Strike the Golf Ball Like a Pro With This Tour Alignment Sticks Impact Drill (Video) - by Pete Styles
Strike the Golf Ball Like a Pro With This Tour Alignment Sticks Impact Drill (Video) - by Pete Styles

I think a very frustrating part for a lot of golfers is when they’ve worked hard on building up a really nice, beautiful looking, well timed golf swing, but then they are not able to take the results that they see on the practice ground and take them out on the golf course. One of the biggest issues there is the quality of strike. And sometimes off the mat, you can actually get a, a sort of false sense of security that actually hitting the ground before the golf ball on the mat is probably not a serious a fault as if you were to do that on the golf course particularly on a wet day on the golf course. If you play on the mat and you hit the ground two or three inches before the ball, it might bounce the club into the back of the ball and it feels fine. But if you were to do the same thing out on the golf course and hit two or three inches behind the ball on wet grass, the club would get stuck in the grass and have a big problem.

So this exercise is going to help you understand whether you’re striking the ball correctly or you’re striking it a little bit heavy. And the key to this really is the sound of the contact where you’ve got a crisp, clean strike or not. So what I’ve done here is I’ve taken my two tour sticks and I’ve placed them quite close together. Just about half an inch apart and then balanced the golf ball on top of them. And the feeling here is that I want to take the golf ball and just bounce gently off the top of the sticks but I don’t want to throw the club down really too hard into the sticks. You shouldn’t necessarily damage the stick yourself or the golf club. But what you would hear is you would hear a click before the ball. So you would click on the ground or on the sticks before you click on the ball. So we want the balls to be hit fast then the sticks after.

So we have a downwards angle of attack. So click the ball right into the sticks. And it’s quite gentle that will kiss off the sticks. It’s not a great big whack straight down into the floor. Start off by doing this with one of your shorter arms. I’ve just taken a wedge to play this shot. I’m going to play the ball nicely up to the centre of my feet. I’m going to try and move my body away, well forwards making sure that I get a good contact after the ball rather than dunging into the ground and catching it with too much body weight on the back foot.

So we are listening for this shot but also visually I can see on the sticks where I’m hitting and I want to make sure I’m hitting as far forwards as possible. So a nice certain position, get forwards and listen to the noise. So you’ve nicely kissed the ball there, just flicked on the sticks but hit after the ball and the ball flies off nicely. If I’m good at practicing that exercise with the sticks, I can take that back onto the tough I should get a lot less of the fat heavy shots, the frustrating ones that are causing you problems on the golf course.

 2013-06-27

I think a very frustrating part for a lot of golfers is when they’ve worked hard on building up a really nice, beautiful looking, well timed golf swing, but then they are not able to take the results that they see on the practice ground and take them out on the golf course. One of the biggest issues there is the quality of strike. And sometimes off the mat, you can actually get a, a sort of false sense of security that actually hitting the ground before the golf ball on the mat is probably not a serious a fault as if you were to do that on the golf course particularly on a wet day on the golf course. If you play on the mat and you hit the ground two or three inches before the ball, it might bounce the club into the back of the ball and it feels fine. But if you were to do the same thing out on the golf course and hit two or three inches behind the ball on wet grass, the club would get stuck in the grass and have a big problem.

So this exercise is going to help you understand whether you’re striking the ball correctly or you’re striking it a little bit heavy. And the key to this really is the sound of the contact where you’ve got a crisp, clean strike or not. So what I’ve done here is I’ve taken my two tour sticks and I’ve placed them quite close together. Just about half an inch apart and then balanced the golf ball on top of them. And the feeling here is that I want to take the golf ball and just bounce gently off the top of the sticks but I don’t want to throw the club down really too hard into the sticks. You shouldn’t necessarily damage the stick yourself or the golf club. But what you would hear is you would hear a click before the ball. So you would click on the ground or on the sticks before you click on the ball. So we want the balls to be hit fast then the sticks after.

So we have a downwards angle of attack. So click the ball right into the sticks. And it’s quite gentle that will kiss off the sticks. It’s not a great big whack straight down into the floor. Start off by doing this with one of your shorter arms. I’ve just taken a wedge to play this shot. I’m going to play the ball nicely up to the centre of my feet. I’m going to try and move my body away, well forwards making sure that I get a good contact after the ball rather than dunging into the ground and catching it with too much body weight on the back foot.

So we are listening for this shot but also visually I can see on the sticks where I’m hitting and I want to make sure I’m hitting as far forwards as possible. So a nice certain position, get forwards and listen to the noise. So you’ve nicely kissed the ball there, just flicked on the sticks but hit after the ball and the ball flies off nicely. If I’m good at practicing that exercise with the sticks, I can take that back onto the tough I should get a lot less of the fat heavy shots, the frustrating ones that are causing you problems on the golf course.