Here’s a fool-proof way to increase lag in your downswing.

We’re going to learn how to use our hands correctly in the start of the downswing. Now, our hands can work together and pull on the shaft. That starts the downswing. Or, your left hand can pull down and the right hand push out, and guess what that creates? A nice little cast throw-away flip.

So, what we want to try to do is, when I go to the top of my backswing, I want to set the club on top of my shoulder. So, it should rest on my little bit of my neck between my shoulder and my head, and I want to rest it on my shoulder, and I want to feel a pulling sensation while keeping the shaft on my neck.

So, we don’t want the shaft to come off. Now, where I’ll see a common error is, they’ll put it here, and then they’ll throw it off their neck to start the downswing. And so, what that happens, there is, is that, one, when we do this, the club head gets too far away from the body and leads into a scoop, and our hands don’t feel tight and compact.

Now, the second half of this drill that I found that works really well is that, if you can keep your hands there while you turn your chest and pull, you’ll start to learn how to get your hands a little bit more forward to impact, so you can really get some shaft lean while you do this.

Now, the best part about this drill is that I’ve seen everybody do it and have great success with the shaft lean on video. So, we go up to the top and over, if we’re going to hit it, we want to take it really slow and make sure that we get the feeling right because, again, we’re trying to keep the shaft on our neck for as long as possible, and we want to feel our chest turning while we make the contact. So, it’ll look a little something like this. You’ll take it up to the top, rest it on your neck, pull, and swing through, and you’ll take this nice divot, hopefully, but you’ll also make pretty solid contact.

And, again, you’re not trying to hit it really far. You’re just trying to gain a sense of how to keep the club closer to your body in the downswing as you get your hit. So, again, up to your neck, keep it on your neck, turn, swing through, and you’ll start to get this great shaft lean by the time you get to impact.

And so, this is a great drill that, for all of you golfers out there that struggle with the flip, the big difference in what you’ll see is, typically, when you’re flipping when you’re in your normal part of your backswing, you’ll see the golf club go out and away from your body as you’re trying to flick it through impact. When you do this drill, you’ll see the club head get closer to your body, your hands will get closer to your midline when the shaft’s parallel to the ground.

That’s one of our key checkpoints, is that when we get our hands back through our right leg, we want that shaft still parallel on the ground when we hit. And if we do the alternative, which is the pull down here and push up there, what we’ll see is the club be parallel to the ground outside of our right leg and scoop to the bottom. And so, then, when we start to have a good feel for this drill, what we want to do is slowly integrate it into a real swing, right.

So, we don’t want to leave the club on our shoulder when we’re hitting balls for real, so what we have to do is go to the top, keep the club off of our shoulder, but have that same sensation of turning our chest and pulling our hands to in front of our zipper, keeping the shaft parallel to the ground. And if we can do that, we should be able to have a nice little strike. So, try this drill. I’ve had tremendous success with this drill in improving my players’ ability to lie the club into the ball.

You might struggle with it at first if you’re a caster from the top, because what you’ll notice is that you can’t keep that club on your neck for as long as you need to when you start that downswing. You’ll feel that club bounce right off, right out of the gate, and that’s how you know you’re doing it wrong. You want to keep that club on your neck for as long as you can to give yourself the most shaft lean.