Pete Styles – PGA Teaching Pro

Some people will go as far as to say that the impact position is the most important position in the whole of golf, and pretty much everything that goes before that, be it the setup, the grip, the backswing, the stance, everything, is all leading in to getting a good impact position. But a lot of people that do all of the first stuff right and then right at the last minute, they ruin it with this spinning out process, this standing up and turning away from the golf ball process. So here’s how to really make sure that you have a good impact position.

From a good address position, I’m going to get you to hold that address position, move my hands forward 6 inches and rotate my hips slightly. So hands forward 6 inches and rotate my hips slightly and that now puts me a good impact position. The right heel is slightly off the ground. The hips and the chest are turning and the hands are slightly in front of the golf ball. So that’s good impact. Now if we can learn how to get a good impact position to be nice and consistent and dynamic, that’s definitely going to help you improve your golf. So a couple of key checkpoints to make sure that’s happening.

First thing is we want to maintain our posture. We want to set our posture in this area here and then maintain it. I wouldn’t want to start my posture here and then try and hit a ball from higher up or more importantly hit a ball from lower down. By having that posture going up and down to impact, that’s really going to affect the consistency of the strike. So we’ve got our good posture in the setup position. We’re going to maintain the good posture for impact as well. So effectively, somebody would say, keep your head down. I don’t really think about keeping the head down. It’s more like eyes down on the ball and good posture. If we’ve got eyes down on the golf ball and good posture, we’re going to be doing okay. And then turn the hips into impact, that’s quite important but also heavily weigh the left side, so really get into that left side there, because again if I’m on my right leg here, this will be the lifting and spinning out we want to avoid.

So it’s good posture, good chest position, heavily weigh that left side and that means staying down over the top of the golf ball. So it’s good to impact, left side is heavy, good posture, nice little bit of hip turn and that I think is how you can get into a good impact position. Don’t be afraid of freeze framing your impact and having a look at it, sort of as an individual part of your swing. It’s very difficult to make full swings, hit the ball and then see what impact looked like. It’s so much impossible to do that. You just can’t do it. So we need to get ourselves to setup, get to impact and have a look at it. Setup, impact, and have a look at it. Once you’ve done that a few times you can start to feel well what would that be like as a moving part of my swing as a dynamic part of my swing. And if you can take those points onboard and improve your impact and you stop spinning out of the ball, the shot cleanliness, the strike, the direction of the shots will all improve.