If I Only Had 5 Minutes With Your Driver Swing I'd Change This!

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Transcript Summary-

Picture this—you and I are out on the golf course, mid-round, and suddenly things start to go wrong. You’re slicing it miles right or hooking it left, there’s a group waiting behind, and the pressure kicks in. We don’t have time for a full swing rebuild—we need a fix right now. So in this lesson, I’m sharing exactly what I give my students when we’ve only got a minute to get their driver back on track. It’s simple, quick, and it starts in the most overlooked place… your setup.

Most golfers think they need to change their swing, but the biggest gains I see—especially on the course—come from improving how you set up to the ball. Even the best players in the world prioritise this. Meanwhile, amateurs often chase complicated mechanics, not realising that the right setup naturally encourages a better swing. Fix the setup, and a lot of those issues—slice, hook, poor strike—start to disappear without overthinking.

Let’s start with the driver basics. First, ball position—just off your lead heel. That helps you hit slightly up on the ball, which is key for distance. But here’s where most golfers go wrong: they reach for it. When you do that, your upper body tilts forward, your arms get out of sync, and suddenly you’re set up to swing across the ball. Add an open clubface, and that’s your slice.

Instead, I want you to feel more balanced and natural. Let your trail arm sit gently on your body—not lifted above it. That one change moves your trail shoulder back, instantly putting you in a better position to swing from the inside. You’re not forcing anything—you’re just allowing a better path to happen. It also helps you deliver more loft and strike up on the ball more consistently.

Now, check your elbows—this is a big one. Your lead elbow should point more towards the target, and your trail elbow should point towards your hip. This subtly aligns your forearms so they’re just slightly right of the clubface, which encourages a draw shape. If you reverse that—like many slicers do—you’re effectively setting up for a slice before you’ve even swung the club.

Finally, think about your distance from the ball. A lot of golfers stand too tall and too close, which leads to heel strikes or shanks. Instead, tilt forward from your hips, let your arms hang naturally, and create about a club-width of space between your hands and your thighs. It might feel different at first—but that’s often a sign you’re doing it right.

So before each shot, take a few seconds. Check your ball position, your arm connection, your elbow direction, and your posture. That’s it. No complicated swing thoughts—just a solid setup that puts you in the best position to succeed. Do that, and you’ll find it much easier to hit straighter, more powerful drives under pressure.

Full Transcript- Take a moment right now to imagine this. Me and you are out on the golf course having an on-course golf lesson. Suddenly, you start either hooking the ball way to the left or slicing it way to the right and there's a group behind us. You're feeling the pressure. We need to make big changes to your golf shots really, really quickly and we don't have a lot of time. So, in this golf video, I want to share with you what I share with my students when we've only got, let's say, a minute to figure out how to hit driver straight. It's a super simple golf tip and is the first place I would look to improve your golf swing. That is what we're going to cover in this week's golf lesson. 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 we do here, I'll put into a free downloadable practice guide and pin it to the top comment below this video. So, as I said, most of my golf lessons take place out on the golf course. And this week, I've had people topping it, fattening it, shanking it, slicing it, hooking it, and I make progress. I have to make progress in pretty quick time. But most of that progress comes from improving the way they set up to the ball. Now, what's crazy about this is the best players in the world, that is majority of what they focus on. Whereas, when I see people on the driving range or even on the golf course, they're trying to work on complicated swing mechanics but did you know you could achieve all those mechanics by actually making some simple changes to your setup that naturally help improve your golf swing. So, in this week's video, I want to show you what you can do just for it'll take a few seconds before each swing to start to maybe cure your slice, your hook, and your ball striking. So, let's start with what we did with Jerry this week. So, we're on the golf course. Jerry's hitting a big booming slice. Now, whatever we do here basically is applied to pretty much every single driver shot. So when you're setting up to driver, the first thing I'm seeing all the time, the first thing is look, we want to with the great players, they can hit slightly down on driver, but for the majority of amateur golfers who are looking for uh distance, and I'm sure that's what you're after, hitting up on the driver really helps you hit the ball a little bit longer. So we position the ball right off our lead heel. That's the first thing. So double check that. The problem is is when the ball's forward in our stance, what I saw with Jerry, and I see this time and time again is he went over to reach the ball like this. Now, when you see that from this angle, you'll see that this part, the top part here is now ahead of the lower part. What this creates now is the lead arm gets low, the trail arm gets high, and we're in a position now where we're going to naturally probably want to swing up and down on the golf ball. that D loft club struggles to get the ball up in the air. Worse still, we could sky it up in the air, but we're swinging across the ball. If you apply an open face to that, we then hit this great big slice. Now, Jerry knew he was coming across the golf ball. So, rather than change a simple thing, he's starting to try to swing into out, but he set up completely wrong. Yeah. All we did was this. got him here to face me and said, "Look, would you stand and face me like this?" No, you wouldn't. You'd f stand like this. So, look, set yourself up. Point the club out in front of you. Make sure your trail arm is resting on the body, not above the body. On the body. When you do this, look at this. Now, if I suddenly now rest this on the body here, so I'm pointing towards you. I rest this on the body. Look how this trail shoulder sits back. I'm now in a position to swing more on this line coming much more into the golf ball versus look at the difference this line here. So, a simple changing setup does two things. It's not only going to change the swing circle, so you're going to hit it much straighter. We're also changing the loft we're going to deliver now to impact. We're going to hit much more up on that golf ball. And you're hugely increasing the likelihood you're going to hit driver straighter immediately. Now, one final thing here to look for, and it's great from this down the line angle. So, Jerry didn't need this, but certainly Tom did. So, check where your elbows are. So, your lead elbow should be pointing towards the target here, and then we grip it. And your trail elbow should be pointing towards the hip, then we grip it. Now, what this does, particularly if you slice the golf ball, it gets the forearms look pointing slightly to the right of where the face is pointing. The face is pointing towards the target and the forearms are pointing slightly to the right. This now sets up a beautiful draw. Compare that to what Tom was doing at setup. His lead elbow was pointing more towards his hip and his trail elbow was pointing i backwards towards his camera. Now suddenly, even though we have a square face going this way, the forearms are going this way and we're setting it Tom was setting himself up to slice it. Again, very, very simple things, but they can all be done at setup. So, look at this in action. And I'll do a slice for you first so you can see this. So if we get this motion here, left elbow pointing down towards the hip, wrong, elbow pointing out here, and we're in this position. Watch what happens now. Ball positions forward. Watch this. You're going to see straight away that ball slicing off to the right hand side. All I'm going to do now is think, okay, we don't try and swing into wow or anything complicated like that. We get ourselves set here. We put the ball where it was before. We're going to put a routine in place. Now, we're going to look forward as we're talking somebody here. Now, I suggest you do this, by the way, in front of a mirror before the round of golf. If you particularly because I think feel when when you know when I did this with Jerry to start with, he really felt he was doing this. Even though he was absolutely perfect, he was so used to doing that. This felt like he was doing this. So, doing in a mirror is really, really useful before you round a golf. We're going to point the left elbow towards the target. Then grip. Right elbow towards the uh right hip. Grip. Bring this club in position. No. There we go. Now I'm in position. Jerry felt as though he was like this. He really wasn't. Trust the process. And look.

Watch what happens. Absolutely beautiful draw down the fairway. Yes, I exaggerated it, but that's a fantastic thing to do if you happen to be on a golf course slicing it. And maybe one other thing just to help with your your contact with a driver. You know, I was with uh Joe this week, and again, all this can be performed part of your routine. Joe was stood way way too tall with driver. He's way too close to it. And then he was wondering why the ball was coming out the neck of the golf club. The problem is if if you stand like this and then you go into a powerful position impact and you start to get closer to the golf ball, you're going to push that club away. you're going to hit it more towards the the heel of the club. So, making sure you've got the right distance from the golf ball by simply just tip tilt forward, let your arms fall down towards your knees here, then grip it. That is going to get yourself bent over the golf ball as it should be. Arms hanging down beautifully naturally with about a club width distance between the uh club handle and your legs. Get it? That again, that felt very very low for Joe. But, you know, we looked on on the on the mirror after the round, it was absolutely fine. But what that meant was suddenly without doing anything fancy, he started to hit the middle of the club. So setup is absolutely huge. Pay attention to it when you're trying to improve your golf. You want us trying to hit driver stradder. Make sure that ball position is off your lead heel. Get into a system of resting those arms on the chest. Make sure trail arm is softly on that chest there. Elbows pointing down towards the chest. Lead elbow pointing more towards the target. Rest the club down here. If we put a box around your body, we should see the lead hip here at setup closer to this side of the box than this side. Most of the time when I see golfers who are struggling with driver, they've got a gap here at the box here and they're over here. And that's really exaggerated obviously, but this is what I'm seeing. So, this hugely will help you strike slightly up on the driver. It helps you create the beautiful shape with a driver. And you'll find it so much more freeing to swing through that shot. Super simple. I said it wouldn't take long. That's takes a few seconds before you uh before you hit a shot just to check these things. I hope you enjoyed the video. If you did, give a thumbs up. Maybe share it with one of your friends. And next time you're out on the golf course, check your buddies. Take a look take a video of them. Take a look at their setup. You'll start to see the these similarities coming in. They happen to slice it. Look at their setup. You'll start to see they're out of position. You may be even give them a helping hand if you're really friendly. Like I said, if you enjoy the video, give it a thumbs up. Almost forgot, if you want to know how this applies to irons, check this video out right here. But until next week, have a wonderful golfing week.