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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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00:00Hello 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
00:54on the ball. So one of the things that I love to kind of do is get this understanding that
00:59what the club head has got to do in this first initial four foot of kind of travel. Now along
01:06the way, people have been told that they need to take this feeling of almost like a one piece kind
01:10of takeaway where everything kind of comes together. Unfortunately, the problems we see with that is
01:16the club gets really on the inside here. And actually we get this kind of, I've got nowhere
01:21to go. So I either got to lift my arms up or I'm going to take it straight over the top and get some
01:26really weak shots and ball strikes because of it. What I want to kind of have you this, give you this
01:31understanding is this club has got to travel the furthest. So at the initial point is if I had an
01:37imaginary kind of line or I've got an alignment stick here, I like to think of this straight down my
01:42tailbone as a bit of glass. And the idea is the club head is going to move first and it's going
01:47to miss this glass. It's not going to smash in and break the glass. We are going to get a nice wrist
01:52hinge. We're going to take it up and over and that's going to set our takeaway in a nice position.
01:59Now, if you want a good little checkpoint, actually, if you were to take the club to parallel with the
02:04ground, which is here, I want to just check a couple of things. First of all, is my right forearm
02:09looking down on my left? So not the opposite. If you can imagine if I've whipped it in, smashed
02:14this glass, this forearm now, my right forearm is now under and the club face is now massively open.
02:20I want to actually see, is that right forearm looking down on the left and is the club head
02:25now matching my spine? If it's doing this, I know that I'm on a really good, I've set myself up on a
02:31really good start to the swing and I can then just simply go up, come down and enjoy some good shots.
02:39So here's a really nice drill to get, to fix your over-the-top golf swing. Unfortunately,
02:47in the coaching bed on the golf course, we see the over-the-top move just so much in golf and it
02:54produces just some horrendous golf shots. What I want you to really understand is how sequencing
02:59works. So when I mean by sequencing, which parts of the body move first at the very top of the back
03:06swing. So as we finish this backswing, as my hands get to the very top, what the best players in the
03:13world all do is they actually start the swing with their lower body. These are our strongest muscles
03:18that we've got and they make sure they fire first. So the move looks like this, you get to the very top,
03:24you actually get this firing sequence of lower body, then upper body, lead arm and then club.
03:30Unfortunately, when we see the higher handicappers, something very different happens and the upper
03:36body gets so dominant. It's the first thing to fire. You get, it's firing this way, it's coming
03:41over the top and then you're really trying to correct it in the downswing. So what I want you to
03:46try and do is a little pause of the top drill, where very simply you take the club to the top and I want
03:52you to try and feel like you're going to stop there for just a fraction of a second, let gravity take
03:57over and then you're going to have time to get the lower body firing. So it always goes a little bit
04:03like this. Take it to the top, just do a couple of rehearsals where you let it drop and then turn the
04:09lower body through. If I do one more just before I hit, nice rehearsal to the top, let it drop, lower
04:17body through and then try and hit a shot. Give that a go and I really hope that it fixes your over the
04:32top swing. So 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 like
04:47this is, unfortunately, the tee is far too high to start with and they try and mimic what they do
04:53with the driver. So you end up getting this kind of move where you actually get your weight too far
04:58onto your back foot. You try and get a nice big sweeping kind of swing, but unfortunately what
05:04happens is the weight stays on the back foot far too much and you end up trying to hit up on it too
05:10much. Your spine angle changes and just so many problems happen with this. What I want you to try
05:16and do is actually understand that you don't need to tee it up high to do this. I want you to feel
05:20like you're really trying to hit it off more of a perfect lie. So tee the ball down slightly, give
05:26yourself a nice perfect lie to start with, because now I want you to really try and feel that we are
05:32not trying to hit up onto it like we are with a driver. There is a nice kind of descending blow to the
05:39back of the ball to get a three would to go up into the air. So if I take a set up here and take
05:45a shot, I want to make sure that the ball position is not like it is with a driver. So it's not on our
05:52left heel, it's two golf balls in. So, and I feel my weight is a lot more 50-50. For some people,
05:58they can really benefit having more of the weight on their front foot to start with. But far more
06:03important than that, if you are going to go onto your back foot, you've got to get your weight off.
06:09You've got to get energy going towards the target. So I want you to really focus on the finish,
06:14finish the pose and actually feel like you're going to hold a little bit of balance
06:18right at the end. So let's have a go.
06:31Give that a go and I really hope it helps you three words off the tee.
06:34So if you're one of those golfers that really struggles with releasing the club, actually how
06:45you strike the ball when you're doing these kind of short chip shots, I've got a great little drill
06:50to just to give you the understanding of how the club passes the body. Now what we see, we see two
06:56types of poor release patterns when we're talking about these kind of short shots. The first one is
07:01we've been told at some point that we don't want to use too much wrist. So what we tend to do
07:07is get very wooden, very kind of stiff with our whole upper body and our arms and we actually try
07:13and then hold the club off. This is what we call a block release. The opposite can happen when we get
07:19too kind of wristy and actually we get this kind of what we call this open sort of early kind of
07:25release pattern here where we actually return the club at the wrong kind of the wrong way.
07:31So the drill looks like this. What I want you to do is take your left hand off and just place it
07:35onto your lead thigh and I just want you to grip the club as you would normally with your with your
07:40trail arm and I want you to feel like it's really nice and soft and you're just going to practice
07:44making some swings where the club comes up, going to let it just naturally drop, let gravity do its
07:50thing and actually just get used to brushing the ground. You can see the club is now releasing
07:56past my body, it's exposing the bounce. If I do it on the ball just as a practice, it's here, let it
08:02drop and let it naturally kind of release. If I then take another normal shot, put my hands back on, a nice
08:09way to just transition from this is then just with your lead arm, just try and do exactly the same thing
08:14but let's just grip this nice and lightly to start with. Just do a couple of practice swings, let the
08:19club drop, let it go past your body and then let's just try and do one onto the ball.
08:28That's a great way to give you the understanding of how the club releases past your body, stops you
08:33thinning it, stops you hitting all those terrible shots and start enjoying some good chips.
08:37So one of the questions that we get asked quite a lot is how do you compress an iron? Now this is a
08:48really interesting one because for me when I see a lot of players working on their swing,
08:53most of the time they're working on either the backswing at different kind of positions or this
08:57kind of downswing move. The only thing the ball really understands is impact. So for me it's one of
09:04the first areas that I ever go to with a player of just to give them the real understanding of what
09:09impact looks like because unfortunately we have been told a bit of a lie in how we've been told to
09:15set up. If you think of a normal kind of setup position with the ball position in the middle,
09:21most people have their hips very level and they have their hands pointing straight up but impact doesn't
09:27look like that. Actually when we come to impact some of the best players in the world they do something
09:32very different. Their hips have cleared, their chest is cleared and their hands are just in front of
09:37the golf ball. Now if you think about it when we're trying to get the ball to go high for most people
09:43when they're starting that that's a real that takes a lot of sort of thought process to get that kind
09:49of move because it doesn't make much sense to try and hit down on something for the ball to go up. So what
09:55they end up doing is they go onto their back foot and they really try and scoop this ball into the
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
10:13not in this position like it's been built for. It's either back how it started or it's been de-lofted
10:18completely to this. So you get a lot of distance, strikes can be all over the place. So one of the
10:24nice drills that I like to do is actually do a drill where we actually start at impact and work back.
10:29So what I want you to do is take your normal set up position and I want you to push your hands
10:34forward. I want you to rotate your hips just about a couple of feet in front of the ball and do the
10:39same thing with your chest. I want you to do some really slow kind of awareness swings where you just
10:45take the club back and try and return back to that position. Do this rehearsal a couple of times and
10:51just get so used to feeling what impact looks like. So hopefully we put that all together and we get
10:58some nice compressed shots. I 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 a 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 need to swing it at five if we had a scale of one to ten, ten being the fastest because that would
11:37be wrong because not everyone plays their best golf at five. So what I like to try and do is I've got a
11:43three ball set up is this is just a nice little drill to try and find your own tempo. So the idea with is
11:50I want you to think of the first ball as we're going to swing this as slow as we can. This is what we
11:55call awareness speed swing. So kind of as slow as I can the whole way back and through just to give
12:01myself a guide of what slow is. So if I just hit one and I'm thinking this is only going to go kind of
12:0820 yards just really slow back and through and I just about carry the water just to give myself a
12:17gauge. Now I want the second ball to be as fast as I can. So this is ten on the scale. So literally like
12:22blink and you miss it type swings but I really want you to hit one and I need you to feel what
12:27the fastest one feels 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've felt what slow is
12:42and I felt what fast is. Now I want to try and find something that I can settle with that feels
12:48natural right. So I'm going to try I actually quite like to have a fastest sort of swing so I'm aiming
12:54for the sort of six and seven mark and let's see if I can just find one with a nice kind of tempo
13:02back and through and that surprisingly was quite a nice shot but the way I did that was I experienced
13:08both ends of the spectrum really slow really fast and I settled for something that I can do on time and
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 passing green just to make sure that my club 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
13:46and I'm going to point those lines literally directly at this target now when I take my putt
13:52and actually I'm going to do this one I'm going to hit quite a few putts doing this
13:55if I start closing the club face down what we're going to see is those lines are going to start
13:59wobbling and the ball's going to go off to the left if I do the opposite and the club face is
14:04returning open again that those lines are just going to start wobbling off to the right so
14:09what I want to do is just I've got a cup of balls I'm just going to hit a few towards the target
14:13and I just want to see can I get these lines to just go end over end towards the hole so let me
14:19just have a little go strike one just to the target so I missed it on the right and I could really see
14:27the lines wobbling off to the right when I did that so I know the club face didn't close down
14:34well enough it was open through so I'm going to do that again line it straight up to a target
14:39set up behind and I'm just going to try now and close the club face down slightly
14:44just so I can really see those lines going end over end it's a really good way of using
14:50the triple track technology to help you putting
14:58so 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
15:09get this nice hip hinge and a nice flat back now one of the things that we see with the higher
15:14handicappers is there's two types of postures that categories that we can kind of fall into
15:19one is what we call c posture which is kind of a lazy sort of position where the shoulders kind of
15:24drop down and we get this flat sort of c shape with our back the other one is s where actually the
15:30shoulders get pushed back quite a lot and we get this really big arc in our back right these two
15:35problems can really help and unfortunately hurts your your striking abilities but if we actually
15:41understand what they feel like we can actually do something where we can find the middle ground and we
15:45can trap that middle feeling that we call neutral posture so what I want you to try and do is with a
15:50club literally put it on your shoulder line like this and I want you to go into this s shape I want you to
15:56actually hinge your hips and actually push your shoulders back and really experience this s kind
16:02of position I then want you to go from here I want you to go to c so flatten your back round your
16:08shoulders and then very simply I just want you to find the middle ground I want you to find neutral
16:13now you can see I've got this really nice flat back and I'm able to rotate around my body so much
16:18smoother if you're still struggling with that another drill that I love is literally with your seven iron
16:23with the club just stand nice and tall and I want you to just put it just below your belt line and
16:29I want you to have this feeling of actually just pushing the club back so if I stand from this angle
16:34it's nice and tall clubs out here and I'm just going to push with my hands back so bum goes out back
16:40stays straight I'm just going to let my hands dangle down and I'm just going to flex my legs now I'm in
16:46a nice solid position to rotate around 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
17:12that 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 a short shot
17:25the brain is very good at kind of making its own kind of calibration and it kind of just goes well if
17:30I make a normal swing and I flush it I'm just going to nut it over the back so what will that what
17:35they do is they naturally start to slow down unfortunately what then happens is the club is then
17:40decelerating to the point of when it strikes what really good chippers do is the complete opposite
17:46the club is actually accelerating past the ball so the fastest point of the swing is just past the
17:53golf ball so one of the really nice drills that I like to practice I've just got six balls here at
17:57the green and all I'm going to try and do is take a nicer kind of shorter backswing back I'm going to
18:02feel like I'm accelerating through and do a slightly longer finish so it's not going to be too far back
18:09nice and short longer finish through the whole idea with this is the club is accelerating towards
18:15the target now one of the problems that some people do when they try this for the first time
18:20is actually they go really too short and they sort of stab at it I still want you to keep your nice
18:25tempo your nice rhythm let that club fall but always make sure you're accelerating through to the target
18:32so 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 helps me
18:51turn away from the target and turn towards now there is a fine line between having too stable of a base
18:58too wide of a stance it's going to affect my turn so for me the ideal sort of position right if I had
19:05a driver in my hand like I've got here I want to make sure that I'm this is the fastest club this is
19:10the club that I'm trying to produce the most power with so I need a really nice stable base stable platform
19:17so how I'm going to start this is I always start with my left foot first and if I'm going to set up
19:22with this ball inside this left heel I'm going to then feel like I'm shoulder width apart as a nice
19:29kind of baseline and I'm then going to take one step back to give me a nice big stable base for me to
19:37produce a nice powerful hit with now when I take another club like a seven iron I don't need as much
19:44balance I'm not trying to hit it as hard so all of a sudden this stable base can come in I can actually
19:49produce just if I was shoulder width apart let's just go slightly wider just to give myself that
19:55nice stability because I still want to make sure I can hold balance now when I get like a wedge in
20:01my hand like this all of a sudden we're talking about finesse we're not talking about power so I
20:07don't need that stable base I just need to produce something that can keep me in balance give myself a
20:13lot of control and allow my body to rotate backwards and forwards and enjoy the shot that we're trying to
20:19produce so there we have it guys I really hope you enjoyed that video I really hope it helps
20:24you with your consistency out on the golf course if it's something that you liked please give this
20:28video a like and we look forward to seeing you on the next video
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