Why You Don't Hit Driver As Far As You Could

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Transcript Summary-

If you’ve been trying to hit your driver further but all that’s happened is your strike has got worse, your direction has disappeared, and you’ve barely gained any distance, I completely understand how frustrating that is. It’s something I see all the time with golfers at my golf school. They try harder, swing faster, and put in more effort, but the extra yardage never comes. The truth is, creating effortless distance with the driver is actually very counterintuitive, and today I want to show you a much easier way to unlock more speed without feeling like you have to swing out of your shoes.

Why Power Isn’t About Strength

One of the best ways to understand this is by looking at something heavy, like a sledgehammer. When you swing a heavy object, your body naturally supports its weight. You don’t force it or try to muscle it around. Instead, the momentum of the object guides your movement, your body reacts instinctively, and everything flows together. That’s exactly how the golf swing should feel. The challenge is that a driver is so light that most golfers stop feeling the clubhead altogether. Instead of swinging the club, they end up trying to move it with effort, which actually slows everything down and makes contact much less consistent.

Learning to Feel the Clubhead

The first step is to recreate that heavy-object feeling with your driver. Hold the club just in the fingers of your trail hand and let the clubhead swing freely backwards and forwards like a pendulum. Don’t move your arm around independently. Allow your body to naturally support the swinging club just as it did with the sledgehammer. As the club swings, let the weight of the clubhead change direction on its own instead of trying to control it. At first it can feel loose or even out of control, but that’s exactly the feeling most golfers have been missing.

Let Momentum Do the Work

One of the biggest mistakes golfers make is trying to direct the club with their hands from the top of the swing. They believe that’s where power comes from, but in reality it destroys momentum. Instead, allow the clubhead to naturally fall into the downswing. As you feel the weight of the club dropping, your body will automatically respond and support that movement. The club begins to release naturally rather than being forced through impact, creating effortless speed instead of tension.

Direct the Swing Correctly

Of course, we still need to control where that speed goes. A simple way to picture this is imagining a tee peg pointing towards the golf ball. As the club starts down, you want the force of the swing travelling towards the ball, not too steep or too far out to the right. When golfers get this direction wrong, they often pull shots, slice them, or flip the clubface to recover. By combining a freely swinging club with the correct direction of force, you get both power and control.

Add Loft Instead of Losing It

As you swing through the ball, imagine you’re adding loft to the driver rather than taking it away. Many golfers try to hit down on the ball or hold the clubface off, which removes loft and makes the strike much less efficient. By allowing the club to release naturally, the loft works for you, producing higher launch, better contact and significantly more distance without feeling like you’re trying harder.

Start Slowly, But Don’t Be Afraid of Speed

When you’re practising this, don’t worry about smashing the ball. Hit little shots that feel as though they’ll only travel around 100 yards. Most golfers are amazed how far the ball actually goes because they’re finally allowing the club to do the work. As you become comfortable, don’t be afraid to let the club swing faster. This is another counterintuitive point—the faster the club swings, the easier it is to feel the weight of the clubhead. Slowing down too much often makes that feeling disappear.

The Key Takeaway

The secret to longer drives isn’t more effort—it’s better momentum. Start by swinging something heavy so your body understands how to support moving weight. Then recreate that same sensation with the driver using one hand before gradually moving back to two hands. Feel the clubhead, allow it to fall naturally, let it release through the ball, and trust the momentum rather than trying to manufacture speed. When you do, you’ll often find you hit the ball longer, straighter, and with far less effort than you ever imagined possible.

Full Transcript -So, if you've been trying to hit driver longer, but all that's happened is your strike has got worse, your direction has got worse, and you've barely gained any yardage whatsoever, I know how frustrating that is. The golfers at my golf school this week were exactly the same. They were doing their best, trying everything to hit the ball longer, but they weren't getting any real yardage gains, and they were hitting it all over the place. The reason is something I see time and time again. To gain distance in your golf swing, especially with driver, it is very, very counterintuitive. Just take a look at this. I'm doing something in this driver swing that is going to give me effortless power and distance, but it's very counterintuitive. Take a look.

Just see how far this ball goes. So, that's gone 220 yards, and I did it with one arm. Not to show off, but to show you that I'm doing something here that doesn't require lots of strength, yet it still goes a decent distance. I do this because I coach a lot of golfers who don't have the body of a tour player. In fact, they can't swing anything like a tour player. But you can still gain yardage, no matter your physical ability. In this video, I want to share how to do that, so you can get rid of some of that frustration and start to hit driver longer. Before I do, if you're new to the channel, or this is one of your first golf lessons of mine, please consider subscribing. I release videos just like this every single week to help you improve your game. You never have to remember a thing. Everything I do here, I'll put into a free downloadable practice guide that I'll pin to the top comment below this video. Or you can simply scan the QR code right there. So, if you grab a heavy object, I've got a sledgehammer here, but you could grab a bag of something, and simply swing that heavy object backwards and forwards, you would start to feel the same feelings I had a moment ago when I hit that driver with one hand. What do you notice here? We have a very heavy weight at one end. I'm very light at this end. I'm forming a lever. I've got a swinging head, and my body is supporting that swinging head in a very natural way. It is not doing this. That's unnatural, and nobody does it. When you have something heavy in your hand, you never move it like that. Let's look at it from this angle. As I'm swinging here, I'm feeling something. But more importantly, as I keep swinging this momentum, and I want to swing it to the point where it goes over my head, I've taken this lever and that lever has swapped around. The head has gone behind me, and my body naturally supports it without me thinking. Why? Because my body feels what it needs to do. It can feel this weight, and it's swinging it. Then what happens? I start to swing down, and that heavy weight naturally wants to fall and flow. What happens to my body? It counterbalances that motion and allows the sledgehammer, or in golf the club, to swing with a massive amount of momentum in a really natural way. So when you have a heavy weight, it's very easy, first of all, for you to swing it, and second, for your body to know exactly what to do to swing it correctly. But in golf, we don't have a heavy weight, particularly with driver. With driver, the clubhead is unbelievably light, isn't it? Unbelievably light. So how can we create the same feeling, and how do we know what that feeling is with the driver? To show you how to do that, I'm going to share step by step how I helped Toby, one of my recent students this week, gain almost 30 yards with the driver. I gave him this sledgehammer exercise so he could feel it. Then I said, how can you create this same sensation with the driver? This is the first step. What I want you to do, and this is a great drill I actually got from a wonderful coach called Andrew Nicholson, is hold the club just in the fingers of your trail hand, down the shaft like this. It's resting on the crease of the finger here, so I can literally have the pad of my hand just on top of this grip. That means I can push down comfortably on the club here. Now all I want you to do is this. As I'm here, you can see my trail arm is not sitting out. It's just sitting by my side. It's supporting this golf club. All I got Toby to do was swing the club backwards and forwards like this. Just like that sledgehammer, we have a slightly heavier hand than this end, and we're letting the head swing backwards and forwards. When he first started, his body wasn't supporting this, and he was moving his arm all over the place. I said, no, keep that just there, and let the club act as a lever like this. Let it swing. You can imagine it felt very out of control for him, but this is important. Now we're swinging it. Let the body start to support it. I'm allowing my body to pivot a little bit to the right and to the left, and I'm supporting this just like we did with the sledgehammer. As that momentum continues, these ends are going to swap over, just like we did with the sledgehammer, and I'm still supporting the weight beautifully here. What do we do now? We simply swap them around again and allow the club to fall. When Toby tried this for the first time, he got to the top and tried to direct it. He hated that initial feeling because it felt completely out of control. He would hit driver like this, trying to control it. He thought that was power, but it's not. That is effortful. When you let the momentum of this object start to flow, your body can feel its momentum and will start to help you, just like it did with the sledgehammer. There is one other thing I'm going to share with you in a second, but for now, imagine feeling this motion where the club is naturally falling, and look how it's releasing beautifully on its own. Almost imagine that, as I'm doing this, I'm adding loft to this driver face. That's very different from what I see with golfers who struggle and heave at the golf ball like this, where there's very little loft on the driver. They may sky it because the ball comes off the top of the club, but there's no natural release of the club. So get that sensation first of this swinging club. But to make this accurate, you need to be able to direct the force of the golf club. What we do here is this. As we swing the club back, this is important. Let me just grab a tee peg here. This is what I gave Toby. We play golf on a lovely angle like this. So when we're swinging, let's put the TrackMan back on. When we're swinging, we need to make sure that when we get here, we direct the force at the golf ball. This tee peg is pointing at the golf ball. If I direct the force this way, suddenly the club will swing, yes, but it's swinging too far to the right. I'll either hit it to the right, or my hands are going to react and turn the face over, and I'll hit some big hooks. What Toby was doing was getting to the top in his two-handed golf swing and turning this way, where the tee peg would point into the middle of his stance. That's too steep. He would either come across the golf ball, pull the shots way left and low, or then react and hit some big slices. So, in order for us to let this club swing freely but still give it control, we need to know how to direct the force. I got him to imagine the tee peg just here, pointing at the golf ball. Then let it swing. Point it at the golf ball. Let it swing. I got him to do that a few times to visualize the motion of the club swinging into the golf ball at the right angle. No. No.

Yes. Makes sense. Then we start to move to two hands. You take this feeling, and first of all, you've now got the sensation. You've got to allow the weight of the club to help guide your golf swing, just like the sledgehammer did. As I was doing this, I started to say to Toby, imagine when you're here, and you've directed it, that you're adding loft onto this driver. You're not taking it away. You're letting the club swing, and you're adding loft to the driver. You can see here, we're creating and releasing that, just like we did with the sledgehammer. Let's have a look at this in action in a really gentle way. The temptation, and certainly with Toby on his first few shots, because he didn't get this straight away, was still to hit at the golf ball. That's where he felt power was. So I said to him, start by hitting shots that feel like they're not going to go anywhere. Maybe just try to hit them 100 yards. He tried, but he didn't hit it 100 yards. He hit it so much further. But that's the lesson. You've got to realize this effortless driver swing is a lot easier than you might think.

So, really easy to start with. Really lazy and easy. You can see here, all I'm doing is using this as a lever. So what's happening here? That club is simply acting as a lever. It goes up, the weight falls down, and the club naturally releases with a lot of energy. Jack Nicklaus once said, "You can't release the club early enough." This is the really important thing. Naturally, the club needs to release. Most golfers are trying to hold lag. What creates all these angles is the way you support the club with your body. But this is missing for so many players, and it is one of the keys to effortless and easy golf swings. So start off first with a heavy object to really appreciate this. Notice how your body supports that very naturally. Then, because the driver is light, make it feel heavier by swinging one-handed first. Don't just swing the arm out like this, because your body is not supporting it. You didn't do that with the sledgehammer. Allow it to fold. Swap that lever around, and then let it fall through. Now you'll get the feeling you had with the sledgehammer. Imagine you're adding loft onto this golf club as you're doing this. Then gradually hold it with both hands and try to get that same sensation. You'll find, by the way, the quicker you swing, the more you'll feel this. Do not swing slower with this drill. The quicker you swing, the more momentum there is in the head, and the heavier the head will feel. Again, this is very counterintuitive. When you lose control, what do you normally do? You swing slower and more carefully. When you do that, you lose the feeling of the clubhead. That's what this driver tip is all about. Once you feel the clubhead, your body will respond, and you'll start to create a lot more distance without as much effort. So give this a go. If you know somebody who's struggling with distance and needs to hit driver longer, share this with them. It works with every club in the bag, including your putting. Most people are steering their putts. Let the club swing. Golf is fundamentally a kind of pendulum. If you enjoyed the video, give it a thumbs up, and maybe share it with one of your friends. And once you've gained a bit of distance, if you feel like you want a bit more accuracy, check this video out right here. It's had huge reviews and it's been going down really well. But until next week, have a wonderful golfing week.