I Wish a Golf Coach Had Told Me This Sooner

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Transcript Summary-

When I first started coaching golf 20 years ago, it could take me weeks to help someone hit their driver straight or strike their irons cleanly. But I eventually realised I was missing one key thing — and once I figured it out, my students started improving ten times faster. What used to take weeks, I could now achieve in a single lesson. In this session, I want to share that with you because by the end, you’ll feel like you can genuinely go out and play better, faster.

So, what’s the secret? It all comes down to controlling one thing — the club head. Where that club face is at impact determines your strike, direction, and distance. But most golfers aren’t really feeling where the club is. Their heads are full of technical tips and swing thoughts, which stop them from building a true relationship with the club head. To fix this, we have to get you out of your head and into your hands — feeling the weight and motion of the club.

I like to start with something simple: hold the club out in front of you and feel its weight moving back and forth like a pendulum. Don’t force anything — just notice the swing. One of my students, Bob, did this and said it felt rhythmical, even though he couldn’t quite explain how. That’s perfect — you don’t need to know, you just need to feel. Once you’ve got that pendulum motion, start hitting shots with it and pay attention to the strike.

Next, I had Bob use a bit of foot spray on the clubface — it’s the cheapest launch monitor you can get. Each time he hit a shot, he’d guess where he struck it before checking the mark. This awareness is massive. Once you know whether you’re hitting it off the toe, heel, or centre, your body naturally starts to self-correct and move the strike closer to the middle.

When Bob started finding the middle more often, the next step was learning compression — that feeling when the ball rockets off the face. To get that, you want the club shaft and lead arm to form a straight line just after impact, rather than flicking the wrists. It’s not something you force; it happens naturally when you feel the whole club working through the shot, rather than just the head flipping through.

Then we looked at direction — especially with the driver. Bob was slicing, so I had him focus on where the club face was pointing and how it was swinging through the ball. You can’t see it at full speed, so you have to feel it. By becoming aware of where the toe and heel were in relation to each other, he started to square the face more consistently and straighten out his shots.

Finally, once he could control strike and direction, we looked at power. The secret to more distance isn’t trying harder — it’s about feeling the club head and allowing your body to respond naturally. When you can sense where the head is, you can gradually feel it speeding up through impact, and your body instinctively supports that motion.

So, to summarise — build a relationship with the club head. Feel its weight, know where you’re striking it, sense where it’s pointing, and let your body respond naturally. When you do that, everything — strike, direction, and distance — improves far faster than you think possible.

If you enjoyed this lesson, give it a thumbs up, maybe share it with a friend who needs help with their strike. And don’t forget to subscribe — I post new videos every week, each with a free downloadable practice guide in the description. Until next week, have a wonderful golfing!

Full Transcript- 20 years ago when I started coaching golf, it could take me sometimes weeks to help a golfer hit driver straight or strike irons pure and hybrids much better off the ground. And the reason being is I was always missing one thing. Once I figured this out and I started sharing it to all of my students, every single one of them, the the speed at which they learn to play golf 10xed what took me sometimes weeks to achieve, I started to now achieve in one single golf lesson. So whether you're looking at improving your driver, your irons, or any part that uh for that matter, by the time you finish this lesson, I promise you it's going to give you this incredible feeling that you can go out and play and actually start to play better much, much faster. I can't wait to share it with you. Before I do though, look, if you're new to the channel, it's one of your first golf lessons of mine. Please consider subscribing. I release golf 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 we do here, I'll put into a free downloadable practice guide in that description box below. So, I really believe this lesson is going to be something that you're going to return to time and time again. My students always do. So, whether you're looking at, like I said, improving your driving, your striking with your driver, how far you hit your driver, or like I say, irons, this will help. So, to improve your strike, how far you hit it, and your direction, what one thing do you need to learn to control? What? One thing the club head. This is the key. Where this club and how this club strikes the golf ball will determine whether you strike the ball correctly. If the face is turning is is angled incorrectly, that's going to affect your direction. How do you increase the speed of this club whilst maintaining its control to increase the distance? Well, you need to be really good at feeling where it is and building that relationship up. Now, when I show my students how to do this, I'll often introduce a simple metaphor. I want to give you this because it's it was really eye opening for them. Have you ever had a conversation with a loved one, a friend, and they're chatting away and you're you're listening? Well, you can listen. The words are coming out of their mouth, but your brain is somewhere else. You're thinking about what you're going to do for tea tonight or what you going to do tonight or whatever. They turn to you at that moment and go, "You haven't heard a word I've said, have you?" And you're going, "No." How is that relationship? What is the quality of that conversation? It's poor, isn't it? You could have heard those words, but somewhere you were somewhere else. Now, this is very similar to what I'm seeing with golfers playing golf. There's a conversation and a and a relationship you could be having with this golf club. You could be feeling where it is in space if you want to. If it's going too far to the right or too far to the left, you should be able to feel that. But people don't. They don't. They know they've done it, but they don't feel it. They're not they're not able to change it real time. Why? Often because their head is full of so many different tips and instructions that they're thinking here, but they're not feeling down here. So, here's how we get great at that. We're going to start with first of all improving your strike. Then, we're going to start showing you how you can use this to improve your direction. And then I'll show you at the end how we then amplify this to hit the ball so much further. So stage number one in this is this. Just simply do the basics. Build some form of relationship. Hold the club. If you can pause the video and do this with me, it' be amazing. Hold the club out in front of you and just for a second feel the weight up and down. Now I gave this to a recent student, Bob. And this is kind of what it said. I said, "Bob, start moving this club backwards and forwards. And all I want you to do here is this. Don't try and do anything. Just pay attention to the mass of this golf club moving backwards and forwards. To start with, he would get distracted. He was like, I can't feel it. Oh, there it's gone. So, it would one minute feel it, next minute it wouldn't. I said, just keep there. Just feel that club in a moment. He said, Danny, it feels a little bit like a pendulum. Right. Okay. Just notice that pendulum swinging backwards and forwards. And what we're going to do now is I said, "Bob, go and hit a shot just with that sensation of hitting that ball with that feeling of the ball getting in the way of this simple pendulum motion.

So, hit that shot there, make a swing, let the pendulum swing, get a feeling of that." And the first thing he says to me, "Danny, that feels rhythmical, but I don't know how I did it. You don't need to know. The reality is this. Your job first of all is to feel the mass of the golf club and let the club swing and the ball get in the way of the swing. Too many times we're trying to instruct ourselves to put this club in a position. I don't want you to do that. Stage one, let that club swing backwards and forwards. And in what Bob did to start with, he started to do this and he was enjoying that sensation so much that he actually just walked the golf ball and actually hit the golf ball doing that because he loved the feeling of this pendulum style motion. Now from here he said the strike wasn't didn't feel quite right down. He felt bad. Which moves us into step number two. What great players have done is they're able to to determine what bad really is. So, let me show you something. I'm gonna hit you a shot here. And this is what I want you to learn. You've got that now swinging club pendulum, but the strike didn't feel great. I want to show you something. Watch this.

Now, I know that strike there was pretty much out the center, maybe a fraction towards the toe. Let's have a quick look. Oops, not that one. There you go. Look, a little bit towards the toe. And you can see here, look. But fairly close to the center. That's pretty useful, isn't it? I But the problem is this. When Bob was striking it, I know without looking that ball's going to strike the toe of the golf club. What do we see? It's off the toe. But how does that benefit me? Well, I can feel that. I don't say it's a bad shot. I feel that and I can make subtle adjustments. I my once my body experiences this, it can naturally self-organize itself to start to move towards the center. I'm talking millimeters here. But Bob couldn't do that. He just felt it was a bad shot. So, here's what I did. I got him to get some foot spray. Simple foot spray. Nothing more than that. I got him to spray the face. And the stage one in this process, I said, "Look, you've got the swinging pendulum. I need you to get really good at noticing where that club is striking on the face because if you don't know where it's striking on the face, how can you ever adjust to it?" So, I said, "Look, let's do a few shots, and I want you to guess." So, we're going to play a shot here. Watch this.

That's a little bit towards the toe, but still pretty good. Let's have a look at this. So, can you see on here? Look. Can you see the mark off the toe? And what does trapment tell us? Off the toe. So, this foot spray is your cheapest launch monitor. Now, once you start to recognize it off the tour allow that's what did Bob. Bob goes, I didn't realize that. I thought that feeling was off the heel of the golf club. I've actually been trying to stand closer to the golf ball and it's been getting worse. Exactly. So, step number one, now you got the pendulum. Start to simply become aware of where your club is striking the ball in the middle or the toe or the heel of the face. Now, look, makes sense, right? So, that is goal number one. get the pendulum and start to become aware of where your ball is striking in the face so that your body can then naturally organize itself to make those millimeter adjustments necessary to strike it so much better. So once Bob started to kind of hit more of the center of the face through that awareness, he wanted clearly to be hitting it a little bit further. And to do that, you need to get something called compression where the ball flies off the club like a rocket. Now, this isn't compression. When you becomes quite flicky here with the wrists, compression looks like when we strike the golf ball, the club come through just after strike here and the lead arm and club form a straight line. It's like the whole shaft and club are one just after that golf ball here. This is what you see with most players. So, I needed him to feel that. So, I'm going to give you a visual here. This is a nice way of looking at it. So, I want you to imagine the golf club is like almost like a crickety bat. the full face of the shaft and the and the club face striking a flat surface. Most of the time golfers, like I say, will be throwing the head at the golf ball like this and getting the tip only striking it. I want you to imagine the full shaft and the head face onto that there. Can you see the angle we've created naturally here? But I don't want you to think of all those things. I needed Bob to feel them. Yeah. So the first thing is is one now he recognizes this is swinging. No here. Now as I'm trying to hit more of the face here, the full shaft on there, I'm already naturally experiencing what Bob was saying, experiencing the trail side of my body working forward to help me achieve that. I'm not trying to actively do it. The fact that I know that this if I do this trail side's hanging back trail side of my body now is moving through the shot to try and get the full shaft and that club in line to strike that golf ball. So it is not this look holding this angle. No speed there. So I asked Bob now to play some shots and pay attention to this. And when he started you can see a difference here. this right side wasn't really moving. And then he suddenly tried to imagine this line of club here and he said, "Oh, that feels more in line, Danny." Okay, well, let's see. Let's see what the results are like. Do you think he got it straight away? No, of course not. When he actually started to do it, first of all, he could feel the club flicking. After a while, he started to get the sensation of that club and the arm lining up. And as a byproduct, put the actual tracer on so you can see this flight. As a byproduct, this started to happen. Unbelievable

compression. So, what we started to see now is that ball starting to set off more and more like a rocket where suddenly now rather than him hanging back here, he's swinging the head, he's starting to feel where that head is in space. He wants that head lined up more with the shaft. Doesn't want it hanging back, flicking past the shaft too soon. There. So, his body is starting to move forward naturally without him even trying. Just like this.

Now, the question is, how does somebody start to hit the ball straighter from here? because Bob did have particularly with driver, he had a little bit of a slice going on. So, let's just grab driver for a second. Now, if you're slicing the golf ball and you're doing this, he's getting striking it much better, but the ball's it was the irons are pretty good, but with his driver, it was turning into a bit of a slice. So, he's like, now you've got the sensation. How does this relate to the driver? Very, very similar. Look at this ball positions in place here, just off to my lead heel. We still want to get this sensation look of the club and the shaft all lining up. We don't want kind of this flicky weak position. So, but what Bob was doing is he was doing this this face was in a sense wide up. He was coming across the ball. So, I said to him, "Well, what does the face need to be here?" Right? So, it needs to be more this way. So, can you feel that? How do I do that, Danny? Well, you could take an image of the face, close your eyes, and just get and ask yourself, where is the toe relative to the heel? Is it toe ahead of the heel or is it behind the heel? Feel it. It's like, you can't see it, can you? It's going too fast. You got to feel this. This why you got to get that relationship with the head. Now, naturally, he would start overthinking it at times. Just just let it go. Just notice where that toe is relative to the heel. Also, where's the club swinging? Is it swinging away from you or towards you? I don't know. Well, pay attention. There you go. This is a way to if I swing the club, look away from my body. Watch what happens. Watch this ball now. Just naturally curve to the left, right? Just as a little chip down there, right? So, this is what tends to happen when you start to really experience a club head. And the great thing is once you can feel the head, you play around with that. Where is it? Very different to go I must swing here. I must swing into out. That's all this that's all in your head here. Paying attention to where the head is going. I'm paying attention to where the face is pointing. And I allow that club just to swing. And this little ball will again will curve right to left. Yeah. And let's finish off. Now Bob wasn't really keen on he was loving this by the way, but he wasn't keen yet on trying to hit the ball further. He said, "Dad, I'm just I'm just enjoying the fact that I'm not slicing it anymore." I said, "Great. But let's just for the fun of it, how would you increase the power?" Well, similar. Once you can feel the head swinging like this just what would you do? Feel it increasing. What am I doing? I'm feeling something. My body's reacting. It's helping increase the speed. How are you doing that? I said I don't really know. I said you don't need to know. Feel the head swinging and just imagine it's speeding up where it matters. what I started to see with his body, his body was moving in such a way that was helping speed up this club more and more naturally. You will start to have the same. So remember, it's about building a relationship between you and that golf club. Feel where the weight is. We've got the drawer now. And I'm just going to imagine now I can really feel I'm using my body to really get that sense here of that's a little bit faster, a little bit harder. and you'll start seeing that distance. Look, jump up there. This is how we start to ramp up the power. You can't ramp up anything if you can't feel what the head's doing. So, learn to build that relationship between you and the head. Get out of your real head and into this club head down here, and you're going to start to see some incredible progress and much, much faster with your game. More importantly, it's gonna feel amazing, right? Hope you enjoyed this video. If you did, give it a thumbs up. Maybe share it with one of your friends. And of course, look, if you're new to the channel, this is your first lesson of mine, don't forget to subscribe. I'll put a free download practice guide in the description box below. If you want to know how to strike your irons much better, you want a iron specific video, click this one. If you just want to focus on your driver, click this one down right here. But re-watch this one and share it with a friend. You know, this could help. Until next week, have a wonderful golfing.