If You Want to Hit Driver Longer, I'd Always Start Here

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Transcript Summary-

Alright, so here’s the thing—there are four ways you can add distance to every club in your bag. Now, two of them will give you extra yards but you’ll lose a lot of accuracy, so we’re going to park those for now. Instead, I want to focus on the two that can give you serious distance without sacrificing control. I recently had a senior golfer, Richard, gain almost 40 yards with his driver using these exact steps—and with zero extra effort.

Before we get into it, if you’re new to my lessons, I release golf tips every week and put everything into a free downloadable practice guide for you. So, first things first—before we talk distance, we’ve got to prime your setup. If you’re like most golfers, you’re probably setting up in a way that has you hitting steeply down and across the ball. That kills distance. For the driver, we want to catch the ball level or slightly on the way up. So, check your ball position—just inside the lead heel—and make sure your spine tilt is correct. Hang a club from your zipper; it should point more towards your lead leg, not your trail leg. Get the hips slightly forward, forearms aligned—this sets you up to win.

Once we’ve got that, we move into the first big change—creating more length in your swing. Think of a snowball rolling down a hill: the longer the hill, the faster it goes. Same in golf. If you’re trying to generate all your speed at the bottom, you’re too late. You need to start creating that speed earlier by making a longer backswing. Most golfers, especially seniors, think they can’t swing any longer—but often they’re just blocked in some way. I use a simple drill with a driver shaft held across your chest to train your body to turn, tilt, and extend properly. This frees up your motion, stores more energy, and gives you effortless power.

Then comes step two—adding momentum. This is something I picked up from world long-drive expert James Tait. You’ve got to load into your trail leg, but without swaying. Think of throwing a heavy bag—you’d naturally shift into your trail leg but counterbalance with your body to stay stable. Same in golf. Once you’ve learned to get that longer swing, now you add some flow and momentum going back. It might feel a bit out of control at first, but it’s this “controlled looseness” that gets you more speed while staying accurate.

A great way to train this is with a heavy bag or even a towel. With the towel, you still want that long backswing, then whip it down to the ground fast. This teaches you to create natural speed and lets your body open up in reaction, rather than forcing rotation. Keep yourself moving before you swing—look at players like Ludvig Åberg, always in motion before pulling the trigger.

So, to sum it up: step one, set up to win; step two, create more length; step three, add momentum into that length. It’s simple, feels great once you get it, and the results speak for themselves—more distance, more accuracy, and no extra strain.

Full Transcript- There are four things that you can do to add distance to every single club in your bag. Two of them, however, will add distance, but you can lose a lot of accuracy. So, we don't want to focus on them yet. I want to focus on the two things that will probably have the greatest impact on how far you hit the golf ball. But more importantly, you won't lose accuracy doing so. In fact, these are the two that I gave. A recent student of mine, Richard came at me, senior golfer. We added almost 40 yards onto his driver with no extra effort needed. It was super, super simple. I want to share with you step by step how we do this. I do it with every single player because there's not many ways, like I say, to add distance to your game. It's super super straightforward. I can't wait to share with you. 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 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 download practice guide in that description box below. So, before we work on your distance, the very first thing we need to do is prime your setup. Now, if you're anything like most of the students that come and see me, we can't add distance until we have a great setup, a sound foundation. Now, Richard came at see me and unfortunately, like a lot of golfers, he was primed like this. He was primed with a setup that got him swinging steeply down on the ball and across. So, what we have is the bottom of the swing was too far ahead of the golf ball and his swing circle was coming down and across the line of the golf ball. Whenever that happens, you've pretty much got no chance to max out your distance. To hit driver longer, we either want a level strike, so we catch that ball at the bottom of its arc, or even catch the ball slightly on the way up, but we do not want it to be catching excessively down and across. So, all I want you to do to start off is double check setup. So, from face on here, what we're getting is we want the ball position just off our lead heel. And what I like to do is this. I like to get people stood nice and tall so that their arms are resting on their chest, not like this. From here, they just fall straight down. Now, one great checkpoint here just before you start is to hang a club right down your zipper here. Now, if that is pointing too far towards your right leg, you know that your angle is is too much here. This is a downward angle. It's much harder to hit driver longer from here. So, what I do is make sure when it's hanging down the zipper, we are pointing it, if anything, central or even just more towards your lead leg here. And all that's doing is setting ourselves up to strike it more at the bottom of the arc. The final thing here is I'm going to make sure that my hips are forward enough, maybe weight forward here, and my forearms are all in line. We're not like this. Really important. I see too many golfs like that. That's exactly what Richard was like. No point in working on the next stages because it doesn't make any difference. Set yourself up first of all in a great place. And now we can get stuck into the fun stuff to start working on some distance. Right, let's get into the fun stuff. Take a look at these two swings. Swing number one.

Let's have a look at this. Club head speed 100 miles an hour. Total distance 250. Right. Okay. Take a look. at swing number two and tell me which one out of the two do you think looks the fastest.

Let's have a look. So, we've added two 11 10 mph more club head speed. But tell me which one out of those two swings looked the quickest. Did they look the same? Because whatever one was a lot faster and went a lot further. Now, I bet the second swing looked quite a bit slower than the first one, yet it's gone further. Why? Well, the reason being most players are trying to hit the ball longer, trying to generate more speed at the bottom of their golf swing as opposed to at the top. Let me explain a simple analogy. I want you to imagine a mountain covered in snow. We put a snowball at the top of the mountain and we just push it down there. What's going to happen to that snowball? It's going to gather speed. It's going to get quicker and quicker as it goes down the mountain. The bigger the mountain, the faster it's going to go, right? But if we take that snowball and put it further down the mountain, so it's only got short place, short way to go, what's going to happen? It's not going to go as quick. So, no, there's no difference to a golf swing. If you're trying to put the power, if you've only got a very, very short motion, you're trying to put all the power down here, you have absolutely no chance. What we have to do, and this is what I do with all of my students, even the guys teach so many senior golfers, and they feel like, Danny, I'm I don't have the flexibility to swing any longer than I'm doing right now. Every lesson, I prove them wrong because I show them what they can do. They're blocking their swings in some way. If I can help you swing a little bit longer. I'm going show you how I do this in a second. You naturally have will have more energy stored. The more energy you store, the further you'll hit it. So, if you can get longer, you can see here I don't swing any faster. I've just got more energy stored. Boom. Effortless power. So, the simplest way to learn this to start with, and this is what I I gave Rich, you got to learn uh there's so many things that happen in the body to kind of increase that mobility. And this is the best drill to do it so you don't have to think about too many things. get a uh a driver shaft just like this. Hold it both sides. So, I've got my head look right in the middle of this shaft. And the all I'm going to do here is get myself primed as we've just done a minute ago. Right from here, what we're going to do is we're going to make this a turn. So, I'm pointing the shaft at a normal swing angle, not like this or like this. And I'm working I'm just keeping my head right in the middle of the shaft. I'm going to see how far I can go. And what I'm doing is my body here, look, is twisting and turning and tilting all on its own to try and achieve this motion. This is basically, look, a golf swing, right? And it's teaching you how to turn that body. Now, what you'll see with Rich is is his head is vertically downwards and he's simply doing this. This trail shoulder is stuck in here. He's very restricted. He said, "I can't go any further." But that's because he doesn't know the feel of how to go further. So you get going through this exercise here. This will teach you ultimately how the body is supposed to move in your way to try and get you around here and get you naturally extending. So once you've learned that sensation, this is stage number one. You get yourself set and we start to move. And all we're trying to do is keep extending the golf swing here. I'm not lifting out my posture or anything like I'm turning as far as I can based on what the drill taught me. Right. So, if I do this correctly, my I'm going to probably max out to start with before we move on to step two at around about 110 mph club head speed. So, let's check that out. So, I prime myself up setup ball position in place. Make sure I've got my circle ready to go so I'm not chopping down on it. There we go. And then from here, look, I'm going to rehearse that motion. Really feel I can get in as long as I can. that slow sensations there and away we go. I'm not going to try and hit it any harder. All I'm going to do is try to swing as long as I possibly can.

Came a little bit out the top of the club, but you look at here, look, 110. So, I'm going to max out at that swing. And just doing that, I am going to max out 110 mph club head speed. So, I'm now going to once I've done that, and that's what I start with players with. So, I start with a great setup and usually in session one, we work on building or working out a way to create a longer movement. And you'll notice that longer movement, there's tilts in my head with uh Rich, this shoulder here, which was getting in the way, I just got him to kind of retract it backwards. This is what it taught him. Look at this. As I come back, my trail shoulders back. It's not like this, which most people are. It's getting out of the way. It's providing space. My head look isn't fixed down here. It's tilted slightly. Just there. Just a little bit. Again, helping me create that longer motion. Not faster motion, just longer. Store more energy. You'll generate more power. Let's move on to step two. So, you've primed your body. You set up. You've you've started to learn how to kind of extend the length. So, you've got more potential for power. What do we do now? Or what do I do to get this from 110 to more of a PGA Tour standard? add another five miles an hour, right? Well, I'm going to add something super super cool that I got from a world long drive expert, James Tay. And this anybody can do. I don't care what age you are. Anybody can learn this. Now, once you've got an idea of the destination you're going to, which is really important. We've just done that. Then what we want to do is is again I said, look, power is created in the back swing, not in the down swing. We need to create some natural momentum to this power. We got to train the body to naturally move to generate that speed, unload that power. And one of the things that James gave me was he said, "Really, Danny, when you're swinging, you've really got to get loaded into this trail leg." And I said, "But a lot of players, Danny, um, James, when you when they do that, they they call loading into the trail leg swaying, but it's not." And let me explain. When you set up to a golf ball, I've got a heavy weight here, right? What I'm going to do is I'm going to imagine throwing this weight towards you. And to do that, I'm going to load into this leg, but as I throw it towards you, I'm not going to go with it and sway because I'd lose my balance, right? So, what my body does is it counterbalances very naturally the weight that I'm throwing. Right? So, as I create the move here and I throw this from this angle, you will see that I am not actually swaying. If anything, I'm actually more stable by trying to in theory move more. Yeah. because my body's balancing the heavy weight. Now, with a driver, what you've got to do is you've got to be willing to create that. So, when I'm here, look, I'm really getting some momentum into this right leg. Almost to a certain degree, it feels like I'm throwing this club back into the back swing. For a lot of people, that's going to feel scary. But I promise you, it produces so many beautiful natural motions that it's strange by by giving up control, you give your golf swing actual control. Most people who are being too careful and slow what they end up doing, those are the people that swing because there's no real force in this club. You just keep going with it back. No force doing anything. You've got nothing to react to. So then you just go through. But when I add a bit of momentum here onto the trail leg, suddenly I can feel that force going this way. So my body is basically it says cued to react to it. That then puts me in positions, great positions for power, great positions for accuracy, but naturally. All right. So how do we do it? The first thing you can just get some bag a heavy bag like this or just a ball bag really or shopping or do just get a feeling of this. But watch what happens to my speed as I start to kind of prime myself here. Develop. Now I know my destination. Got to get a nice long motion still. But now what I'm going to do is I'm going to load into that trail leg as I'm doing this here. Let's have a look at this in action.

So that was certainly more momentum into that side there. And look at that. Now 115 is to standard. We're almost at 115. I don't want to push it too much more after my little lop. But that's how we start to gradually add that speed. Now, all I would do from here is when I give this to all the students is is they still want to stay quite restrictive. They they're nervous about swaying. But what I do is I just Yeah. using the bag really get them sensing momentum because the more you do this, the more you get that beautiful momentum on the way back, the more the body will respond in such a brilliant way. And I simply make this more and more efficient. Now, the other thing I do, I definitely encourage this just get an old bath towel. This is just a heavy bath towel. And James gave me this as well. It's just a great warm-up. It really helps me and my students experience what it's all about. However, a lot of my students have seen this and they were doing it wrong slightly. Because even with a bath towel, a lot of people were just doing this. What do you see? Well, that's just a version of not doing step one. So, the same principle here. Look at this. I still want you here. Look, to get this motion back here. So, you're still moving and creating length, right? So, you get that sensation. Then what you do when you've got the bath towel, you then fire it nice and fast and hard downwards towards the ground. Not what most people are doing, by the way, trying to rotate. Rotation is a killer for golf swings. You see the best players rotating, but they do it naturally. It's their response to them throwing the club down to the ground that pushes the hip open. This is how we get open. So, you learn that as a feeling. And then all I do from here is is refine it. So I get myself set. I summarize. We get myself in position here. Get everything lined up. Now feel the length there. I've got the length from there. Now I'm going to Right. Let's add some momentum to that motion. And then do you know what? You'll see the best place. Get ready. Don't stand still for too long. This then keeps you static. Now we're in trouble. I'm moving. I'm keeping moving. Look at someone like a Ludvig Oberg. Never stops moving. One of the reasons why he's the longest, I reckon. Keeps that dynamism.

Should be nice and straight. 115 flying up there. Everything else, look, has remained really consistent. And once I get a little bit better, I'll start pushing back to that 120 mph. But 115 for now will do me just nicely. So for yourself, get first. Step in place. Set up first. Set up to win. None of this works without it. Work on increasing the length. So, just like that snowball, you've got a longer time to generate energy on the way back. Then produce more energy on the way back in the back swing. Give up control to get it. I promise you, it feels weird, feels scary, but you'll you'll thank me for it. It's so much more accurate. Hope you enjoyed the video. If you know somebody who's struggling to gain distance with every club in their golf bag, share this video. If you'd like to see that lesson with me and James, click this video out right here. And I'll put a free download practice guide in the description box below. If you like some help with your game, go to dannymod.com and I'll personally help you with your game. But until next week, have a wonderful golfing week.