Stop Turning Your Shoulders and Hit Every Club Longer

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Transcript Summary- 

Have you been trying to hit your driver longer but not really seeing the results you deserve? You’re not alone. So many of my students come to me saying that all the clubs at the top end of their bag — their hybrid, fairway wood, and driver — all seem to go about the same distance. They’re putting in loads of effort, but not getting the reward. So, in this lesson, I want to share something I’ve been teaching for years that can really help you generate effortless power — I call it the catapult method. With just a couple of small changes in your swing, you can increase your clubhead speed and hit your driver longer — all without swinging harder.

The idea behind this is simple — you need to turn your body into a human catapult. Now, I know that might sound a bit crazy, and when I say this to my senior golfers, they look at me like I’ve lost it — “Danny, don’t break me!” But trust me, this doesn’t hurt your body at all. In fact, it makes the golf swing feel so much easier. Think about how a catapult works — the top stays fairly stable while the bottom accelerates. Most golfers, unfortunately, move everything together — head, chest, and hips — and that kills speed. But if you can create that separation, you’ll start to unleash real, effortless power through impact.

When you look at top players, you’ll notice that at impact their pelvis is ahead of their chest, and their chest is ahead of their head — that’s the catapult position. Shorter hitters, on the other hand, tend to do the opposite — their head and chest move forward together, and everything gets stuck. So, how do we fix that? It starts with the head. At setup, I want your chin slightly down, eyes looking at the golf ball. On the backswing, rather than keeping your eyes level, I want you to let your head move on an arc — imagine your lead ear pointing towards the ground and your trail ear towards the sky. You’re literally “pouring water” out of your lead ear. That small move gives your shoulders more freedom to turn, extending the length of your swing without you forcing it.

Now, for my senior players who don’t have as much flexibility, I actually want you to exaggerate that head tilt. It helps create more mobility and gives you more time to generate speed. My younger players don’t need to move as much because they already have that range of motion, but everyone benefits from allowing the head to move naturally on that arc. What you don’t want to do is level your head too much — that’s when you move off the ball and lose contact. So, keep that steady tilt and build some confidence in this longer, more flowing motion.

Once you’ve got that feeling, the next step is learning how to catapult the club through. At setup, push a little more weight forward to create a slight tilt in your body. As you swing through, imagine “pouring water” out of your trail ear — that’s how you know you’re firing through correctly. You’re tracing the arc with your eyes and head, staying in balance, and letting the body naturally create that whip-like motion. What you absolutely don’t want is to keep your head dead level or lunge through the shot. You’re not muscling it — you’re catapulting it.

So, to recap — build a bit of mobility around your head, use your eyes and ears to trace the arc of your swing, and let that movement create the catapult effect. The more your eyes work level, the less catapult you have. The more they trace that arc, the more you build effortless power. That’s how you start hitting your driver longer without extra effort. If you want to see me actually walk one of my students through this process, check out the video linked right here. And, as always, if you’re new to the channel, consider subscribing — I post videos like this every week. Everything’s broken down in a free downloadable practice guide below. Until next time — have a wonderful golfing week.

Full Transcript- How long have you been trying to hit driver longer? If you're anything like my students, they're putting so much effort into hitting driver longer, but they're just not getting the reward that they deserve. In fact, what they often find that they come to me with, they often say, "Danny, I seem like all my clubs at the top end of my bag, like hybrid, fairway wood, driver, they're all going a similar distance, and no matter what I try and do, I don't get any distance." So, in this golf video, I'd love to share with you what I I always show my students, which is the catapult method. It's something I introduced many, many years ago, and it really helps my student generate what I like to call effortless power. Basically, with no extra effort, you can increase your club head speed and hit driver longer by changing just a couple of things in your golf swing. In this golf lesson, I just want to share with you exactly what that is in the hope that it helps you as much as it does my students. Before I do though, look, if you're new to the channel, it's your first videos 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 downloadable practice guide in the description box below. So, what is the secret to effortless power? Super simple. You need to turn yourself into a human catapult. I know it sounds ridiculous, and when I say this to my senior golfers, they go, "Danny, do not break me. Don't break me." But by the time they finish, they realize it won't hurt your body. In fact, it makes things so much easier. So, what is a catapult? How does it work? And how can you turn yourself into one? Well, let's show you this. So, ultimately, a catapult looks like this. We have a something fairly stable at the top and then we accelerate. Look, the bottom and whoops, and this club catapults. Most people, unfortunately, when they swing, they have a movement that basically gets the upper part and the lower part almost working like this together, right? And there's no speed at the bottom, right? So once you understand that, we start to turn yourself into some form of catapult. We then need to find a way to slightly extend the length of your swing. And this is where a lot of my senior students get a bit worried. I don't have the flexibility. I'm going to show you one trick how you get it in a second. Because if I only swing to here, that's I don't have a lot of time to put force into this club. Look at the force I can put in now. So, if we can turn you into a catapult and just increase that length just a little bit with one single tweak around your head, we should be able to generate some effortless yards that you're going to absolutely love.

So, if you take a look at those two swings, it's quite clear that one is putting loads of energy and effort in and not getting much reward. And the other one looks more fluid, more effortless, and getting a substantial increase in distance. So, what is the difference? Well, one, I've turned myself into basically a human catle. And if you take a look at any of the top players as they come through impact here, you will notice that when they're coming through, their pelvis is going to be ahead of their upper chest and their upper chest is going to be ahead of their head. And what this basically means is look, they've turned their body into a catapult, right? Versus what you'll see with the shortest hitters I've seen is this. You will see that their head and their chest is ahead the other way. And what they've done is they simply move through the shot like this. They haven't turned their body into a catapult. So ultimately the head and the hands are all working at the same almost the same rate. So they don't hit it very far. So whether you are a senior golfer looking for extra yardage or a young player, what I want to do now is just show you how you can start to turn yourself into this human cat. So let's just get Trackman back on and we're going to focus on something super super simple. We're going to focus on just your head. And that's all we're going to focus on today because this is how you can really learn to feel it. So a lot of players what you'll see is this. When they set up to the golf ball, I want you to get your eyes kind of looking downwards towards the ground. So head just your chin working downwards here. It's looking straight at the golf ball. Now what a lot of players and I saw this my dad recently who was really struggling with distance. They make a back swing like this and the eyes are still looking level. If your eyes are still looking this way here and your ears are pointing either side, there's no way I can make a a longer swing than this, right? So, I'm already screwed. So, the length, amount of power I can generate in this club has already been restricted. So, what I want you to do is unbelievably simple. I want you to use your ears or your eyes. I want you to imagine lasering the circle of the swing like this. You're going to laser the arc of the swing. As you do this, what do you notice about where my ears are going? They point, this lead ear look is pointing towards the ground and my trail ear is pointing up towards the sky. They're at an angle. Now, this is important. This is the first start look of starting to create the catapult, right? But what it's also doing is it's improving your mobility. If I'm able to kind of allow my eyes to move here, my my head to tilt this way, I'm able to continue moving my shoulders. If I'm able to move my shoulders, I'm able to keep extending the length of this golf club. Right now, with my senior students, I really get them. They have to move their head on an arc much much more than my younger clients because by them moving their head here, look, and almost feel like they're pinging pouring water out of their their lead ear. They're able to extend the length of this uh club and therefore generate have more time to generate more speed into the back of the golf ball with no extra effort. My younger students, they won't move nowhere near as much as this. Why? Because they've got mobility in their shoulders and their neck. They can keep their head almost pointed. They still have a little arc on it, but not maybe as much as the senior students. But really, please, please, please just get your eyes working on an arc and pour water out of that that lead ear. Do not do when people say, "Oh, I need to turn longer, swing longer." Do this. Now, suddenly my eyes have worked on a level. My ears are too level. I've moved off the golf ball. Now I'm in real trouble. I'm miles away from the golf ball here. This is where we ruin all our contact and strike. Yes, we've turned longer, but we're gonna have to get back to the golf ball. And that's when people start to shove this club over the top. So, you've done the first bit of turning your back swing into that pendulum, that human pendulum here. The next thing, again, just keep focusing around the head. What do you think you need to do? Imagine lasering the eyes on this arc here. And then on the way through, look, we're going to imagine lasering the eyes on this angle. So now look, my trail here is pointing towards the ground. I'm pouring water out this side. And look, I'm firing through this way. Right? Does that make sense? So we're literally lasering this entire arc all with our head. And we're using our head as the guide to your entire golf swing. So like I said to my students, we're going to do this just in two steps. The first step is we're going to make sure you're going to learn the feeling of a slightly longer golf swing. And then what I want to do is I'm going to give you a simple routine that I gave a recent student of mine, Damian, that you can take straight to the golf course and really experience this. So stage one, let's just get used to swinging a little bit longer. This can be scary for people. If you're out there and you've you've been hitting driver everywhere, it's understandable that you want to stay kind of close to that golf ball. But you need to build some trust. You need to build some confidence in this. I promise you it really is worthwhile. Just imagine here and you get yourself set. Just imagine I'm tilting. I'm pouring my I'm just about to pour water out of my lead here almost on feel like it's onto the golf ball here and keep turning turning turning. And now I'm looking at the golf ball. Look down. I'm just still looking down here, but I can still see the ball even though I'm tilting this way. And that increases that length of the swing. For now, just focus on that completely. Maybe ignore the follow through for a bit. Just get used to building confidence in a longer motion through increased mobility in the neck.

Okay, simple as that. So, start with that. Don't worry about followroughs or anything to start with. Just build some confidence in increasing the length of your swing. It's not as easy as it sounds initially. People still want to keep the head dead, still afraid of missing the ball. Allow it to tweak. really build that length up and let the let it just absolutely flow. Once you've built that confidence up, one thing I love and I get my students take to the golf course is just reverse engineering this pro process. So turn yourself again, feel what it's like to turn yourself into this catapult. This wouldn't be a catapult. This would be a catapult. Yeah, I'm catapulting the club through because this lower body's gone through. It's ahead of my chest. It's ahead of my head. And I'm catapulting the club. All we got to do to do that is get yourself set up from here. Look, push your weight slightly further forward here in this position. This this adds a little bit of tilt to your body. And then when you're coming through, look, watch this. I all I'm going to do now is going to turn turn through on the on that circle. As I'm turning on the circle, look, I'm pouring water out of my trail here. And I'm just tracing that line all the way through. What I'm not doing, look, is keeping those that head level. I'm basically tracing that line with my eyes and pouring water out. And all this is doing, it's going to help you look to realize, oh, I am there through impact. This is the catapult versus look the lunge, the over the top swing. Make sense? So, get yourself set. Same principle here. Look, head's looking down towards the golf ball. Put my weight forward. Hover above the ball. Pivot. Where's my ear? Point towards the ground. Really kind of get a sense of that. Okay. Right. That's my destination. And away I go.

That'll do. All right. So, build mobility around your head. allow the eyes to almost laser in the arc of the golf swing or even use your ears as a guideline look to kind of create the swing but also create the mobility and create the catapult. The more your eyes work a level, the more you're basic you removing the catapult, the more you start to get the eyes working this way, the more we create the catapult with the body. And that's how you start to create effortless power and more yardage with your game. If you'd love to see me actually giving one of this uh these this example to one of my students, check this video out right here. And of course, look, if you're new to the channel, press that subscribe button down here. And if you'd like more personalized help from myself, look in the description box below and head over to dannymod.com. But until next week, have a wonderful golfing.