My Favorite Drills

1. Right and Left Handed Pitch Swings - Maintaining Wrist Angle & Training With Both Hands
One of the drills that I really like, when I started out with 10 year old kids was to start really simple, was to start with the right hand and just hitting little chips maintaining the wrist angle.  Once they got really good at doing that, I get their club in their left hand and get them to do a similar thing.  One side is pushing and one side is pulling.  The left side is more of a linear body movement,

and one side is more of a pivot movement.

  Because if I stop my pivot with my right hand, I'm going to get going like this [see below] which is basically flipping the club at impact.

So I start out with that because I want to educate both hands.

2. Bare Foot Swings - Proprioception & Balance Drill

The late great Canadian golf professional, Ben Kearn, who was my mentor growing up; Ben always used to say, nothing should be done at the expense of balance.  He was making a point about the golf swing, but he was also making a point about life, so as a coach he was much more than a golf coach, which I think is what great coaches are.  And ideally is that I think you shouldn't be doing anything in your golf swing that's going to affect the balance that you have.  So if you ever took a kid who was very talented and just started playing golf, if you can just teach them to focus on staying balanced, you start to notice a lot of the hand angles, plane angles, things like that would be in position.  So one of the first things that I think people need to realize is that within balance there is sequence.  The club has to travel the furthest distance.  So if the club has to travel the furthest distance in the arc, it has to move first.  The hands and arms are moving the second furthest distance, so they follow the club, then the torso, and then the hips move fourth.  From here (the top of the backswing) it's the opposite sequence with: driving the hip first, having the torso move second, having the arms move third, and then the club moves last.  The difference of why that's the case, is that the body is going to be rotating at impact at about 4 mph, while the club at impact could be moving up to 100 mph.

Then from there, we go into proprioception, so I get the kids in bare feet hitting balls, and what happens is, 40% of your proprioceptors are in your feet, (proprioception is where we are in an unstable environment/ state) so when you slip on ice, you put your hand down, that comes from proprioception.  So it's either your head or your arm.  So I'd get kids in bare feet hitting with their left and right hand.  

It's understanding that the feet are the keyboard to the brain.  And we lose a lot of function in how our feet work when we are in shoes with stability and spikes and all that.  Hitting in barefoot maximizes balance.  Two it gets to the point of really being able to create power; all the biomechanic experts I've talked to all talk about the necessity to root yourself to the ground and grip the ground.  So once you're in this position here and you've got that connection with the ground, you're able to use the ground.  When I'm capable of using the ground, I'm capable of putting force into the ground and then that force is going to come up through my body.  That's really the genesis of clubhead speed.  And really a simple analogy, "its the earthquake that causes the tsunami."  It is also an environmental teacher.  It's going to teach your brain 50 things about what you need to understand (11:54) that would be very difficult to explain auditorily to the student.

I want you to still try to create speed, and I want you to hit the shot staying in balance and holding your finish until the ball lands.

Our foot is where we house all of our proprioceptive qualities, which is basically our brain's awareness of where we are at in an unstable environment.  And secondly our foot is full of mechano receptors which are receiving our mechanics.  So they are educating and integrating all of these super important muscles, the core into the legs to help us become more proficient.

3. Posting Up On Right Toe - Hitting The Ball Solidly & Vertical Centralized Tilt

So you've been told to keep your lower body quiet to keep your X-factor, stretch, etc, but since the backswing is a counter movement, that stretch is happening in the transition.  So let the lower body go on the backswing, keep it moving.  I never see a discus thrower not moving both ways.  So from up on one leg, you just hit half shots to half shots.  And the nice part  is that you're really organizing  from a neurological standpoint that you are on your left side at impact constantly.  So I'm not left tilting.  

Practice with your right foot dropped back to get the feel of a full hip turn. You might have been told to make a backswing where your left shoulder is under your chin. That way you know you've reached the top and can start down. This isn't the worst advice I've ever heard, but it's possible to turn that left shoulder under the chin without rotating your upper torso much at all--and that can put too much emphasis on the arms. It's better to focus on your hip turn. Ideally, your hips turn away from the target as much as they can. Here's a great drill for feeling the proper rotation: Make practice backswings while posting up on your right toe. Your right foot should be set back about two feet from its normal position (above). This allows the hips to turn freely. If you don't turn them, it's difficult to keep your balance at the top.

4. Step And Unwind - Transition & Kinematic Sequencing Drill

 So I would take the kids from right hand, to left hand to until they were really good at it, where they could chip good with it, where they could pitch good with it, and then get them on one foot.  

From there we would get into some transfer drills and get into the kinematic sequence without letting them know that that was what it was.  So I got them to set up normal, then put their feet together, then take the club back from there, and right when they got to hip height, they had to step and hit.  So that's in transition creating that stretch and the shortening of that muscle over that isometric center, core.  Justin Rose does that, that's ten minutes of his warm up every day to get those things firing. 

5. Stop At The Top - Transition & Kinematic Sequencing Drill

Two players I work with -- Justin Rose and Tiger Woods -- sometimes make what I call a "violent transition" from backswing to downswing, rather than let the change of direction happen smoothly. Their goal is to have the speed of the downswing increase gradually, with the fastest part happening at the bottom. When the transition gets violent, it's hard to square the face at impact.

Many average golfers also suffer from a poor transition. That's mostly because they take the club back too quickly, and then fail to complete the backswing before starting the downswing.

If you have this problem, a simple, time-tested drill I use with Rosey and Tiger can help. Next time you're practicing, when you reach the top of your swing, pause for a second before swinging down.

The reason I suggest doing it on the range is because, if you're quick at the top, this drill will feel very strange and might take a while to get used to. But if you do pause, you can then swing down as hard as you want, and the ball will really jump off the clubface.

6. Towel Under The Arms - Connection & Vertical Centralized Swing

If the towel stays in place, your hands, arms and shoulders are moving together.

"One of the misconceptions that has happened historically in golf instruction is how the body works and why it should work that way."

What I want to see is the hands and arms moving in sequence with the rotation of the upper torso. All three should move together as one unit until the left arm gets parallel to the ground--at that point the swing's momentum will keep the hands and arms on plane. This first part of the swing is crucial to staying in sync. Ingrain this feeling of everything moving together by stretching a towel across your chest with the ends under your armpits. Practice starting back while holding the towel in position (above).

7. Club On The Back Of Head - Vertical Centralized Swing

Well, there are lots of reasons, there is a big lateral move towards the target on the downswing, but there never should be that much off of it on the backswing.  When you get to the top there is still a force/ pressure in the right leg which is helping us to create a force in between both feet.  So this isn't just loading into your left side, you're still loading into the right, but you can still feel a pressure in the left quad.  Optically your eyes haven't moved that far off the ball.  This drill ensures that your eyes don't move off the ball where your brain would have to make new calculations on the distance to the ball, and that's just hand-eye coordination.  By staying in a single axis, by keeping everything centered, as we start to drive forward into our left leg and move forward it allows us to ensure those principles that I talked about: hitting the ball solid, starting it on the intended target line and having one miss.  To me it's like: the ball's not going to move, so why should I?  This supports the idea of the function of the arc, so as we create an arc around us, the more I move across the ball laterally, the more the circle turns into an ellipse.  And fourth, maybe the most important for most golfers out there, is that if I start bent over in flexion in my posture, and from here my head starts moving off the golf ball,  you can see that my shoulders start turning very level.  Well in order to hit down on the ball, my shoulders are going to have to get steep again.  Then the club must redirect over the top and then we are attack out to in which is the genesis of the slice.