The takeaway sets up your entire swing
The takeaway is one of the most underrated parts of the golf swing. Get it right and your swing has a chance. Get it wrong and you spend the rest of the swing compensating.
In this video, we break down what a correct takeaway looks like and how to work on it in your practice.
How to make your practice on the driving range worth more
I see it with my students all the time. ‘ Davey, I’m striking it well on the range, but when I get on the golf course, I suck.’
Practicing on the driving range can work great for you game, but there are a couple things that are fundamentally different then playing on the golf course. To begin: most of you reading this practice from mats and not real turf. Which will give you less feedback on bad or good strikes. I will help you with some points, which can help you practice better on the driving range and take that good practice with you to the golf course.
A lot of people practice without purpose, they get a drill from their Pro and when practicing by themselves they have absolutely no idea if they do it wrong or right in their swing. Practice with purpose is THE way to get better. There’s a couple ways you can do that, for example: make videos of yourselves, so you can make sure you actually make adjustments compared to your ‘old’ swing. Or build a station in which you have to do your new swing correction right, or you get punished. For example: place a headcover in front of the ball around 2 clubheads away. When hitting a driver and you are working on hitting it more in the upswing, hit the ball and miss the headcover, so you know 100% you are striking the ball in the upswing.
Golfing mats in general are square, which we people have the tendency to stand parallel to. When standing on a mat, make sure you are always well aware of your target, so you don’t actually try and hit it towards a target that’s not parallel to the mat. But even better, make sure you putt an alignment stick or a club down on the ground which will help you with a target line.
This will also help with feedback on setting up your feet, knees, hips and shoulders parallel to the target line. Since you don’t have any reference out on the course first try this with help of alignment sticks, and after that try and play to random targets. So you can actually train your alignment instead of just whacking balls to the same target.
Driving range mats give way more room for error then turf, hitting the ground before the ball on a matt can still result in a decent strike and/or shot, where on turf the ball would lose a lot of distance.
So if you struggle with impact on the course and not necessarily on the driving range, this will probably be the issue.
I like two things to train impact on the driving range. The first one is use chalk, make a line of chalk in front and behind the ball, see if only the one in front of the ball is gone when you’ve made your swing. Are both of them gone or only the one behind the ball? Betcha, the strike on the course would have been worse than on the driving range.
You can also use a microfiber towel, which you place about 1.5 ball away from the ball you are trying to hit. Mis the towel and hit the ball, is a good way to see if your strike is good. You can make this easier and more difficult by moving the towel closer or further away from the ball.
There was a request on my grip video for a drill for fixing a slice. This is a great little drill to help fix coming over the top.
Hey, Davey Porsius here. I've seen a lot of videos being posted with grips that could be a lot better, so I made this quick video showing how to correctly grip the club. An incorrect grip is one of the most common errors that I see. I hope that this helps