Golf Ball Striking Drills (Video) - by Pete Styles
Golf Ball Striking Drills (Video) - by Pete Styles

So here is three really great drills to help improve your lag angle and ultimately help improve your ball striking. Now this first exercise, what I've got here is I've got a towel, and I've wrapped it around the hazel of my golf club where I've actually managed to strap mine on. But if you can’t do that just wrap the towel around the hazel of your golf club and then bring the golf club down and put it on the floor, about two or three feet behind the back of the ball. What I'd like you to feel now is the resistance that that towel provides as I drag the club in towards impact. Obviously the towel’s quite heavy, and I'm not going to be able to flick it, I want to use this to get the feeling that you're pulling that towel across the ground and the resistance that creates allows my hands to press forwards more and drags the club head back. And that's a great way of creating and then feeling the lag angle as you're coming in towards the golf ball. Repeating that a few times with a nice heavy towel will certainly give you the feeling that you're lagging correctly coming into the back of the golf ball.

And then in the downswing, I'm going to create that lag and hold that lag as if there’s something pulling back on the club head. So utilizing the towel creates that really nice feeling. The next exercise I'd like you to work on to create lag and release lag correctly is a swoosh drill where we take the club and we spin it over. And just swinging with the club head this way round allows me to feel the release of the lag. So this way I create lag and then I let my hands go. And the speed of that swoosh, the sound of that swoosh, particularly as it gets louder really gets the sensation that I've got lag, and I'm releasing lag to accelerate the club head into impact. When I spin the club head over, my lag angle and releasing of lag angle, creates the sensation that I'm hitting the ball quite firmly, quite hard. And the last exercise I'd like you to work on is a lag exercise. It’s to take a tee peg here. I'm going to place the tee peg in the ground, here, and put the ball four inches behind it and then go on to focus on striking the ball and trying to strike the tee peg after. Now you’ll notice the tee peg is in the ground after the golf ball. So any element of lifting, scooping, trying to hit up on the ball simply is not going to work. I'm going to set up to the ball, I am going to try and strike down instead I’m low enough to hit the tee. So I took a nice shot there and I think my tee peg flew out all the way over to here. So I took my ball and then the tee peg was at the end of the divot and the tee peg came out. Now by having the tee peg as a focal point to encourage me to stay down long enough, that I was able to make really good contact rather than hitting the ball and lifting up, which is what we see with some golfers that struggle to stay down to make good contact, so practice those three exercises, the towel drill, the swoosh drill and the tee peg drill to help improve your ball striking. 2015-10-14

So here is three really great drills to help improve your lag angle and ultimately help improve your ball striking. Now this first exercise, what I've got here is I've got a towel, and I've wrapped it around the hazel of my golf club where I've actually managed to strap mine on. But if you can’t do that just wrap the towel around the hazel of your golf club and then bring the golf club down and put it on the floor, about two or three feet behind the back of the ball. What I'd like you to feel now is the resistance that that towel provides as I drag the club in towards impact. Obviously the towel’s quite heavy, and I'm not going to be able to flick it, I want to use this to get the feeling that you're pulling that towel across the ground and the resistance that creates allows my hands to press forwards more and drags the club head back. And that's a great way of creating and then feeling the lag angle as you're coming in towards the golf ball. Repeating that a few times with a nice heavy towel will certainly give you the feeling that you're lagging correctly coming into the back of the golf ball.

And then in the downswing, I'm going to create that lag and hold that lag as if there’s something pulling back on the club head. So utilizing the towel creates that really nice feeling. The next exercise I'd like you to work on to create lag and release lag correctly is a swoosh drill where we take the club and we spin it over. And just swinging with the club head this way round allows me to feel the release of the lag. So this way I create lag and then I let my hands go. And the speed of that swoosh, the sound of that swoosh, particularly as it gets louder really gets the sensation that I've got lag, and I'm releasing lag to accelerate the club head into impact. When I spin the club head over, my lag angle and releasing of lag angle, creates the sensation that I'm hitting the ball quite firmly, quite hard. And the last exercise I'd like you to work on is a lag exercise.
It’s to take a tee peg here. I'm going to place the tee peg in the ground, here, and put the ball four inches behind it and then go on to focus on striking the ball and trying to strike the tee peg after. Now you’ll notice the tee peg is in the ground after the golf ball. So any element of lifting, scooping, trying to hit up on the ball simply is not going to work. I'm going to set up to the ball, I am going to try and strike down instead I’m low enough to hit the tee. So I took a nice shot there and I think my tee peg flew out all the way over to here. So I took my ball and then the tee peg was at the end of the divot and the tee peg came out. Now by having the tee peg as a focal point to encourage me to stay down long enough, that I was able to make really good contact rather than hitting the ball and lifting up, which is what we see with some golfers that struggle to stay down to make good contact, so practice those three exercises, the towel drill, the swoosh drill and the tee peg drill to help improve your ball striking.