Improve Your Impact Position with the Delivery and Go Drill

The Delivery and Go Drill teaches you how to move from a strong transition position into a better impact without the urge to scoop, flip, or throw the clubhead early. If you struggle with thin shots, weak contact, or a low point that stays too far behind the ball, this drill helps you feel what a proper delivery position should look like and how the club should travel from there. It is especially useful if you tend to release the club too soon, lose your wrist angles, or stand up through impact to avoid hitting the ground.

How the Drill Works

This drill starts by placing you in a preset delivery position, which is essentially the end of the transition phase. Instead of trying to build that motion dynamically from a full swing, you begin in the correct spot and then simply move into impact. That makes it much easier to learn the right pattern.

In the delivery position, your hands and wrists are organized so the club is still supported by its angles rather than thrown away early. For a right-handed golfer, the trail palm is more upward, the lead wrist is flatter or slightly flexed, and the trail wrist has some extension. The club is still “set,” and your arms are closer to your body rather than fully stretched out.

From there, you bend into your golf posture, align the club to the ball, shift pressure into your lead side, and then let your arms extend down through impact. The key is that the extension happens from a good delivery position, not from a cast or flip.

This matters because many golfers do the opposite in transition. They lower the club too early, throw the angles away, and arrive at the ball with the arms already extended. That creates a sweeping strike, reduces power, and makes it difficult to move the low point forward. When the club releases too soon, solid compression becomes much harder.

The drill also helps you get comfortable with a visual that often feels uncomfortable at first: your hands being ahead of the ball as you begin the release. For golfers who scoop, that can seem wrong. But learning to release from this forward-shaft, structured position is exactly what improves contact and face control.

Step-by-Step

Build the delivery position first. Stand upright and place the club in a strong downswing delivery position. Your lead wrist should feel flatter, your trail wrist should feel bent back, and the club should still have angle in it. Keep your arms relatively close to your body rather than reaching them away.
Bend forward into your posture. Once the club and wrists are set, tilt forward into your normal golf posture. As you do this, let the delivery position stay intact. You are not trying to re-route the club or throw it at the ball. You are simply bringing that structure down into address height.
Match your arm line to the ball. As you settle in, your trail forearm should feel as though it is pointing generally in line with the ball. This helps organize the club and arms so you can approach impact from a more functional position.
Bump pressure into your lead foot. Shift your hips slightly toward the target so your pressure moves into your lead side. This should resemble a good impact setup, with your body beginning to organize forward rather than hanging back.
Keep your chest down and close. Stay in your posture. Let your chest remain inclined toward the ball instead of standing up. This is important because many scoopers instinctively raise the body to create room for an early release.
Extend the arms down through impact. From the preset delivery position, simply let your arms go down through the ball. Think of the trail elbow straightening into impact while the clubface squares from the proper wrist action, not from backing the handle up or flipping the clubhead past your hands.
Make short, controlled strikes. Start with very small motions. You do not need speed at first. The goal is to learn how to move from delivery into impact while preserving your structure and striking the ball before the ground.
Add a ground reference if needed. You can pair this drill with a line on the ground to monitor low point. If the drill is working, you should find it easier to strike the ball and then the turf, rather than bottoming out too early.

What You Should Feel

The most important sensation is that the club stays up and in a little longer before it goes down to the ball. If you normally cast from the top, this will feel very different. You should sense that the club is being delivered from a compact, organized position instead of being thrown outward early.

You should also feel:

Pressure moving into your lead foot before the strike rather than hanging back on your trail side
Your hands slightly ahead of the ball as the club approaches impact
Your chest staying down in posture instead of lifting up through the shot
The trail wrist staying bent back longer into the strike
The trail elbow extending through the ball rather than straightening too early from the top
A shallower, more compressed strike even though your upper body feels closer to the ground

If you are used to flipping, one of the biggest breakthroughs is realizing that you can keep your chest down, keep the handle forward, and still make clean contact. That is often the barrier. Many golfers flip because they are afraid that if they stay in posture and keep the hands forward, the club will dig into the ground.

This drill helps you replace that fear with a better pattern. You begin to feel that the club can approach the ball from a shallow, controlled path while your body remains inclined forward. In other words, you do not need to stand up and scoop to avoid hitting the turf.

A good checkpoint is the condition of your arms and wrists at impact. If the drill is working, your arms should not feel fully thrown out too early, and your wrists should not feel as though they have dumped all their angles before the strike. Instead, the club should arrive with structure, and then release through the ball.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

Moving the handle backward to release the club. This is a classic flipper’s move. You get into a decent delivery position, then pull the handle back so the clubhead can pass. That defeats the purpose of the drill.
Letting the club drop too low too soon. If the club immediately falls behind you and loses its angles, you are back to an early-cast pattern.
Standing up through impact. If your chest lifts away from the ball, you are likely trying to create room for a scoop release.
Starting with too much speed. This is a feel drill first. If you swing too hard, your old release pattern will usually take over.
Over-rotating the forearms to square the face. The face should square from a sound wrist condition and proper extension, not from a frantic hand roll.
Failing to shift into the lead side. If your pressure stays back, it becomes much harder to get the low point forward.
Reaching the arms away from the body. The drill is meant to teach a compact, connected delivery. Do not start by stretching everything outward.
Trying to help the ball into the air. The loft on the club is already designed to do that. Your job is to deliver the club properly, not scoop underneath the ball.

How This Fits Your Swing

The Delivery and Go Drill is not just an impact drill. It is really a transition drill that improves impact as a result. By presetting the end of transition, you train the part of the swing that determines whether you will compress the ball or throw the club away.

If your transition tends to be poor, you will usually see one of two patterns. Either the club gets dumped under and low too early, or the wrists and arms fire too soon and the clubhead passes the hands before impact. Both patterns make it difficult to control low point, face angle, and power.

This drill gives you a better blueprint. It teaches you that a strong transition keeps the club supported, the wrists organized, and the body moving into the lead side. From there, impact becomes much simpler. You are no longer trying to time a last-second save with your hands.

It also connects directly to solid contact. Better players tend to strike the ball with the low point of the swing arc farther forward. Golfers who scoop often bottom out too early, which leads to fat shots, thin shots, or a weak brushing strike with very little compression. When you learn to move from delivery into impact correctly, the bottom of the swing naturally shifts more forward.

There is also a power benefit. Early extension of the arms and loss of wrist angles remove important levers from the swing too soon. That can make the strike look smooth, but it is usually weak. Preserving those hinges into delivery and then extending through the ball gives you a more efficient transfer of speed.

If you are a decent player who still scoops, there is a good chance you also stand up through impact. Those two issues often travel together. Scooping sends the club farther away from you, and standing up creates the room for that pattern to happen without burying the club in the turf. The Delivery and Go Drill attacks both problems at once: it teaches you to stay in posture while releasing the club from a better position.

Use this drill when:

You hit behind the ball too often
You struggle to take a divot after the ball
You feel the clubhead race past your hands
You tend to flip or scoop through impact
You lose power because the club releases too early
You stand up to avoid hitting the ground

As you improve, the goal is not to make your full swing look robotic or overly staged. The goal is to build a better delivery pattern so that your natural swing can produce stronger impact conditions. Once that delivery improves, you can blend the feel into small shots, then half swings, and eventually fuller motion.

In the bigger picture, this drill helps you understand an important truth about ball striking: good impact is created before impact. If your transition puts the club in a poor delivery position, you will have to compensate late. But if your transition organizes the club correctly, impact becomes much more stable, powerful, and repeatable.