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In this video, which has been created in partnership with Callaway, we look at the key to handicap cuts for many golfers - consistency. PGA professional Ben Emerson puts a list together of his 10 best consistency drills. This covers everything from keys in the golf swing to better chipping and putting techniques. These drills are simple designed to add structure to your practice so you can start making tangible improvements to your golf game.
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00:05Hello everyone, Ben Emerson here, head professional at San Martins Golf Club and Golf Monthly Top 50
00:11coach. Today I'm going to give you some of my top drills. I'm going to give you 10 consistency
00:16drills to help you tee to green, hit it further, help some more putts and enjoy your golf more.
00:22So let's get started. So when we're looking at takeaway, one of the things that people get wrong
00:32so early doors in the swing is this initial takeaway point, that initial first kind of
00:38four foot of travel from the club. And unfortunately it sends the club on the wrong path and actually
00:44really hurts the entire swing. If you've imagined, if you get it wrong in the first kind of point,
00:50you are unfortunately going to have to make some compensations to actually get a good strike on
00:54the ball. So one of the things that I love to kind of do is get this understanding that what
00:59the club
01:00head has got to do in this first initial four foot of kind of travel. Now along the way, people
01:07have
01:07been told that they need to take this feeling of almost like a one piece kind of takeaway where
01:12everything kind of comes together. Unfortunately, the problems we see with that is the club gets
01:16really on the inside here and actually we get this kind of, I've got nowhere to go. So I either
01:22got
01:22to lift my arms up or I'm going to take it straight over the top and get some really weak
01:26shots and ball
01:28strikes because of it. What I want to kind of have you this, give you this understanding is this club
01:33has got to travel the furthest. So at the initial point is if I had an imaginary kind of line
01:38or I've got
01:39an alignment stick here, I like to think of this straight down my tailbone as a bit of glass.
01:43And the idea is the club head is going to move first and it's going to miss this glass. It's
01:49not
01:49going to smash in and break the glass. We are going to get a nice wrist hinge, we're going to
01:53take it
01:53up and over and that's going to set our takeaway in a nice position. Now if you want a good
02:00little
02:00checkpoint, actually if you were to take the club to parallel with the ground which is here, I want to
02:06just check a couple of things. First of all, is my right forearm looking down on my left? So not
02:11the
02:11opposite, if you can imagine if I've whipped it in, smashed this glass, this forearm now, my right
02:16forearm is now under and the club face is now massively open. I want to actually see is that
02:21right forearm looking down on the left and is the club head now matching my spine? If it's doing this,
02:28I know that I'm on a really good, I've set myself up on a really good start to the swing
02:32and I can then
02:33just simply go up, come down and enjoy some good shots. So here's a really nice drill to get to
02:44fix
02:45your over the top golf swing. Unfortunately in the coaching bed on the golf course, we see the over
02:50the top move just so much in golf and it produces just some horrendous golf shots. What I want you
02:57to
02:57really understand is how sequencing works. So when I mean by sequencing, which parts of the body move
03:03first at the very top of the backswing. So as we finish this backswing, as my hands get to the
03:10very
03:10top, what the best players in the world all do is they actually start the swing with their lower body.
03:17These are our strongest muscles that we've got and they make sure they fire first. So the move looks like
03:22this. You get to the very top, you actually get this firing sequence of lower body, then upper body,
03:29lead arm and then club. Unfortunately, when we see the higher handicappers, something very different
03:34happens and the upper body gets so dominant, it's the first thing to fire. You get, it's firing this
03:40way, it's coming over the top and then you're really trying to correct it in the downswing. So what I
03:46want
03:46you to try and do is a little pause of the top drill, where very simply you take the club
03:50to the top
03:52and I want you to try and feel like you're going to stop there for just a fraction of a
03:56second,
03:56let gravity take over and then you're going to have time to get the lower body firing. So it always
04:02goes a little bit like this. Take it to the top, just do a couple of rehearsals where you let
04:08it drop
04:08and then turn the lower body through. If I do one more just before I hit, nice rehearsal to the
04:15top,
04:15let it drop, lower body through and then try and hit a shot.
04:29Give that a go and I really hope that it fixes your over the top swing.
04:38So one of the questions that we get asked quite a lot is how do you hit a three-wood
04:42off a tee? Now for me, one of the biggest problems that I find with people when they're set up
04:47like
04:47this is unfortunately the tee is far too high to start with and they try and mimic what they do
04:53with
04:53the driver. So you end up getting this kind of move where you actually get your weight too far onto
04:58your
04:58back foot, you try and get a nice big sweeping kind of swing, but unfortunately what happens is the
05:04weight stays on the back foot far too much and you end up trying to hit up on it too
05:10much,
05:10your spine angle changes and just so many problems happen with this. What I want you to try and do
05:16is actually understand that you don't need to tee it up high to do this. I want you to feel
05:20like
05:21you're really trying to hit it off more of a perfect lie. So tee the ball down slightly, give yourself
05:27a
05:27nice perfect lie to start with because now I want you to really try and feel that we are not
05:33trying to hit
05:34up onto it like we are with a driver. There is a nice kind of descending blow to the back
05:39of the ball
05:40to get a three-wood to go up into the air. So if I take a set up here and
05:45take a shot, I want to make
05:47sure that the ball position is not like it is with a driver. So it's not on our left heel,
05:53it's two golf
05:53balls in and I feel my weight is a lot more 50-50. For some people they can really benefit
05:59having more
06:00of the weight on their front foot to start with. But far more important than that, if you are going
06:05to go onto your back foot, you've got to get your weight off, you've got to get energy going towards
06:11the target. So I want you to really focus on the finish, finish the pose and actually feel like you're
06:17going to hold a little bit of balance right at the end. So let's have a go. Give that a
06:32go and I
06:33really hope it helps you three-woods off the tee. So if you're one of those golfers that really struggles
06:42with releasing the club, actually how you strike the ball when you're doing these kind of short chip
06:48shots, I've got a great little drill just to give you the understanding of how the club passes the
06:53body. Now what we see, we see two types of poor release patterns when we're talking about these
06:59kind of short shots. The first one is we've been told at some point that we don't want to use
07:04too
07:04much wrist. So what we tend to do is get very wooden, very kind of stiff with our whole upper
07:11body and
07:11our arms and we actually try and then hold the club off. This is what we call a block release.
07:17The opposite can happen when we get too kind of wristy and actually we get this kind of what we
07:22call this open sort of early kind of release pattern here where we actually return the club
07:28at the wrong kind of the wrong way. So the drill looks like this. What I want you to do
07:33is take your
07:33left hand off and just place it onto your lead thigh and I just want you to grip the club
07:38as you would
07:38normally with your trail arm and I want you to feel like it's really nice and soft and you're just
07:44going to practice making some swings where the club comes up, going to let it just naturally drop,
07:49let gravity do its thing and actually just get used to brushing the ground. You can see the club is
07:55now
07:55releasing past my body, it's exposing the bounce. If I do it on the ball just as a practice, it's
08:01here,
08:01let it drop and let it naturally kind of release. If I then take another normal shot,
08:07put my hands back on, a nice way to just transition from this is then just with your lead arm,
08:12just try and do exactly the same thing but let's just grip this nice and lightly to start with.
08:17Just do a couple of practice swings, let the club drop, let it go past your body and then let's
08:24just
08:24try and do one onto the ball. That's a great way to give you the understanding of how the club
08:31releases
08:32past your body, stops you thinning it, stops you hitting all those terrible shots and start enjoying some good chips.
08:43So one of the questions that we get asked quite a lot is how do you compress an iron? Now
08:48this is a
08:48really interesting one because for me when I see a lot of players working on their swing,
08:52most of the time they're working on either the backswing at different kind of positions or this kind of
08:58downswing move. The only thing the ball really understands is impact. So for me it's one of the
09:04first areas that I ever go to with a player of just to give them the real understanding of what
09:09impact
09:10looks like because unfortunately we have been told a bit of a lie in how we've been told to set
09:15up.
09:16If you think of a normal kind of setup position with the ball position in the middle, most people have
09:22their hips very level and they have their hands pointing straight up but impact doesn't look like
09:28that. Actually when we come to impact some of the best players in the world they do something very
09:32different. Their hips have cleared, their chest is cleared and their hands are just in front of the
09:38golf ball. Now if you think about it when we're trying to get the ball to go high for most
09:43people when
09:44they're starting that that's a real that takes a lot of sort of thought process to get that kind of
09:49move
09:49because it doesn't make much sense to try and hit down on something for the ball to go up. So
09:55what
09:55they end up doing is they go onto their back foot and they really try and scoop this ball into
10:01the
10:02air. It gets the opposite effect of this nice compressed look that we are looking for. Unfortunately
10:07what happens is it's twofold. You lose so much distance because of it because the club is now not in
10:13this position like it's been built for. It's either back how it started or it's been de-lofted completely to
10:19this. You get a lot of distance, strikes can be all over the place. One of the nice drills that
10:25I
10:25like to do is actually do a drill where we actually start at impact and work back. What I want
10:30you to
10:30do is take your normal setup position and I want you to push your hands forward. I want you to
10:35rotate
10:36your hips just about a couple of feet in front of the ball and do the same thing with your
10:40chest. I want
10:41you to do some really slow kind of awareness swings where you just take the club back and try and
10:47return
10:47back to that position. Do this rehearsal a couple of times and just get so used to feeling what impact
10:54looks like. Hopefully we put that all together and we get some nice compressed shots.
11:09I really hope that helps.
11:15So one of the questions that I get asked quite a lot is how fast or slow should I swing
11:20a golf club
11:21to get the most out of my swing. Now this is a really difficult question to answer because unfortunately
11:27not everyone swings at the same speed so it's very important that I just say you I don't just say
11:32you
11:33need to swing it at five if we had a scale of one to ten ten being the fastest because
11:37that would be
11:38wrong because not everyone plays their best golf at five. So what I like to try and do is I've
11:43got a
11:43three ball setup is this is just a nice little drill to try and find your own tempo. So the
11:49idea with is I
11:50want you to think of the first ball as we're going to swing this as slow as we can. This
11:55is what we call
11:55awareness speed swing so kind of as slow as I can the whole way back and through just to give
12:01myself
12:01a guide of what slow is. So if I just hit one and I'm thinking this is only going to
12:06go kind of 20 yards
12:08just really slow back and through and I just about carry the water just to give myself a gauge. Now
12:18I
12:18want the second ball to be as fast as I can so this is 10 on the scale so literally
12:22like blink and you
12:23miss it type swings but I really want you to hit one and I need you to feel what the
12:27fastest one
12:28feels like. So if I was to set up and let's try and crack one down there
12:36that was far too fast for me but now all of a sudden I can actually I felt what slow
12:41is and I
12:42felt what fast is. Now I want to try and find something that I can settle with that feels natural
12:48right so I'm going to try I actually quite like to have a fastest sort of swing so I'm aiming
12:54for
12:54the sort of six and seven mark and let's see if I can just find one with a nice kind
12:58of tempo
13:01back and through and that surprisingly was quite a nice shot but the way I did that was I experienced
13:07both ends of the spectrum really slow really fast and I settled for something that I can do on time
13:14and
13:14time again on the golf course take that to the driving range really experience both ends
13:19and trap the middle and enjoy some good shots.
13:27So one of the drills that I love to do on the putting green just to make sure that my
13:31club face
13:31is returning to the ball square is I like to use just on my chrome soft here I've got
13:37I've actually got these three lines the triple track lines and I'm going to use these as kind of a
13:41drill and very simply what I'm going to do is I'm just going to aim at a target and I'm
13:46going to
13:46point those lines literally directly at this target now when I take my putt and actually I'm going to
13:52do this when I'm going to hit quite a few putts doing this if I start closing the club face
13:57down
13:57what we're going to see is those lines are going to start wobbling and the ball's going to go off
14:01to
14:01the left if I do the opposite and the club face is returning open again that those lines are just
14:07going
14:07to start wobbling off to the right so what I want to do is just I've got a cup of
14:11balls I'm just going
14:11to hit a few towards the target and I just want to see can I get these lines to just
14:15go end over end
14:17towards the hole so let me just have a little go strike one just to the target
14:24so I missed it on the right and I could really see the lines wobbling off to the right when
14:29I did that
14:29so I know the club face didn't close down well enough it was open through so I'm going to do
14:36that again
14:36line it straight up to a target set up behind and I'm just going to try now and close the
14:42club face
14:43down slightly just so I can really see those lines going end over end it's a really good way of
14:50using
14:50the triple track technology to help you putting
14:57so what we're looking for here is finding neutral posture now one of the things that we see with very
15:03good ball strikers is they have this really nice flat back that we call neutral posture where we get
15:09this nice hip hinge and a nice flat back now one of the things that we see with the higher
15:14handicappers
15:15is we there's two types of postures that categories that we can kind of fall into one is what we
15:20call
15:20c posture which is kind of a lazy sort of position where the shoulders kind of drop down and we
15:25get this
15:25flat sort of c shape with our back the other one is s where actually the shoulders get pushed back
15:31quite a lot and we get this really big arc in our back right these two problems can really help
15:37and
15:37unfortunately hurts your your striking abilities but if we actually understand what they feel like we can
15:43actually do something where we can find the middle ground and we can trap that middle feeling that we
15:47call neutral posture so what I want you to try and do is with a club literally put it on
15:52your shoulder
15:53line like this and I want you to go into this s shape I want you to actually hinge your
15:57hips and
15:58actually push your shoulders back and really experience this s kind of position I then want
16:03you to go from here I want you to go to c so flatten your back round your shoulders and
16:09then very simply
16:09I just want you to find the middle ground I want to find neutral now you can see I've got
16:14this really
16:14nice flat back and I'm able to rotate around my body so much smoother if you're still struggling with
16:20that another drill that I love is literally with your seven iron with a club just stand nice and tall
16:26and I want you to just put it just below your belt line and I want you to have this
16:29feeling of
16:30actually just pushing the club back so if I stand from this angle it's nice and tall clubs out here
16:36and I'm just going to push with my hands back so bum goes out back stays straight I'm just going
16:41to let
16:41my hands dangle down and I'm just going to flex my legs now I'm in a nice solid position to
16:48rotate
16:48around myself and hopefully hit some good shots so let's give it a go
17:08so if you're one of those golfers that really struggles to make a good strike one of the things
17:13that could be happening is you're decelerating the club throughout the downswing now one of the things
17:18that I see a lot of sort of higher handicappers do they take the club so far back for such
17:23a short
17:24shot the brain is very good at kind of making its own kind of calibration and it kind of just
17:29goes well
17:30if I make a normal swing and I flush it I'm just going to nut it over the back so
17:34what will that what
17:35they do is they naturally start to slow down unfortunately what then happens is the club is then
17:41decelerating to the point of when it strikes what really good chippers do is the complete opposite the
17:47club is actually accelerating past the ball to the fastest point of the swing is just past the golf
17:53ball so one of the really nice drills that I like to practice I've just got six balls here at
17:57the green
17:57and all I'm going to try and do is take a nicer kind of shorter backswing back I'm going to
18:02feel like
18:03I'm accelerating through and do a slightly longer finish so it's not going to be too far back nice and
18:09short longer finish through the whole idea with this is the club is accelerating towards the target
18:16now one of the problems that some people do when they try this for the first time is actually they
18:21go really too short and they sort of stab at it I still want you to keep your nice tempo
18:26your nice
18:27rhythm let that club fall but always make sure you're accelerating through to the target
18:37so when we're looking at stance width it's really important to understand what we're trying to
18:41achieve with this for me it's this whole understanding that I'm trying to produce two
18:46things I'm trying to produce a nice stable base and I'm trying to produce a body movement that
18:50helps me turn away from the target and turn towards now there is a fine line between having
18:56too stable of a base too wide of a stance it's going to affect my turn so for me the
19:03ideal sort
19:04of position right if I had a driver in my hand like I've got here I want to make sure
19:08that I'm this is
19:09the fastest club this is the club that I'm trying to produce the most power with so I need a
19:14really nice
19:14stable base a stable platform so how I'm going to start this is I always start with my left foot
19:20first
19:21and if I'm going to set up with this ball inside this left heel I'm going to then feel like
19:28I'm
19:28shoulder width apart there's a nice kind of baseline and I'm then going to take one step back to give
19:34me
19:34a nice big stable base for me to produce a nice powerful hit with now when I take another club
19:41like
19:41a seven iron I don't need as much balance I'm not trying to hit it as hard so all of
19:46a sudden
19:47this stable base can come in I can actually produce just if I was shoulder width apart let's just go
19:53slightly wider just to give myself that nice stability because I still want to make sure I can hold
19:59balance now when I get like a wedge in my hand like this all of a sudden we're talking about
20:04finesse
20:05we're not talking about power so I don't need that stable base I just need to produce something that
20:10can keep me in balance give myself a lot of control and allow my body to rotate backwards
20:17and then some forwards and enjoy the shot that we're trying to produce so there we have it guys
20:21I really hope you enjoyed that video I really hope it helps you with your consistency out on the golf
20:26course if it's something that you liked please give this video a like and we look forward to seeing you
20:31on the next video
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