Before Hitting Your Woods Just DO THIS For 5 Seconds

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Transcript Summary- How often do you find yourself out on the course pulling out a hybrid or a fairway wood? If you’re anything like most of my students, it’s quite a lot. They’re the clubs you lean on when you need to get yourself up to the green in two. But here’s the problem I see all the time: inconsistency.

One shot is thin, the next is heavy, and even when you do catch it cleanly, it doesn’t quite get the height or distance you’re expecting. And before I go any further, just remember—these aren’t the easiest clubs in the bag. They’re the longest, they’ve got the least loft, so don’t be too hard on yourself. But there is something you can do to make a big difference to your contact and distance.

From what I see with my Shot Scope data, mid to high handicap players are using hybrids and fairways around 25% of the time. That’s a huge part of your game. So if we can improve how you strike these clubs, we’re going to have a real impact on your scoring.

When I work with players, I focus them on three key things. First, how the club is interacting with the ground—are you consistent, or are you going from heavy to thin? That’s your depth of strike. Second, where the club is bottoming out—because if that changes, everything changes. And third, are you delivering enough loft through impact to actually get the ball up and travelling?

If I had to pick the most important one to start with, it’s always the first—controlling that interaction with the ground. A lot of inconsistency comes from the fact the arms are working too independently. They separate, they spread, and suddenly you’ve got no control over the bottom of the swing.

A simple way I get players to feel this is to imagine they’re making a swing without “reaching” with the arms. If I stood too close to you and you swung by throwing your arms out, you’d be all over the place. But if the arms stay more connected and the body turns properly, everything becomes much more stable. You can even rehearse this next to a wall—if your arms separate, you’ll hit it, but if you stay connected, you’ll miss it cleanly.

What I often see is that better players start to feel their lead or trail shoulder working more on an angle. That’s the key. When the shoulders rotate properly, the arms don’t have to manipulate everything. They naturally stay more stable, and that helps you maintain a consistent arc and strike.

So I get players doing a few rehearsal swings—just feeling that shoulder motion working around them. And when they do it right, even without thinking about the arms, the club starts to move in a much more controlled way. That’s when you start striking it cleaner.

Once you’ve got that, the next step is controlling where the club is actually bottoming out. You want that strike just ahead of the ball. If it’s too far back, you’ll fat it or thin it. Too far forward and you lose loft and distance.

One of my favourite ways to train this is what I call the “prop drill.” We set the body so the trail foot is giving you a bit of support, almost like you’re propping yourself up against a post through your lead side. From there, you feel the trail leg pushing you into a proper turn, rather than sliding side to side.

That small shift changes everything. Instead of swaying and losing your centre, you start rotating properly. And when that happens, the club naturally swings on a better arc, your low point becomes more consistent, and you can actually deliver loft through impact instead of de-lofting or hitting down too steeply.

At first it can feel a bit strange—most players are used to moving side to side. But once you get used to that feeling of staying centred and rotating, the strike becomes much more predictable. You start launching hybrids and fairways properly, with height, control, and distance.

So if you’re struggling with these longer clubs, start simple: improve your connection and shoulder motion first, then work on controlling your low point with that supported pivot feel. Get those two things right, and you’ll give yourself a much better chance of hitting greens in regulation.

Full Transcript- How often do you find yourself on a golf course pulling your hybrid or a fairwood out? If you're anything like my students, it's a lot of the time we have to need them to get up to the green in two shots, don't we? But my students, I don't know if you're the same, but they struggle to make consistent contact. Some top it, some hit the ground behind the golf ball. But a lot of them really struggle to get the ball high enough to hit it long enough. Now, the first thing I tell them is, look, they're not always the easiest club to hit. They're the longest in your bag. They're the ones with the least amount of loft. So be easy on yourself. However, there is something you can do that will increase the likelihood that you can make much more consistent contact and hit the ball longer so you can start reaching those greens in two. In this video, I want to share with you basically what I told them because I think it could help you too. Before I do though, look, if you're new to the channel, it's one of your first lessons of mine. Please consider subscribing. I release videos just like this one every single week to try and help you improve your game. Plus, you never have to remember a thing. Everything I do here, I'll put into a free download practice guide that I'll pin to the top comment below this video or simply just scan the QR code right there. So, here's what's super interesting. Data from my shot scope watch tells me that average amateur players, mid to high handicap players, are using fairwoods and hybrids 25% of the time. So, can you imagine what we could do to your score if we can improve the consistency of your strike? That's what I want to do for you today. So, to do that, you need to get good at three things. First, you need to get good at controlling how the club strikes the ground. If you find that you're making cons inconsistent contact, it's likely to be down to one or two things. Either you're not controlling how the club is interacting with the ground, i.e. one minute you go too much into the ground, next minute you're above the ground. That would be called the depth of the ar. That's the first thing. The second thing would be, are you controlling where the club lands? not how it lands, where it lands. Is it landing in the same spot every time? That's super important for ball striking. And the third and final thing is, are you delivering enough loft onto that club when it strikes the golf ball? That's super important because that height is going to give you the distance. Okay? So, that's the test I want you to pay attention to when you're out in a golf course. How is your club interacting with the ground? Where is it interacting with the ground? And how high are you hitting it? Which one of those three is the most important initially? For me, for most of my students, it's number one. That's where we're going to start. Now, with John this week, we're out on the golf course actually here, and he was really struggling. One minute he would miss the ground, next minute he would clatter into it. It's always a depth issue. So, we got to find out what the cause is for that. And it's different for everyone, but this is the most common. I want you to look into this. So, I'm going to get Leoin just to kind of demonstrate this. So, [snorts] I This is kind of what I do to a lot of my students. Just stand back a little bit, Leo. Actually, so I said, so if you if I want, this is the depth of ax. So if if I'm suddenly kind of like going to do this and then bull my arms, I'm going to be miles away from you. If I then suddenly extend them out, I'm going to hit you in the head. You feel nervous? Yeah. Okay. So I get my students to do this with me. So I say to them, the question I ask is, right, make me a swing. That's what I said to John. Take me a swing that you feel if I put you really close to the nose and I was going to make a swing now. What would m what how would I make a swing that would increase the likelihood I would never hit Leo? And they just do it. What do you think's happened? What can you see happening? My arms are staying very very close together. What they're not doing if I start doing this now, you know I'm going to be pushing and that makes Leo nervous. Yeah. Make sense? So thanks Leo. That's all we need to do. So, I often get them to do that. And you could do this next to a wall. How do you in a sense not smash into the wall, but if there's a lot of the arms spreading apart, that would be a disaster. Okay, it's hard to solve this problem. So, when I gave this to John, he actually said to me, his arms were now he started off by pulling his arms inside, but he said, "Danny, I'm not really thinking about my arms staying close together. I'm actually thinking, this is a really good one, I'm actually thinking about my trail shoulder going behind me." Okay. Now, I've seen some of my students like like the idea of the lead shoulder going down and across. All this is doing in reality is is it's making sure that the swing is staying on an arc and it's basically staying intact. If your shoulders don't move, your arms will have to do the work. That's when they start to generally spread apart. And now suddenly we it's very very hard to make consistent contact and control that depth of arc. So when you're swinging, make some swing. You could do some small practice swings like this. Either it's your trail shoulder or your lead shoulder. Get them working on an angle on an arc. Either trail shoulder behind you here. And notice how my arms are naturally staying fairly close together on the way back. Look. And look at this. Even on the way through, not because I'm forcing them together, but simply because my lead shoulder and my trail shoulder are working. If they don't work, which I see a lot of times, people swing their arms. They start spreading those arms apart. And now we've got no control over how that club interacts with the ground. You could do this just as a little warm up before your shot. Just left shoulder down, right shoulder down, and away we go.

And you see there, look, clip that ball beautifully off the ground with my three hybrid. If you are that golfer that is kind of struggling to make consistent contact with the ground in a consistent way, this is the place I would definitely start. Now, if you are doing that and you're doing it fairly consistently, the next place to have a look, if you're still not striking it very well, is in where the club's landing. So, for a lot of players who are struggling, they struggle not just with the hybrids and fairs, but also the irons, they tend to land the club in very different spots. Now, we want to land the club, certainly with any ball on the ground, just slightly ahead of that golf ball here. So, with a hybrid, I want the ball just ahead of center. Hopefully, the camera angle is good enough to show that. And then from here, I want to make sure that when I'm swinging, that club is landing in the correct spot every time. If, for instance, I land it too far over here, I'm delivering no loft onto the golf club. I won't get the ball up in the air. If I'm kind of landing it too far behind here, I might fat it and then top the ball or thin it and hit it nowhere at all. So, I want to be good at landing it in the correct spot. How do you do that? Well, one of my favorite drills, and if you if you're a regular to the channel, you'll have seen this, but it's important to get it right. Some people I've noticed got this wrong, and it's the prop drill. And what we try to do here is this. to land the club in the correct spot every time. We want to find a way to eliminate excessive head movement side to side. So, here's what we want to do. So, we're going to set up the prop drill where we're going to move our trail foot slightly further away and we're going to point it outwards here. And the prop is I want you to imagine we have a stake running through our lead side here. And we're going to prop this stake up like this. Now, I gave this to Tom recently and it was it was massive for him. Absolutely massive. So, we're propping this steak up. What does this do? Well, what I'm going to do now is I'm pushing with my trail foot in this direction and I'm it's basically propping up the stake as I move my shoulder lead shoulder to the right and sides. As I turn to the right, I'm propping it up here. Now, what's super cool about this is as my leg is pushing, it's doing something else. It's helping me pivot push around and what? Almost do what we did in the first one. Push my shoulders around. What this does also like magic it helps me club to swing in the which direction creates all this space. What else does it imagine uh help me do? It helps me to come look beautifully on this arc here. What else does it do? Well, look, I'm able to deliver look loft onto the golf club. What was Tom doing rather than this prop exercise? He was moving over here. So, he's almost swaying over to the right hand side. There's no real turn here. His shoulders haven't really turned because of that. Then he turns on the way down. His club gets thrown over the top. He's got no loft on that golf club and he's either hitting tops along the ground, he's hitting the ground in loads of different spots, but there's no consistency. So, the way you set up this uh prop drill, and what I said to to Tom was simply push with your trail foot here over onto that lead side here. So, yes, it's an drill. It's an exaggeration to start with. So, really feel that that push is there. Now, from here, very, very important, and this is where some people watched one of my previous videos were getting this wrong. Keep your head nice and central in your stance. If you push and you keep pushing and you tilt this way, now, unfortunately, there's no loft on that golf club. So, the head stays in the middle of your stance as you're doing this. Push back. And as I'm pivoting now, look, I'm really feeling that leg is almost locking out. It's not. And then, that's me. Look at this. Look at this from this angle. Look at my backside here. I'm pushing here. That pushes me this way. That trail pocket is going there. It's keeping me over the ball and increasing the likelihood that I'm going to strike the ground in the correct spot. Compare that to this right and left. Yeah, too much sway to the right means I've got inconsistent bottom of the ark, but also I've got no power. Look. But if I prop myself up, watch this here. There we go. I've propped up the ark. I've got all this space to move into. Look. And now I can hit into the back of that golf ball with loft. Now Tom, like many of my students, said it felt weird. It felt a little bit restricted. Why did it feel restricted? Because he loved the freedom of moving side to side. So you might feel this. So let's get this in action. So we got ourselves set. And it helps the first one as well, doesn't it? Right. So get yourself set here. Prop ourselves up. There's the stake in the ground. My right leg here is propping that stake up. And then I'm going to really sense here. Turn. I'm not doing this. Tom did this initially. Even when he propped himself up, he wanted to kind of go back into this way. I said, "Look, push that back. Keep it back and allow those arms, look, to work back down and into the back of that golf ball there." So, we've got loft.

Look at that. Launched beautifully high with a draw. Why? Because I'm coming down into this arc here. I've got all this space. I'm turning back into the golf ball. I've got loft. This is the prop disappearing. Look. Oh no. The stakes's gone. Club comes over. Club comes in steep. No loft. Variety of different low points. Yeah. So those two things uh to start with, control how the club interacts with the ground and then control where it interacts by really pushing that prop in place, pivoting around here and use that foot here to push those hips around. And look, you get the first one as well. Look, by creating space and pushing around that lead shoulder can also work in a circle to help that initial radius. So, super super simple, but those two things can really really help your ball striking with your fairwoods. But, as I said earlier, they aren't always easy to hit. They're the longest clubs in your bag. So, do give yourself a bit of a break, too. I hope you enjoyed the video. If you did, and you know somebody struggling with their fairwoods, share this video. Now, if you want to know how to use something like this with your irons, check this video out right here. And if you want to improve maybe your driving, you want to hit driver a little bit straighter, click this video here. But until next week, have a wonderful golfing week.