If you want to hit the ball sweetly and accurately off the tee, you have to nail the basics. With this being such an important area of the game, we sought the expertise of two Golf Monthly Top 50 Coaches to share their advice. In the article by Tom Motley, and the accompanying video from Katie Dawkins, we delve deep into the basics to help you improve your understanding of how to hit the perfect drive...
1. Weight Distribution
The type of set-up you should be looking to adopt has the pressure feeling like it’s 50/50 between the feet. I tell a lot of my students, especially those who don’t have so much mobility in their hips, to flare the lead foot out slightly, which opens up the hip joint and allows it to move laterally and rotate comfortably.
If the lead foot is square, or slightly pigeon-toed, it can lock the lead hip joint and limit its lateral movement. As a result, the lead hip often pulls up and back, and the foot spins out. Eight out of ten recreational golfers I see do not have the ability to rotate around that point with the foot square.
2. Spine Tilt
I like to see that the neck, eyes, sternum and centre of the pelvis have matching angles. I call this ‘setting the eyes’. When there’s curvature in the spine versus the neck, it creates unwanted movement.
When you’re next setting up with the driver, think of it like this: “I just want to tip a little bit of water out of my right (trail) ear.” This will help you settle into the right position. This slight spine tilt away from the target will help provide a positive angle of attack, which is what you want with your driver.
3. Holding The Club
Many golfers create a problem in the swing by setting the wrong levels with the forearms. I like to get people thinking about bringing that right (trail) shoulder in from underneath the left hand to take the grip, rather from round and over the top.
It’s important that you don’t have the butt of the club too close to your body, otherwise you’re going to need to find some space in the downswing to get back into the ball properly.
4. Grip Pressure
In terms of grip strength, I always say that if you hold the club up in front of you, you want to be gripping it hard enough that someone can’t pull it out of your hands, but not so hard that they could pull you over. You don’t want the level of pressure that you’re putting on your grip to feed on into your forearms as tension.
If the forearms are relaxed, and you’ve got a firm grip, that’s a good benchmark. There shouldn't be any veins popping out of my forearms, and my grip pressure is about a 5/10 (10 being very tight).
5. Extend Without Swaying
You should keep the arms fairly straight in the takeaway, which allows the ‘set’ to happen naturally in the backswing. The key point to remember when taking the club back is that you don’t want a lot of lateral sway away from the ball.
The lower half pretty much wants to maintain its position; it just rotates around its central point. Once the hips sway away from the ball, it then becomes a real lottery as to whether or not you can return the club square to the ball.
6. Up To The Top
When people ask me for backswing tips, I simply say it’s best just to think about maintaining your width throughout; that way, the wrists will hinge naturally. I put it like this: you want to feel like your trail arm is always seeking to be straight, knowing that it can’t be, so you’ve always got that level of pressure through the right arm to keep that connection. If you take that pressure away, that’s when the arms tend to fold.
7. Starting Down
It wouldn’t hurt for you to rehearse getting into this position. I like my students to think about pumping into the lead foot. Get to the top of your swing and then get used to pushing into your left foot – it will feel like you’re resisting your upper body.
What you don’t want to do is feel like you’re moving the upper body forwards to pump into it. Imagine the force going diagonally from the trail shoulder – not vertically down or laterally forward – but diagonally to the ball of the lead toe.
8. Downswing
Above are two typical ‘death moves’ I often see among club golfers. The most common is where the player hangs back and then, in an effort to hit up on the ball, gets ‘scoopy’ with the hands.
If you’ve been accused of ‘scooping’, don’t think ‘hit up’ as this can encourage golfers to back up and hit off the back foot, which is when you get that ‘scoopy’ action. Rather, think ‘hit out’. If you’ve nailed your set-up, the outward path/swing direction should take care of the angle of attack.
9. The 'Straight Arm' Drill
There are hundreds of different driver drills, but I like this one because it helps with so many different aspects of the swing, and teaches good ‘feels’. It’s called the ‘straight arm’ drill, where the idea is to hit no more than half swings, and build up the pace.
Here’s a challenge for you: hit 10 balls at half speed to within a 30-yard gap; 10 balls at three-quarter speed to within a 35-yard wide gap; and then 10 balls at full speed into a 40-yard gap.
Tracks your scores. Perhaps you can find the ideal speed to help you hit the fairways more often on those tight driving holes around your home course.
10. Finish
A lot of people ask me what the importance of a good finish is. Really, the finish is a by-product of what’s gone before. Work on the basics, and that will give you a good chance of finishing in a position where you feel in balance and extended, with your chest facing the target.
