Posts tagged Driver

The driver is the hardest club to hit the golf bag aE” not only is it the longest golf club in the bag but It also has the least amount of trajectory which means you have to be very, very accurate when hitting your drives. The good news is that hitting the driver isn’t actually that hard when you know how to do it which is why the pros can hit drives 300 yards consistently and get on the fairway in the most situations. I spent the last two months try and add yardage to my drives by following golf tips from the world’s long drive champion of 2003 aE” Eric Jones. Over the last four weeks are managed to add somewhere in the region of 30 to 40 yards to my drive on average simply by following a few drills which I’m going to share with you today. Great extension in the backswing if you watch all the great professionals like Tiger Woods, Sergio Garcia and John Daly then you’ll notice how they always have a great extension at takeaway. This means that when you address the ball you should have a swing thought to take the club backwards away from the ball as far as possible. There is one thing that you can do to encourage the swing thought and make the takeaway as natural as possible. Put a golf tee into the ground behind the ball and make sure your clubhead hits the tee on the take away. Practice this feeling with a couple of buckets of balls down the range and you’ll naturally take the club back on the correct path with great extension. Don’t grip the club to tightly This is a very very common mistake among amateurs aE” they think that because they’re going to be using driver that they need to grip the club tightly. Unfortunately, this can really take distance from your drives. A tight grip means that you are unlikely to release the clubhead properly through impact which would lead to less distance and in some cases a fade.

You can use your sand wedge to practice this aE” simply address the ball as usual and try and chip the ball into a bucket about 10 aE” 15 meters in front of you. Make sure that out of a scale of 1 to 10, your grip is somewhere around the 3 mark. I always refer to this as soft hands. When you pick up your driver again you can try and replicate the feeling and really feel your hands releasing properly through impact. Weight Distribution Another thing you should be thinking of when trying to launch a long drive is your weight distribution. When you take the club head back in the backswing you should be loading your back foot with most of your weight. As you come through into the downswing you should try and transfer that weight to the front foot in a smooth consistent motion. This is how you generate power in any sport where you have to transfer body motion into object motion. For example, baseball players do the same thing aE” they load up on the backswing and throw their whole body into the throw when coming through. If you can practice each of these tips then you’ll be well on your way to improving your drives. Using these three tips alone I’ve managed to increased my drive substantially and as a result knock a couple of shots off my handicap. Good luck!