Hi, I’m Rick Sessinghaus, PGA coach and coach for Collin Morikawa.
Are you sick and tired of playing out of the trees and seeing your buddies in the fairway? We’ve got to hit more fairways in order to hit more greens to lower those scores.
So with the driver especially, we start seeing more directional problems. Now it gets back to again, a few key components that you have to master. But I have noticed a few things with drivers and is that you tend to get a little tighter because you want to hit it a little bit further.
Unfortunately, that tension is getting in the way of how the club face comes through, and it’s actually slowing you down. But let’s talk about the concepts. First one … are you actually aiming where you think you’re aiming and having a good pre shot routine? A lot of people will actually pick something right in front of here called the intermediate target to help them align properly.
Because again, if I’m aiming in the left trees and I think I’m aiming in the center, you’re doing yourself a disservice. So alignment is number one. Number two, shape of swing. With the driver, It’s longer obviously and I’m a little bit further away. It’s on a flatter plane. Unfortunately, people try to over swing the driver and they start lifting it. They start coming down on it. And that changes the angle of attack and actually changes where you’re hitting it on the face.
However, it also is changing the path. The path is 15% with the driver of your direction. So the last one, which is most important, is club face. Clubface needs to be square in impact for you to hit a ball straight.
85% of your direction is club face related. Club face changes through hands, hands equal club face. So get a good relationship with how you want your hands to be at impact. And to be able to commit to those shots, you need to train your golf mental game approach.
We put all three together. We have good alignment, we have a good plane and path and club face. We’re going to hit some straighter shots.