Increase Your Clubhead Speed With Vertical Force

GROUND FORCE DRILL - PGA Professional Robin Symes shows how he used a GROUND FORCE DRILL to increase a student's clubhead speed by up to 10 mph. Transcript Robin here, with one of my recent lessons. I think this is a good lesson for anybody who constantly struggles with push shots, you find that you feel like you struggle to release the clubhead, but mainly players who are struggling to correct clubhead speed. You feel like you put a lot of effort into the swing, but you don't get much out. You feel like maybe your body type and your athleticism, you should be somebody who creates a fair amount of clubhead speed, but you don't, this might be a good lesson for you. Now, I think most players understand some of the components which have an effect on clubhead speed. Maybe pressure transfer between right and left foot, rotational speeds of your body, the hinging and unhinging of the wrists, the kind of leverage you create in your wrists, and yes, those are all important components of how much speed you create. What many players don't realize is that there is also a vertical component too. There is a vertical force in the golf swing which will greatly affect how much clubhead speed you can create. This player is a great example of this. She's a good player. Obviously, somebody shooting in a round even par but struggles to create clubhead speed. Definitely, doesn't hit the ball far enough at this stage to compete on a higher level, but I won't go into huge detail there. I am focusing on the one area we worked on and the effects that had. But if I take you to impact, you can see how her lower body, a simple way to look at that, it was higher than...almost her knees look collapsed. They look too much down. They look too close to the ground. Her right knee is kind of rolling in towards the target, left leg still looks bent. It doesn't really look high enough. It's telling me she hasn't really got that vertical component in her swing, that vertical force, which is affecting her clubhead speed. So another thing, it will get a little bit more complicated, but because she doesn't have this vertical force, her hips don't stabilize, which doesn't allow her to release the club, so she struggles with push shots to the right as well for the same reason. All right, very simple. We just simply did some drills here. One leg only, this is the left leg only, whereas she put her right foot behind her left up on its toe, tried to make her backswing that is close to normal as possible but then simply learned to push up from her left foot. Used the ground, she used that force to push up. She feels like she's jumping. Now, maybe you might not believe me, but we tested this with TrackMan, and from this one-foot-only swing, she was actually creating more clubhead speed than her normal two-footed swing on the left. She was hitting the ball farther here on the right than with her normal swing, which instantly tells us that she didn't have this vertical force in her swing. That's a good way for you to test are you using the ground in the most effective way. Give it a try, maybe not in the first ball, but within 10 balls, if you don't have this component, you will be at least hitting the ball the same distance from this drill as you will with your normal swing if you don't have this force in your swing. Now, let's skip forward, and this is really only a few weeks later. You can see now, at impact, there's a little bit more thrust. Certainly, her knees don't look as collapsed. She's working up away from the ground, and on these swings, her clubhead speed, on average, was eight miles an hour faster. Now, that's a huge difference actually. It's almost 10%, so she went from somebody whose distance was a little bit below average to someone's distance which was a little bit above average. Actually, her swing speed in the right here was above the LPGA average. And I was really only thinking about one thing, that left foot drill and then repeat the same feeling during the shot. Let me show you why that will also have a little bit of an effect on the direction. So before on the right, right knee sort of collapses, everything collapses, so actually, here her right knee gets on the ball too early, but here you will see she is pushing up, so this stabilizers her hips. This one, her hips spins back more, so her hips don't stabilize. Her hips don't slow down, so she can transfer the speed into the clubhead. But yes, effecting distance, but also affecting the release of the club. This one, the club releases more freely, so it helps the clubface square up instead of...very commonly for her, the clubface would be left open at impact. The ball would start to the right. So simple but very effective lesson, and I think a lot of golfers out there can benefit from some of this in their game. I say simply trying that left-foot-only drill, you will soon work out whether you're using the ground correctly. If not, give this a try.