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It has long been said that we should hit down on the irons and sweep the driver and fairway woods. But I find that a lot of golfers miss this subtle implication of that advice. If you are going to sweep the driver, then the clubhead has to be low before it hits the ball. This drill helps you bring your focus to where is the clubhead and how does it relate to the vertical path.
Tags: Driver, Fairway Wood, Drill, Intermediate
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The drill is angle of attack, club height to the ground. So basically what we're going to do in this drill is we're going to look at
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how high is the club off the ground and use that to relate to the angle of attack or the path through the golf ball
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kind of from high to low. So what a lot of amateur struggle with is if you're trying to hit a driver
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they will tend to have too much of a negative angle of attack or the club will be going downward
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kind of like so as it's making context with the golf ball. So one way that I've had a lot of
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success explaining this to students is just with a simple spatial illustration. So if I were to
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tee up a golf ball just like so, in order for the club to be going flat or hitting up on the golf ball
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the club head is going to have to be relatively low to the ground about a foot behind the golf ball.
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Even on the ground works pretty good. So if I was to take my normal driver set up and go into a good
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delivery position and then I was to continue using my body side bends and rotations. You can see that the club
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is actually slightly lower than the golf ball so that when I go to extend my arms it's actually hitting
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it slightly on the way up. What a lot of golfers who struggle with the driver tend to do
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is they will do the angle of attack similar to if I had an iron. So if I were to take my normal
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iron set up and get into that same delivery position but now in my upper body slightly in front
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because I'm doing a good iron swing what you'll see is when I'm a foot behind the golf ball
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the club is going to be you know three four five six inches off the ground because it's going to
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be traveling downward when I make contact as opposed to upward like it would with the driver. So
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you can use this club height to the ground as a great reference for your angle of attack. So if you
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look on video and you happen to see that the driver looks like this when it's even with your right
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thigh you're going to have to straighten your arms but the club is going to be probably traveling
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downward as you make contact with it. So one of your challenges is to get the club almost on the ground
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even or just in front of your right foot so that when you swing through with the driver you can hit the
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driver on a flat or slightly up swing. This is that classic sweeping image that they talk about
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we're just going to use the height to the ground as a good reference point for feeling this concept.