Pete Styles – PGA Teaching Pro

If you’ve not worked on improving the dropkick driver technique and you’re now getting less and less of them on the driving range, we now need to make sure you’re getting less and less of them on the golf course too and the main focal point to take on the golf course is the concept of not rushing with the driver.

This is something that doesn’t normally happen to golfers on the driving range. There’s less pressure on the range, they’ve got a bit more time on the range. But then on the golf course, the golf swing tends to get a little bit quicker. So if you’re fine in practice, but struggling on the golf course, consider that you could be rushing your drives.

Now, we want to hit this ball hard, we know that. We’ve got the driver for a reason because we’re trying to propel the ball as far as we can down the fairway. But at the same time, with the driver being the longest shaft in the back, making the widest arc, we don’t need to rush to generate the power. The simple nature of the long arc and the long arm positions, the long left arm for the right-handed golfer, that creates a huge amount of power even with a relatively smooth tempo.

Anyone that rushes that tempo particularly with driver is going to find that the upper body and the arms engage a lot more than the lower body. So from the top of the swing, the arms will hit and rush down and the lower body doesn’t have time to work. To that end, the arms are too involved, the hips aren’t involved and that’s one of the reasons for staying on your back foot and dropkicking your drives.

So we want to make sure we’ve created a nice big wide arc and then allow the time for the hips to move in the downswing. So as I hit a ball here, I want you to appreciate the rhythm and the tempo of the swing. It will be quite hard but it won’t be quite fast.

So I’m able to hit a nice drilldown over that red flag which is my target flag. Backswing was super slow, nice little wait and transition and then the power comes on in the downswing but there was nothing in that swing that was rushed and quick. If you’re rushing and you’re quick on the golf course, you’ll feel your hips can’t engage, your hands do too much in the downswing, you’re leaning back and all of that causes those dropkicked drives.