Most Golfers Ignore This… And It Ruins Their Ball Striking

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Transcript Summary- There’s one thing I work on with my students every single week, and honestly I don’t think enough golfers pay attention to it. It doesn’t matter whether it’s driver, irons, hybrids, fairways or even your short game — if you can’t control this one thing, you’re always going to struggle with consistency. And that thing is controlling the bottom of your golf swing.

What I mean by that is simple: where your club is actually bottoming out. For the best players, that low point is consistent. With a driver, it’s slightly behind the ball. With irons, it’s ahead of the ball. But the key is it’s always in the same place relative to your body. For a lot of amateur golfers, that low point is changing all the time — sometimes behind the ball, sometimes at it, sometimes way after it. And that’s why you get fat shots, thin shots, and inconsistent contact.

So the first thing we always look at is setup, because most players are already putting themselves at a disadvantage before they even swing. With something like a 7-iron, I want the ball just forward of centre, and I want your body set up so your lead side is clearly more “forward” at address. Your belt buckle should be slightly ahead, your lead ankle, thigh and shoulder should feel like they’re stacked and working over your lead side. But importantly, your head stays centred — we don’t want you leaning or drifting to get there.

Just that setup alone starts to shift your low point forward, which makes striking the ball first much more achievable. But then the real challenge is what happens in motion, because a lot of golfers either freeze and stay stuck on the lead side, or they sway too much and lose all structure. Neither of those work.

The best players still move — there’s always a little shift or pressure into the trail side — but the difference is they maintain structure and then move back through the ball into a powerful, stable position. They’re not just sliding around. They’re creating a platform to strike from.

One of my favourite ways to train this is what I call the “prop drill.” You set the trail foot slightly wider and angled out, and it almost acts like a support that encourages your pelvis to stay forward and work towards the target. As you swing, you’ll still feel pressure shift, but instead of your body drifting away from the ball, your lower body is effectively being guided back towards the target. That keeps your centre in the right place and massively increases the chance of striking the ground after the ball.

When players do this properly, the difference is immediate. You start seeing consistent low points, better contact, and often a natural draw appears because the club is travelling on a much more consistent path. And if you struggle with slicing, this is especially powerful, because a forward-moving pelvis encourages the club to return more from the inside rather than cutting across it.

So the key message is this: don’t just think about hitting the ball — think about controlling where the bottom of your swing is. Get your setup right, use the prop drill to build awareness of your lower body, and learn to keep your pressure moving towards the target rather than away from it.

If you can do that, you’ll improve your contact, your distance, and your accuracy all at the same time.

Full Transcript- So, there's one thing that I religiously work with my students on every single day in the week to improve their striking with their irons, hybrids, fairwoods, and driver. And unfortunately, even though some of them are regulars to my channel, they come for a lesson and they're working on a variety of things, but they still can't driver straight. They still can't strike the iris consistently well because they ignore this. The one thing that I believe will improve every single golfer. I want to share with you what that is, but more importantly, how to work on it because I just think it's the thing that will have the biggest difference on your golf from your chipping to your iron player to your fairways, your hybrid, and your drive. It's that important. So, I really want to share it with you. Before I do though, look, if you're new to the channel, from 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 or practice guide that I'll pin to the top comment below this video, or you can simply just scan the QR code right there. So, I really want this video to be one that you revisit over and over again because what I'm about to share, I just don't think golfers of lots of abilities put enough importance on this one thing, and that is your ability to control the bottom of your golf swing and where it is. Now, a lot of people who've viewed my channel have seen me do this before, but they still come to golf lessons working on lots of different things, but it's this one thing that they don't work on enough or don't know how to work on it. So, in this video, I want to show you how this being able to control the bottom of your swing does three things. It doesn't just improve the quality of your ball striking, it will immediately improve your distance, but also improve your direction. So, so important. So, what is it? How do you improve it? Well, the bottom of your swing for uh top players is when the lead arm and club all line up here, right? And it's generally in line with this lead shoulder somewhere over this area here. And it's the same place for your driver, fairwoods, hybrids, and irons. The only difference is look the bottom of the swing with driver. Our ball position would be somewhere over here. As we move, I've got a seven iron here. As we move to our seven eye, I'm gonna have my seven iron much much more just ahead of center ball position. Now, suddenly you can see here, look, I'm going to strike the ball and then the ground here where the bottom of the swing is. Yeah. So, we need to be good at two things. We need to make sure that the bottom of the swing is always forward in this place and we need to make sure that we achieve that every single time. Now with the higher handicappers, I am seeing the bottom of the swing first of all in loads of different places. It's never in the same place twice. So we want to get some consistency. How do you do that? So I'm going to give you an example of uh Allan who came to see me this week. We always start with setup. Most of your ball striking, whether it be your driver, your fairways, hybrids, irons, should start with setup. And nine times out of ten, you're putting yourself behind the eightball or you're handicapping yourself even before you swing. So the first thing I want you to do is this when you're setting up. Now I've got a seven on here. So I'm going to have the ball position just maybe ahead of center. The first thing I want you to do is check two things. Where is your belt buckle? Now you'll notice with mine, look, as I'm here, my belt book, if I hang a club down here, is ahead or closer to my left foot here, my lead foot. Most of the time when I'm seeing players, they're either center or too far back. Now, what do we say? The better players are able to get forward here. They're striking the low point here. The bottomless thing is over this side. What's going to make it easier to strike this side of the golf ball? Well, certainly not a start position that's over here. So, we want to give ourselves a head start. This is the first thing. The second thing I want you to do, and this is where Al was struggling he here, his left leg, everything was a bit too much over this side. I want your ankle, your thigh, and your left shoulder almost look lined up in a straight line like this. This is super super important. Again, why? Because it's going to increase the likelihood what that we're going to strike or keep that low point, the bottom of the swing over in this vicinity. If we are like this, that's going to be trickier. So, we're already setting ourselves up. Now, the one thing to watch out for, and I did say this to Al. When Al tried to get this lined up, he moved his head this way. That's not what I want. That would be an unfunctional shot you'd hit down on the golf ball. So, make sure your head stays nice and centered in your stance. And that is it. That simple setup there will massively help you stay forward. So before we work on how you stay forward through the swing, that is what I would go Al to do initially. So look, set yourself up there, Al and just see if that improves your strike. So we go through the routine of this look here. Move forward. Make sure this is all all in alignment. Head in the middle of the stance and we are good to go. Right, let's hit a shot just from that standing position here. And we're going to look at where my low point is.

3.1 in after the golf ball. Okay. Comfortably after the golf ball. Easy. Yeah. So, what you want to pay attention to and what you can track is look at where the lowest point of your divot is relative to where the ball was. That's how we're going to track whether you're actually striking the ground after the golf ball every time. Now with Al setup was already a great start. The problem is what he did and this is one thing to watch out for. We've got to figure out well now we've got set up. How do we stay? How do we stay in that place so we can actually increase the likelihood that we're going to strike the ball in the turf? Well, what Al did was he's got himself set up here and he froze. He thought staying was literally staying still, keeping it forward like this. And he start to lose some power. And I said, "No, this is not what we're trying to do. We still want to have the freedom to move. Okay. All the best players even have a little move to the right hand side as they swing. The difference is what I'm seeing with amateur golfers is they just move and they keep moving. Yeah. Now the problem is two things have happened. Is that going to be harder to now to get forward? Absolutely. But the other thing is this. We don't have a platform there to generate any control or power. Now, we're going to lunge to the golf ball like this. You're going to lose all of your power. If I asked you to throw a ball, it would look like this. You'd form a platform. And now from here, you'd throw. We want that in the golf swing. Right? So, when I'm here, I said to Al, look, here's what I want you to do, Al. You get yourself set up here and we're going to give him the prop drill. You probably seen this on the channel where I got him to kind of point widen his uh his trail foot slightly further away and point it out into the corner. And what this is doing is this. It's just pushing him and holding his pelvis forward. I knew that he would have a little move to the to the to the right hand side because that's natural for him. But as he moves, this foot look is pushing him back this way. But more importantly, what it's doing is this naturally it's pushing his bum his pocket towards the target. So rather than him staying still and doing this, this prop exercise, look, is pushing his pocket there around towards a target. What's that done here? To my center. It's kept it where? This way. Is that going to make it easier now to come back down and be ahead of the golf ball and closer to the target? Absolutely. Fantastic. So quite simply, we are doing everything in our power to increase the likelihood that you are forward before you start that down swing. That's where the best players are. We don't want you back here starting the down swing. We want you nice and forward, excuse me, so that you've got the platform so you can just turn down and let it swing. That's the goal and the pure intention with this. And I just don't see golfers working on this concept or this kind of um motion enough. So, let's work on this here. So, I get myself set. Quick double check. Get myself in alignment. Point that foot out here and propping myself up here. Keeping feeling where that pelvis is. And all I said to Alice, I said, "Look, I'll make a few practice swings, paying attention to where your uh pelvis is." So, I'm swinging. I'm noticing where my pelvis is all the way through the swing. That's all they asked him to do. Set. Pay attention. Notice where it is now and where it moves.

And again, look, very, very consistent. 3.3 in after the golf ball. And you notice that I've got a little draw on my shot. If you happen to slice the golf ball, this is amazing for accuracy, too. Why? Because look at this here. As I'm here, if I've got my pelvis moving forward in this direction towards the target, where does the club go? More online, comes down here, continues through the act into the back of the golf ball. Watch what happens now if my pelvis actually moves away from the target. Can you see the difference here? Now, the club comes outside the line. So, not only does controlling the bottom of your swing help you with your ball striking and your distance, it hugely helps with your accuracy. And I'd like to say 99% of my golf lessons are in some way helping a player improve the consistency of where that club lands. So, check your setup. Do the proper exercise here. Really get that sense of paying attention to where your pelvis is here. It should be naturally moving even closer to the target through that impact area here. The more that does, the more chance you've got of striking the ground after the golf ball. Just be careful. Some people do misinterpret getting forward by trying to hit the ground after the golf ball like this. This is not what we're after. I am talking about moving the whole section, my lower body and the upper body here. Working it this way towards that tap, keeping it forward. It will improve so many things in your game. Now, if you want to see the prop drill working with a fairwood, check this video out right here. It's been super super uh popular. And of course, look, if you want to have more personalized lessons from myself, check um the description down below. If you want to see the practice plan, I'll link it somewhere on this page, maybe the QR code right here, or I'll pin it to the top comment below this video. But until next week, have a wonderful golfing week.