Every golfer I ever speak to wants to hit the ball further. Sometimes they don’t admit it but most do. Most say, “No I definitely like to hit the ball further, I want to be one club longer or 20 yards longer of the Tee or whatever it might be. But for a lot of golfers, they put the effort and they put the power into the wrong part of their swing. They’re putting the effort and the power into the back swing or the first half of the down swing and then they get a little bit scared. They get a little bit fearful they’re not sure how to hit through the ball. So they almost steer the club onto the back of the ball, they keep their body weight back and they decelerate when they hit the shot. So it’s a good set up, a massive back swing and then decelerate and then they are a bit scared of it. And it might go high and it might go straight but it definitely doesn’t go far enough and they’re not really using the efficiency of their motion as well as they could.

So we’d like any golfer to try and accelerate the golf club through the impact zone as fast as you possibly can from a decent bouncing position. So here’s a couple of tips to make sure that you are accelerating the club. First thing really is try and avoid hitting at the ball. The ball is not the target, the target is out here. We’re just propelling the ball towards the target. So if we swing towards the target, the ball will just nicely get in the way of that. So definitely don’t be tense as you hit up the ball, but instead you should hit through the ball. So hit through the ball towards the target.

Another good exercise to make sure you’re not decelerating is a little whoosh drill. So we can take the golf club and we can flip it up side down holding the head with the handle down here. Now because the handle is very light, it would stand to reason that we can swing it quite quickly. So we swing the handle through the impact area nice and quick, and it starts to make a little bit of a whoosh. Now I would like you to make that whoosh as loud as you can but also make it as loud as you can, quite lay it on. Sort of from the ball through to knee height in the follow through is the best place for it to be loud. If you’re loud here, and whoosh here and then slow down, there’s a littler bit of a problem. So we spin the club over we hold the other end and then we whoosh as loud as we can, lay it on in the swing and certainly not early and then slowing down.

Another great little exercise for you is an impact bag. If you can get yourself an impact bag, they’re very good little trainings aids. You can take a golf club and you can start to hit into the side of the bag. Now contrary to what you might think, I don’t want you to slow down when you hit the bag. I want you actually to hit into it quite hard, give it a real good thump, it will make quite a loud noise on the camera here I would have thought, but as I set up to this, I make my nice little back swing position, and I give it a nice good hit.

And it gets me really confident hitting into something rather than decelerating and pulling out of it. So if I can hit that a few times and by all means, get one in the garden and just whack it up and down the yard and then back again. Then go to the driving range and that feeling of hitting the ball straight through there, it feels very light, it feels effortless and it will definitely encourage you to accelerate. So go ahead and try those exercises to make sure you’re not decelerating on your iron shots.