Natalie Adams – PGA Teaching Pro

Do you find that your drives are going too low when you're out on the golf course or on the driving range you are going to be really reducing the distance that you could possibly hit the ball. To hit a good drive and a long drive you’ve got to get the ball up in the air. So if your drives are going too low they are going to land too early and you won't get maximum distance from the amount of carry time in the air and the amount of rolling you are getting on the ground. So to improve this low ball flight let’s have a look at what's causing it.

Now one of the reasons you could be hitting the ball low is that as you are swinging back into the ball you're catching the ball too low on the clubface. Clubface on a drive is designed to be hit from the top part of the clubface and if you're capturing more on the bottom part of the clubface its going to give you a very low ball flight. So one of the reasons that you might be hitting too low on the clubface is from your grip pressure, so you double check your grip pressure when you set up. Squeeze the club as tightly as you can and we’ll call that a ten and then half that grip pressure down to a 5 and then just not one more of it down to 4 and that’s the correct grip pressure that you should be holding at a 4 half turn. So squeeze as tightly as you can just half it just a little bit less and now you are holding the club rather than squeezing tight. What that’s going to do is its going to line your muscles to remain relaxed so when the nerves are relaxed are as long as they can be you start gripping too tightly, effectively you shorten your muscles because you're making all the muscles in your arms work, when they work they shorten so the length of your arms is shortening and you'll pull a club head up away from the floor and tend to catch the ball with the bottom of the club head. So that’s one reason you can be hitting the ball low.

Okay the next reason you could be hitting the ball low is that your golf club is actually as its hitting the ball is closed and de-lofted because of that. So a closed clubface would bring the club back to the ball instead of in this position you’d be more like this and you can see straight away the loft has been taken off the club and if there’s less loft on the club you’re going to hit the ball out at a much lower trajectory. So work on keeping your clubface a little bit more open. A good way to do that is you could place your stance back on the left hand side of you as you practice your shots, so we'll just do that. And once we got the bag in position, so the bag is in line with the ball just let it stand down and you’ve now got this angle that you are going to be able to use to swing the club up.

So as you going to hit, work on striking through the ball but keeping the club face pointing upwards from the back. If you're closing your clubface, your clubface will really be pointing downwards on to the top of the bag and its de-lofting the club and sending the ball a lot, lot lower. So work on keeping the clubface more — the clubface is pointing more at the target slightly more at the sky and you should notice that your right palm is a little bit more under the handle rather than it being over the top of the handle and rolled over your left hand. And if you are closing the club face not only will you see a low ball flight but you would see the ball flying left as well, it may curve right to left in the air or it may go straight left but there would be a left element into that so that would be a really good indicator that your reason for the ball flight being low is due to the clubface.

Okay so we've looked at two elements there of why we've got these low ball flights, number 1 is that you're hitting too high up on the ball and number 2 is that you're closing the clubface as you're hitting. The 3rd element or 3rd reason that you might be hitting the ball too low is that as you're setting up you've got too much weight on your left side. So you're swinging back and you are still too much on your left and then as you're swinging through, you're moving too much to the left. So what's happening is its shifting the bottom of your swing up to the left so the low point for your swing up is now left of the ball and that just means, as you swing down you're striking with the downward movement and if you are on the downward swing with your golf club the golf club is going to be de-lofted. It hasn’t yet reached the point where it presents in the correct loft on to the club.

So for that situation just work on getting more weight onto your right foot so set up till you’ve got the club head next to the ball your hands over the cub head and your head to the right of your hands. This will set more weight onto your right side and work on staying behind the ball with your body in this position as you strike the shot. Because that will give you a much higher ball flight and the more you get the ball into the air, the more carry time that you get you’ll find the further you hit the golf ball, but just work on those three tips and you should find that you see the trajectory that you hit the ball really increase and because you get a higher ball flight you get a lot more yardage.