I'm gonna try to hit one high off the face here. I'm gonna try to cut it a little bit less. 'cause that one, that one had a lot of cut on it. I don't wanna overdo it and just start cutting everything. But I'm gonna go ahead and try to hit one high heel with a little bit of fade if I'm perfect.
A little bit of fade worked perfect. Still low and on the heel on that one. So right, I've developed, I'm pretty daggone close on everything, to be honest with you. My facing path is pretty good. It was a little inside out, and then outside in, I have control of it. My face angle was pretty good. I'm able to get the ball to draw and cut the way I want to my strikes, whether they're heel or toe.
I'm able to move that around pretty well. But I'm definitely biased toward the bottom of the club face. I'm gonna spray this again, and I'm going to go back to my natural swing and I'm gonna see how I did it. So let's make a few more sprays here. Again, I'm gonna get two or three good ones that are the opposite of whatever my natural pattern is before I go back and test.
And now I'm gonna hit three to five balls. Whatever it takes you to feel your natural swing again, or develop a pattern and go from there. So when I'm going back to my natural swing, it's gonna naturally have me swinging a little more left. Now, because I've done this opposite exaggeration type drill, it's gonna have me hitting a little more to the heel.
I'm. Again, I'm not gonna feel like I'm doing anything. I'm gonna feel like I'll just make a completely standard swing. I'm not trying to manipulate it all, and I'm just gonna let the ball flight tell me what I should do next. So I'm not sitting here thinking, okay, I gotta really cut it. I'm just gonna swing normal.
And if I still need to work on cuts, I still need to work on cuts. But I'm gonna try to just do whatever feels good to me and see what happens.
There we go, and that one faded. About two yards felt solid. It was solid. It was very, very slightly low and off the bottom, but it was almost dead center. That's pretty daggone good there, so you can see how I didn't feel like I did anything different. I felt like I swing normal. When I started out doing that, it was drawing.
I did my exaggerated opposite, got the cuts in there and now when I go back to feel like a swing of normal, it straightened it out. So I'm just gonna hit two or three more to see if I have any kind of pattern here that I still need to work on. Now, if I go keep on hitting these, fantastic. I'm not gonna change anything.
I'm just gonna keep on swinging normal. I mean, that's the whole goal of all this. I don't wanna be constantly trying to adjust my swing. I wanna get to where I'm hitting it good. And I just don't think about much of anything other than swinging and getting the ball to go to the target. So let's go ahead and try another one.
That one started about 10 feet left, drew maybe a yard, basically dead straight. I hit it a little low on the toe again, so even just a few of those slice swings for me 'cause I'm so close to being where I want to be. I actually started swinging a little bit too much to the left by exaggerating that just those few times.
Now, if I have a big, huge hook. It's not gonna be this fast. It may take me five or six sessions to really get rid of that hook. It may take me longer than that to dial it in, but you can see when you get pretty close, small little practice swings can get you dialed in better. All I'm gonna do on this one because both of those last two, I swung a little too far left, went left and didn't move.
I'm gonna feel like I make one or two practice swings, swinging out to the right, a little more inside out, and then I'm gonna swing natural again.
The ball started a few feet left of the target, drew maybe two or three yards again in the fairway. I'm just all over it to be right, honest with you right now. I should have done this a long time ago. 'cause as I've worked through these drills, I've gotten control of the facing path. Really, I've hit seven, eight balls right now and I, I haven't had any that were really significantly offline and I would just keep on working on that until I get it perfectly dialed in.
Now, when I'm all over it like this, what I will do is I will fine tune it by using this path on the brick. So I'll take this and I'll square divot setting, and I found for me. I need to line this up, a hair right of the target to get me to swing perfectly square. So now that I know I'm swinging straight, I'm gonna make my natural swing and just try to split these sticks.
The only thing I would be working on today, 'cause again, like I said, I have it pretty zeroed out. I hit both of those a little low on the face again, so I'm gonna make a few practice swings, feeling like I'm hitting 'em high on the face, like it's almost on the top of the club. And I'm gonna feel again, like I swing normal, and we'll see what happens here.
That one was almost perfect. That ball cut, maybe two, three yards, started dead at the target, landed about six feet right at the target, dead on the screws. I'm not gonna hit one. Much better than that, to be honest with you. To hit that in the middle of the face, though I felt like I was hitting it off the top of the face.
So for me today, I would keep on exaggerating off the top of the face. So to recap here, I'm gonna make three to five normal swings, and I'm gonna see what my pattern is. Is my face closing or is it open? Is my path inside out or is it outside in? Am I hitting off the heel? Am I hitting off the toe? I write that in my book so I can start to identify that pattern.
Once I see a pattern developing, I go to my practice shots. I hit 2, 3, 4 shots until I can do the opposite of that successfully. So for me, I'm low toe. I'm gonna go and practice those practice swings until I'm high heel. For me, I was overdrawing it very slightly. I wouldn't even call it an overdraw. It was pretty good.
But you get the, the theory here, I'm gonna try to cut it a little bit, then I'm gonna go back and repeat it. That's one time through it. So I've identified my pattern. I've gone to work fixing my pattern by doing the opposite. Then I come back to the ball, three to five more natural swings. See what the ball's doing.
Now it's probably starting to straighten out. The big thing I get here is if you're struggling with the driver and it's gotten better throughout this course, but it's still not good, and you say, well, I blocked one out to the right, and then I pull sliced one, and then I hit one dead straight, and then I blocked another one out to the right.
And you're starting to look at this and you're like, it just seems like it's all over the place. You'll find when you write down on the sheet, it's actually more of a pattern than you think. So if I block one to the right, I know my face was open to the path and I was swinging, you know, either inside out or or, or if it was cutting, then I was swinging pretty straight.
I rarely find anyone. This is a big key to take away from this. I rarely find anyone that swings to the left. And then turns around and swings to the right. When I test real radars like TrackMan or my, my GC Quad, my flight scope when I've hit on TrackMan path is very consistent. Be paying attention to the face angle.
If you hit five shots, you're probably gonna notice they all curve in a certain direction. They probably all hit somewhere on the face. Focus in on that. That's the easiest way to identify where you're off. So if it seems like it's going all over the place, you say, well, one went right, one went left, they're all over, but they all faded or they all sliced.
I know for sure my face was open to my path on all those. I'm gonna go to work on releasing the face more, doing the drills that we did here earlier. You look down at your club head and they're all off the heel. Get those off the toe. So I kind of know, alright, when I go to my practice swings here, when I were doing the opposite.
Sit and hit it off the toe, even if the ball is flying this way and that way and this way and that way. You may be opening the face a lot on some of them and opening the face a little on others, but you're gonna notice most of the time the ball's gonna curve in one direction or the other. It's very rare that I see players.
I've actually never seen, I've only seen like one or two guys out of probably a couple thousand that hit all over the face and there's no rhyme or reason to it. So if nothing else, just look at the face and see what the. The pattern is there. Now, you may have a pattern that's big, but it's gonna favor the toe side or favor the heelside.
I rarely, rarely, rarely see players that hook one and then slice one and hook one and slice one. Most of the time they're hooking it, or it's straight to the right and then they hook another one. Most of the shots are over curving to the left. If they're doing that or if they're slicing it, it'll be straight left, and then a couple slices.
So pay attention when you write on the sheet, you'll notice well. My face was square on about half of them, but it was open on the other half. I didn't have anywhere the face was closed. Just look for the patterns there. Train the opposite. The more times you do this, the better you'll get. If you want to get to be a fantastic driver of the golf ball, it's really comes down to how much do you wanna do this?
How much do I repeat this process? If you track it, you hit your 40 yard wide gap like we talked about in the beginning of the course when we've been training all the way through here, you'll notice that your scores get better and better as you keep on doing this process. So best of luck and I'll see you soon.
