This One Minute Effortless Golf Drill Beats 5000 Hours On The Range

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Transcript Summary-

How many days, weeks, or even months have you been trying to hit your driver straight or improve the contact with your irons? And how’s that going for you? Are you really improving as fast as you’d like? Because what I find with a lot of students who come to see me is that, despite all the effort, the sweat, and sometimes even the tears, they’re not seeing the progress they feel they deserve. And it’s not because they’re not working hard enough—it’s because the way they’re learning is often slow, frustrating, and filled with tension. But there’s a better way. There’s actually a learning approach backed by science that not only accelerates your improvement but also makes the whole process way more enjoyable and relaxed. That’s exactly what I want to share with you in this lesson because it’ll help you hit your driver straighter, strike your irons more solidly, and improve faster—all while actually enjoying the process.

Let’s start with contact. If you’ve watched my videos before, you’ll know the golf swing moves in an arc. The bottom of that arc—where the club should strike the ground—is directly under your lead shoulder. The goal is simple: hit the ball first, then the ground. But here’s the mistake most golfers make. They hear this and instantly start trying hard to hit the ground after the ball, and that “trying mode” creates tension. Instead, I want you to forget about trying for a moment and just notice where your club is striking the ground. Don’t fix anything—just observe. The amazing thing about your body is that it’s incredibly smart. When it becomes aware of where the club is grounding out, it will naturally start adjusting—just like when you learn to balance on a bike. You don’t force balance—you experience it until your body figures it out. The same is true here. Simply noticing is the first step to accelerating your learning.

Once you’ve got that awareness, the next step is to add variability. Most golfers practice in a way that’s too rigid—they’re trying to “get it right.” But when you’re learning something new, you need to experience the extremes to find your balance. So, I want you to exaggerate it. Hit some shots where your body is way behind the ball—feel what that’s like. Then hit some where you move your body way ahead of the ball. By experiencing both extremes, your body learns where true balance is. You’re no longer trying to be perfect—you’re experimenting, feeling, and letting your swing adjust naturally. That’s what speeds up improvement.

Now let’s move to the driver—the club everyone loves to hit well. The same principles apply here. If you slice, your trail shoulder usually stays too high and works outwards through the downswing. If you hook it, that shoulder tends to drop too low. So instead of trying to “fix” your slice or hook, just start by noticing what your trail shoulder is doing. Make some swings and observe. Then exaggerate—hit one where the shoulder goes high and out, then one where it drops way down. From there, you’ll start finding the middle ground—your natural balance.

This approach is the key to faster, more enjoyable progress. Stop forcing, stop overthinking, and start noticing. Give your body the chance to experience and adjust naturally. That’s how you build a smooth, powerful, consistent swing. So, have fun with it, experiment, and enjoy the process of improving your game. If you found this helpful, give it a thumbs up, maybe share it with a golfing friend who needs to hear it. And as always, if you’d like more personalised help, head over to dannymaude.com. But until next week—have a wonderful golfing week.

Full Transcript- How many days, weeks, and months have you put in to trying to hit driver straight or improve the contact with your irons? And how's that working out for you? Are you improving fast enough? Because for many of my students that come and see me for the first time, they say that despite putting so much effort and sweat and tears, they just don't seem to be getting the improvement that they feel like they deserve. What I often notice is that most of the time they're choosing a way of learning that is unbelievably slow and frustrating. It can often fill you with anxiety too, but there's a way of learning that is backed with science that is proven to be one more enjoyable but it accelerates your rate of improvement. In this golf lesson video I want to share with you what that is because it will help you hit driver straighter. It will help you improve the contact with your irons, but it will do it in a way that is relaxing. It's fun and just so much more enjoyable, right? More importantly, faster. So, in this golf lesson thats what I'm going to share that with you. Before I do the look, if you're new to the channel, it's one of your first golf videos of mine, please consider subscribing. I release videos 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 whether you're looking at maybe hitting the ball a little bit straighter with your irons, your driver, or whether you're looking at improving your contact, maybe even your distance too, this session, what I'm going to do is I'm going to show you how you can accelerate that process in a really fun, natural, and relaxing way. So let's start initially just with contact, right? So I think if you're have been around golf enough now to strike a ball solidly, certainly off the ground, we want to strike the ball then the ground, right? And you know, if you've watched any of my videos, the swings an arc like this. It's always like a a circle and the club is coming down. It reaches a bottom to the circle, bottom edge of the circle, and it starts to rise up again. And the bottom of that circle is directly underneath my lead shoulder. This would be class as maybe the center of the circle, the center of the golf swing. Right? So, that's the point where the club should strike the ground. Now, notice here where my ball position is, it's a good two, three balls back of that. So, we strike that ball look first. then we strike the ground. So now here's how you accelerate that and make it happen a lot faster. So a lot of times people may have heard me say something like this and they go right Danny says I've got to strike the ground after the golf ball. So now they're staring at the ground after the golf ball and they're trying really hard to achieve that. And that's the trying mode. That's the trying way of learning. What do you think that breeds? Tension. a fear of doing it right, wrong, whatever. It's not relaxing. Here's a slightly more accelerated way of doing this to start with. So, you've got the guiding principle that you've got to strike after the golf ball. The ball then the ground. Here's step one. The first thing I want you to do is not try. Forget about that completely. All I want you to do is make some swings and notice where you are striking the ground relative to the golf ball. Just pay attention. People don't do that. Just make some of your normal swings and simply notice where your club is grounding out. What happens is this. The body and your body is unbelievably smart. It has a guiding principle. It knows where it should be now. And just the mere fact that it starts to notice where your club is striking the ground, it will start to move in such a way that starts to move that club further and further forward of the golf ball without even trying. When my students question this, I say to them, it's like riding a bike. When you're riding a bike, the guiding principle is what? Balance. When you fall to the left, you don't go, "Oh, I need to force it to the right." No, your body has a guiding principle. And what it does is it falls left and it falls right and over time it finds the balance, right? Well, the same principle is true here. The balance of your swing needs to be over this side of the golf ball. Most people have a who are struggle or higher handicappers, they tend to have their balance over this side of the golf ball and they wonder why they're striking it fat and thin. We've got to improve your balance. We know it's not going to be instant, but just simply paying attention to where that club is striking the ground, you will start to find the balance of your golf swing and your body will start to move. It won't move straight away. It's like balance. You don't learn balance straight away, but you will start to get the balance of your swing and over time that divot will start to be over on this side of the golf ball. So that's step one. Don't try, just notice first. Become aware of what you're actually doing. So before we look at maybe learning how to hit driver straight or hit hit driver longer, let's just stay with contact just for a second and introduce you to the second step of accelerating your learning, which is adding variability to the way you play and practice. What do I mean by that? Well, a lot of players, they look, we've just said, "Look, we want to strike the ball uh the ground after the golf ball." And they're trying to get it right and they're trying to fix themselves and that's what they're trying to do. And it adds, what do you think? Again, way too much tension. We want to treat this again like riding a bike. Riding a bike for the first time, there's massive variability. You fall left and you fall right. And then because of that variability, your body starts to find balance. Yeah. We don't stand on the bike and go, "Oh, let's try and get this right." We adjust. We work with that balance, right? It's the same in golf. Now, the key with striking, we want to get look striking that ground ahead of the golf ball. So, notice where my body is. The further my body, my middle, my pelvis, and my body here is over this side of the golf ball, the more chance, look, I've got of striking the ball than the ground. The more my body is over this side of the golf ball, the more chance I've got of striking the ground behind the golf ball. that will lead to those horrible fats and thins. But how do you find it? Well, it's a balance. So, what I want you to do now is when you're practicing, just really exaggerate it. See how far forward this way you can get your body and the far and just play hit some shots from that place and then hit some shots from completely other extreme. So, your body now has is falling right basically and falling left. it can start to find the right balance until you find the correct way to start to strike that ball and you start seeing the results. So an example would be this. Let's start with everything way behind the golf ball here. So my body can experience that and that's the key thing experience. So much different to just thinking. That's me hitting the ground behind the golf ball. I can feel where my body is. Then what I'm going to do here now I'm going to imagine now in a flowing way look I'm going to move both my feel my pelvis is moving more and more forward of this golf ball here. So very naturally I'm not trying to hit the ground. This naturally going to happen because of where my body is right. So I now imagine going way ahead of the golf ball. And you'll notice here look I'm 5.4 in. Look ahead of the golf ball. Massively ahead of the golf ball. So what I do now is is I don't go oh I've got to try and repeat that. No, just like riding a bike, I am just going to play around with it. I'm not going to try and be precise. I'm going to play around with and experiment with how forward I can get this body this side of the golf ball. Look at that. I've gone even further forward on that one. 6.3. So, I play around with that. And then what you can do, just like riding a bike, it can be cumbersome to start with and a bit wobbly, just like your swing, but in time you'll find balance. And this is what will speed up your process. The other way of trying to be perfect and try to get it right. All that does is it gets you stuck in your head. It gets you unbelievably tense over the golf ball and you never really find balance. So let's move now on to the drive. The one club that everyone loves to hit well. I want to help you hit driver straighter and gain some yardage. And we're going to use the same analogy of balance again. Right? So if you are a slicer on your certainly air on that side, you're let's say you're falling one way. Maybe you hook the golf ball, you're falling the other way. And we want to try and find straight somewhere in between. How can you learn this in a really natural way? Well, I want you to focus just for a second just on your trail shoulder. What tends to happen with a lot of players, I want you to feel it first. You'll notice if you're slicing it, the chances are that trail shoulder rotates early in the down swing, goes outwards, and it also stays quite high, right? And that gets you coming over the top of the golf ball here, add an open face, and you create this big slice uh to the right. If you hook the golf ball, what you'll probably tend, as you see here, is you pay attention to the right shoulder, it'll tend to fall downwards to the ground very, very low. that gets the club heading too far to the right or you got left at the end. Either a block to the right or a flip of the wrists. Right now, neither's wrong what you're doing. It's a balance between those two. So, I want you to feel it. So, the first thing I want you to do is make a few swings and don't try and fix anything initially. Just pay attention to what your right shoulder is doing. First of all, can you concentrate on it? Make some swings.

This would be over. Feel what that's like. And now imagine you're going under and just, you know, grade it. Just pay attention to these things. You notice here as it goes underneath, if you're slicing, this is one of the reasons why you can you can really gain some distance with this. If that right shoulder starts to work more downwards, can you see how the body works this way, the head works almost like stays backwards and it acts as almost like a catapult. So this is how you gain more yardage. But when this trail shoulder stays high, we start to almost not only slice, but lose power because we're heaving the ball forward. So all I want you to do now is simply pay attention to your trail shoulder. Now you know that if you want to stop slicing it, you want that right trail shoulder to be going more downwards. Don't try and fix it. Just get yourself set. Pay attention to what your trail shoulder's doing and allow the body to naturally move into a place. Two seconds. Too much chatting and not enough hitting. Track's getting bored. Allow that trail shoulder to move into a place where I'm more likely to maybe draw the ball. Let's have a look at this in action. So again, nice nice gentle one to start with. Just paying attention to what my trail shoulder's doing. And there you go. Little draw, right? No big hits at this stage. All we're doing is just noticing what that shoulder's doing, right? And like for me, for instance, I, you know, I tend to be in more of the hook family. So my trail shoulder will stay, I'll tend to travel too far laterally for too long and then I'll flip the wrist sometimes. So, my feeling when I'm talking about balance, I'm often feeling like I'm actually get releasing this club and we're rotating a lot earlier going through my right shoulder doesn't feel as as as low as maybe it might feel for you if you're slicing it, right? But the key with it is this. I'm not trying to fix anything. I'm literally noticing where that trail shoulder is and thinking that would be a slice. I might even hit a few shots doing that. Right? That's a slice and this is more going towards the hook. Now I need to find that balance. And there's no exact science with this. You just make some swings and allow your body over time to kind of really really feel this.

And in time, what we'll start to find is bit by bit, we'll start to get the sense of this. Right? All I want you to do now is spend some time developing that awareness in your game. whatever you happen to be working on, try and stay a trying mode and fix it mode and start to become aware and experience what's happening in your golf swing. Just like riding a bike, you can't tell yourself to go right and left. You have to allow your body to experience these things. So, when you're swinging and you're wanting to improve something, give your body a chance to experience it. Let it notice what's actually happening and let it naturally start to adjust for you. It is far more it's much much faster. It's more relaxing and just fun. It's just fun to learn like this. So, I hope you enjoyed the video. If you did, give it a thumbs up. Maybe share it with a friend who you know could do with something like this. And of course, look, if you'd like more personalized advice from me, head on over to dannymud.com. If you enjoyed this video and you want to see me give a live lesson just like this to a student, click this video out right here. But until next week, have a wonderful golfing.