Tyler Ferrell is the only person in the world named to Golf Digest's list of Best Young Teachers in
America AND its list of Best Golf Fitness Professionals in America.
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Get More Distance
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If you are looking for more distance, the easiest way to gain it is to improve your launch characteristics. Getting a positive angle of attack is the fastest way to do so but you have to be careful in how you do it. Playing the ball forward, axis tilt, better face rotation can all help improve launch characteristics.
It is important to understand what movements do to the club face. Rotating the body, or shallowing the arms, both open the face. If you are going to add that, you had better have a way to close the face or else you will struggle with the face control.
If you've maxed out your launch characteristics, look at swing mechanics like
- Backswing Length
- sequencing
- bracing
- release style
Playlists: Get More Distance
Tags: Not Enough Distance, Driver, Fairway Wood, Analysis, Intermediate
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In this case, study, we're going to take a look at a golfer who came to visit for a couple
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hours looking for more distance.
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So we've got his before swing here and before we get into looking at analyzes analyzing
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his swing, let's take a look at his track mandate before we started the lesson and then
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what it looked like after working on some distance stuff for two hours.
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So over here on the right is the before and then over here on the left is the after.
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Now I'll talk you through what we worked on and why we went that direction.
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You'll see that we gained a marginal amount of club that's being a couple miles per hour, which isn't too uncommon when you're working on some sequencing and some bracing.
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So we did get a little bit of speed but two miles an hour would only account for you know six yards, seven yards of extra distance.
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What you'll see is that the total distance on one of his better shots during the warm up to his best shot towards the end of the lesson improved by about 37 yards.
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So pretty significant in terms of total distance and you'll see that the biggest change we made was going from a downward attack angle.
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In order to attack angle of eight degrees and a launch angle of three degrees to a positive attack angle of 2.4 in the positive launch angle of 11.
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I created a much better max height with a ball speed that was relatively close to the same.
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You can see that that results in a large amount of distance.
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So that's why in the video the fastest way to gain distance I talked not so much about making big swing changes just for the sake of gaining speed, but more for the sake of improving your launch characteristics just like this guy.
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Right so now that you know what we're going to do let's take a look at how we did it.
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So when he came in he was talking about working on getting shallow in transition which you could see yeah we could do some armshallowing there.
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But we also ended up talking a lot about the steepness during the release.
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Now you'll see from the face on view while he does have the ball position just outside of his ear for where we would like it with a driver more outside the shoulder you can see that it's well behind.
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So that was one of the first changes that we are going to make is improving that ball position.
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Now the second thing is getting some shallowing during the release while working on some sequencing and bracing.
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So let's bring up a drill video so you can see kind of what he was working on in order to make this change.
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Now he was more of a slow motion style learner so he was really kind of immersed in the movement and not so much into the drill style so you can see.
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I had him doing some pump drills kind of stopping in the middle checking that checkpoint and then working on the we we use some spatial awareness to work on the path of the club more on the way through.
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Now the reason we went directly after the path is you can see in his before video that he's got a bit of club face rotation through this zone here.
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So he had already kind of been working on squaring the face a little bit better but he was blocked by where the path was.
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So you can see that when he when he started working on the path.
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Getting a little bit better sequencing and a little bit better shallowing you can see that the club face was able to orient pretty easily we didn't have to spend a lot of time on that.
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Many golfers if the club face doesn't rotate during that early phase and you start getting more shallow you're actually going to tend to hit the ball further off to the right.
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Okay so now we've got the final result he was working on a little bit of body sequencing a little bit of arm shallowing you can see a pretty dramatic difference in the ball position both compared to his feet and to his upper body.
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That helped him shallow things out but what we'll see is the sequencing the path and the bracing is going to create some pretty good change in the release so pretty previously.
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You can see that his upper body was kind of well on top of the golf ball and as a result the arms had to bend to add some amount of loft to get the ball airborne.
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Now because he was in the after version because he was in a better position working on falling away that way.
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You'll see that he has a much better chance of getting his arms to extend at about the same position.
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Now I also wanted to use this as a case study to show you know a lot of many golfers would look at this and say that I didn't make a whole lot of improvement because the pattern kind of looks pretty much the same.
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But I'm showing you that the difference between these two swings is about 40 yards.
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So if you're using video and you're looking for enormous global changes like your swing is going to change from lung and chicken wing to you know dust and don'ts and kind of overnight.
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It doesn't happen that way and what tends to happen is you get more subtle changes like this that do have a big impact in terms of your your distance or your consistency but your overall performance.
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Now it is possible to get very big changes on video quickly but this is more than norm especially when I'm doing more of the distance coaching.
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Now if your goal is to make your swing look a specific way that's actually a harder performance goal than if you say I want to gain distance I want to hit the ball consistently I want to hit a draw anything that's more outcome based.
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So if you struggle with distance hopefully you can learn a thing or two from this case study.
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Make sure that the club faces rotating before you try to add some body sequencing or body speed but if your club faces working in a good pattern then adding some.
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Body sequencing some body speed maybe even just playing around with the ball position to give yourself a little more positive angle of attack is one of the fastest ways to add speed to your swing.
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Now if you've played around with those factors and you feel like you've maxed out your launch capabilities then the only way you're going to get extra speed is by improving your swing mechanics.
