It's the Son of a Butcher podcast. I'm your host Claude harmon solo episode of the pod this week. I think it's an interesting time of year. I think there are a lot of people that are golfers that are going into the winter months. They're going to be maybe going inside, maybe hitting a lot of balls off of mats, and then there are a lot of people that are maybe going somewhere to where they're going to be playing a lot of golf. You know, I live in Florida, so a lot of people from the East Coast come down to Florida. So our season down here in Florida is just kind of ramping up. But I know a lot of people and a lot of places are going to be kind of stuck with regards to weather, and I think it's a really good time. I've talked about this before on the pod, but I think the off season for a lot of players is important. I do think that if you are in a climate to where you can't play golf year round, I think you've got to use that time when you can't be playing golf on the golf course all the time. You've got to use think of it like an off season. You know, other than really the PGA Tour, most people get time off. Most other sports get an off season. So if you are in a climate to where you're not going to be playing as much golf outside as normal, you're not going to be on the golf course as much as normal, and you're in a simulator, you're hitting off a mat, you're on the range, and stuff like that, I think it's an important time to utilize the off season that you're not going to be playing. So it's a time to say, Okay, here are some things I need to work on my golf swing. So I've said this a lot. The most important thing for me as an instructor is contact. It's not the direction of the ball, left to right, right to left. I really don't care about which direction players hit the golf ball. I work with players that fade it, I work with players that draw it. I'm not locked into one shape, but I am hyper focused in my golf lessons and when I'm watching players hit balls, is the quality of the strike and the contact. And I always say this, I'm lucky to have a really amazing teaching building here where I work at the Floridian. We have three indoor bays, and the garage doors open up, and we hit balls outside, hit balls from indoors to out. And I always say this to players that are struggling with contact. If we were hitting golf balls inside and just around the corner, he walked out the building and went to the left. If Roy McElroy showed up and started hitting golf balls and you were inside and you couldn't see who it was by the time he started ramping up, once he got anything kind of past a seven iron, once he started hitting five irons, once he starts hitting long irons, and then once he starts hitting three woods or drivers, you would be inside and you would be hearing a sound that would make you think, who the hell is out there? And if you went out looked and saw it was Rory McElroy or Dustin Johnson or Scotty Scheffler or Max Hoome, it doesn't matter who it is. A elite, elite tour player. You were going to notice if you're hitting golf balls on the range and you're going through your shot process and four or five slots behind you, John Rahm shows up, Scotty Scheffler shows up, and they started hitting drivers, we are going to turn around because of the sound. That is the quality of the strike, and that is the quality of the contact. So I think that's for a lot of golfers, I think it's forgotten because they're so obsessed, hyper focused on the curve in the direction of the golf ball, right, how the golf ball is curving, how the golf ball is moving, which obviously is hugely important. But I always say this to players. If you're hitting the golf ball off line, one of the easiest ways to not hit the golf ball off line is to start to hit the golf ball more solid, to catch it more in the center of the face, to not catch it off the toe, to not catch it in the heel with your irons. One of the ways to hit the golf ball more solid is to take a divot right. Two different types of shots in golf right iron shots where the golf ball's on the ground, and then driver, where we tee the golf ball up. So we have one golf club in our bag that isn't on the ground when we hit it, and that's our driver. We are going to tee it up. We can tee that ball as high or as low as you want to, but the golf ball is on a tee, so effectively, the golf ball is in the air. And when the golf ball is on the ground, it's on the ground right, So if it's in the air, you've got to swing the golf club up to where the golf ball is on the tee. When the golf ball's on the ground, you've got to get the golf club back to the ground. You've got to get the golf club back. I always say this in lessons as well. When you start your golf swing, when you set up to a golf ball, the golf ball is on the ground, it's on the surface, and I'd venture to say most people with their irons put the golf club on the ground on the surface. So the ball and the club are on the ground and on the surface. You've got to get the golf club back to the ground to hit the golf ball in the air. Now, obviously, if you return it back to the ground where you hit behind the golf ball, you're going going to hit the golf ball fat. If you don't get the golf club back to the ground, you're going to hit the golf ball thin. And that is going to have a significant effect on the quality of the strike, on the distance, and on the shape and the direction. So off season, utilize the off season to say, Okay, I am just going to focus one hundred percent on solid contact. I'm going to try and contact the golf ball consistently, so I'm not really going to worry about the direction the golf ball goes. And again I said this a few minutes ago, I think most golfers they never really think about how they're striking the golf ball. They only think and they only react to how much the ball is slicing, how much the ball is hooking, how much the ball is curving left to right, how much the ball is curving right to left. So what are some ways in the off season if you are stuck inside, if you are hitting golf balls into nets, into simulators, into matts, maybe just going to the driving range right, because the driving range is covered and you can hit balls. So some of the drills that I use to try and help players improve contact is first of all, just to explain the difference, like I just did. I mean, there's there's a difference between iron shots and driver shots. Holy grail for driver fitting. If anybody listening has been to a driver fitting on the tour at the tour level, the holy grail. The numbers they want is high launch, low spin. So they're trying to launch the golf ball at the driver as high as they can, and they want the spin to be down. Most of us are hitting down on the driver because we're coming over the top of it. We're slicing it. The angle of attack. That's a word that I think everybody maybe is familiar with, but if you're not, I think it's an important phrase that it comes from launch monitor technology. All the launch monitors now with all the radar and the data, they give you a lot of numbers, right, carry, launch, total carry, spin, side spin, all of this stuff, right, But one of the things that launch monitors do tell you is angle of attack. That's the angle that the golf club is coming into the ball. So when you set up to the golf ball, the club is zero, you swing it back up. Now you've got to swing it back down. How much you're swinging it down is kind of a you know, launch monitor for dummies. That's an indicator on angle of attack, how much you're hitting up, how much you're hitting down. So if you're trying to hit a driver, you would want to be hitting up. So what launch monitors do is they give negative and positive numbers. So down would be negative, positive would be up. So using Brooks as an example, right, Brooks Keepka one of the really elite drivers of the golf ball with his driver, he's one degree down with his driver. Why because he's hitting a fade. When he tries to hit a draw, he's hitting one degree up on it. Okay, so when players are hitting irons, you want that. The reason why I think a lot of players can't take dibots is they just they don't hit down on the golf ball enough. Now, there are a lot of reasons why. I think a lot of players it's optical, Right, the golf ball's on the ground, and what you're going to try and do is you're going to try to get the golf ball in the air. If you're topping the golf ball a lot, if you're hitting a lot of golf balls, thin, I think logically it would make sense to say, Okay, the ball's on the ground, I've got to get the golf ball in the air, so I need to swing up. I think a lot of that is perception. But if we put you in your golf stance and took the club away, set up to a five art, said hey, get into your golf pusture, go ahead and set up to this five art, take the golf club out of your hands, give you a ball, and say, okay, now we're gonna throw the golf ball from your setup underhanded, and you're gonna try and get it into the air. Most people the arm would work up. And I think that I've seen this enough to where I think that's what players are trying to do. The ball isn't getting into the air. They're coming from out to in. Their weight is going back because they're tired of hitting it thin. They think if they go back they'll hit up on it, and they hit it fat. They hit it thin, and it doesn't work. So one of the easiest ways with your irons to start to think about improving your contact is when you set up to the golf ball. You're setting up and ideally we would like your weight to be at fifty percent on the left fifty percent on the right. If your right handed golfer, left is your lead foot, right is your trail foot. Reverse that if you're a left handed golfer, so fifty to fifty. One of the best ways to improve your contact is to think of the relationship between where your weight is on the right leg and the left leg. So, if you're a right handed golfer, at impact, we need you to have more weight on your left foot, on your lead foot. So if you're a right handed golfer, your left foot is your lead foot as you're swinging the golf club into impact and at impact, you need to have more weight on your front foot. Fifty to fifty at impact not great, sixty forty at impact better, seventy thirty at impact better, eighty twenty at impact better. You know, with force plate technology now we swing catalyst. When players are hitting golf balls, I can see where their weight is. I can see how their weight is shifting and how their weight is transferring. So one of the easiest ways with your irons is to feel like at the moment of contact, at impact, you have to have more weight on your front foot than your back foot. So if you're right hand golfer, more weight at impact on your left foot. An easy way to feel that is go ahead and get out, get a pitching wedge, get a sand wedge, get a small club that you can control it. You can't even do this with nine irons, you know, nothing more than kind of a nine iron nine iron pitching wedge, sand wedge. You can even do this loob wedge set up to the golf ball normally. Then if you're a right handed golfer, drop that right foot back so your toes are all you know, almost behind your left heel, and then lift your heel right heel up, so now all your weight is going to be on your left side. Right, all of your weight is going to be on your left side. So if you struggle with contact, if you struggle with hitting the golf ball thin, if you struggle with hitting the golf ball fat heavy, this is a great way to start to change and improve how the golf club is being delivered into the ball at impact, but also improve your angle of attack. So take a sand wedge. You're going to make a kind of a half swing, half swing back, half swing through, and you're just basically going to keep all of that weight on your front foot. I'm guessing if you do that, you're going to feel something different because the reason why we're lifting that back leg. That back foot that heal up is we're trying to put you off balance, right, We're trying to balance you on your front foot, on your lead foot. And I think if you get that feeling, all of the sudden, the contact is going to improve. The contact is going to be different. You're going to be hitting most likely the ball then the turf. Right. That's that's what the best ball strikers with their irons do. They get the ball first and then the divot is in front of the golf ball. Another phrase that launch monitor technology has given us is low point. Where is the low point of the golf swing that you're making. So if you think about your golf swing, it's kind of a little bit of a like a half circle. Right. Start with the golf club on the ground, take the golf club up, take the golf club back to the ground, golf club works back up. So where the club is bottoming out, the low point of the golf club it needs to be in front of the golf ball, not at the golf ball, not behind the golf ball. So that's another thing that during the offseason, if you do have access to go to a range, to go to a club and you know, if they have a launch monitor that you can get on, you could go ahead and take a look at this yourself. But hey, if someone's got a launch monitor at the range or the club and say, listen, any chance that I could book you for a half hour and I could just get some basic numbers of what I do. Right, So, if you've never had access to that type of technology, I think it's really really important to do. You would see whether you're hitting down, whether you're hitting up, So having all of that weight kind of shift it onto that front foot and then just basically leaving there and then that right heel is in the air, hit some half shots and then maybe say all right, let me make some three quarter shots. Maybe start off with a sand wedge and you're kind of in that exaggerated close position, the right heels up, all your weights on your front foot, and you're just making swings. If you try and go backwards, you're not going to be able to do it because that right heel is in the air, right, so you're going to be off balance and you're just not going to make really good contact. You might not even make contact at all. So you would maybe all of a sudden One of the things I think that might happen is all of a sudden, you're taking a divot and the divot's in front of the golf ball. I think that's that's a massive, massive change. Another really basic drill to fix contact that I like is an alignment stick. If you've got an alignment stick in your bag, go ahead and take your setup, and you know, start off with this with sand wedges and work your way up. Go ahead and take your setup, take your stance, and then say, okay, once I get the width of my stance, I'm going to take the alignment stick okay, and I'm going to place it on the inside of my right foot. If you're a right hand golfer, right, so you're just going to place it inside and it's just going to run parallel to your right foot. Right, so the alignment rod sticks out, and you want to kind of have the end of the alignment stick kind of in line with the end of your right heel, so the majority of the alignment stick is now kind of in your field of play. The idea behind this is to make some swings and land the golf club onto the ground without hitting the alignment stick. Right. I think that's a good one. I think it's it's again, it's very similar to the drill where your weight is forth, but it's optical, right, It's an optical illusion that we want to try and we know that that alignment stick is there. So what we're going to do is it's going to force us to cover the golf ball a little bit more with our chest because obviously if we go back and you can start off by doing this and just make some practice wings, no golf ball, just make a practice swing and get this feeling and see if you can make practice wings and not hit that alignment stick. That's kind of you know, running parallel to your right foot, your left handed golfer, it's parallel to your left foot, and the majority of the stick should be out in front of you because we're trying to have it as a barrier. Make some practice wings and just say listen, let me see if I can make practice wings and not hit the alignment stick. If you're hitting the alignment stick, that is going to show you a lot of things. It's going to show you that your weight probably is going back that you know you're trying to move backwards to try and get the golf ball in the air, all of those things right. And again I think you will see in this drill that you're starting to take a divot. So you could do this with sand wedges up to you know, pitching wedge seven iron. You can move the alignment stick as close to the golf balls as you want, right, just to see what that angle is. If you look at divot patterns with tour players with their irons, right, what tour players do with their irons is they hit a golf ball and they take a divot in front of the golf ball. So then the golf ball moves back, so they're moving back right, They're not going forward. What most people do is they try and find on the ground. They basically trying to find a t right. So they hit a ball, they take a divot, and then they address that golf ball right at the top of the divot. The club's a little bit below it helps it get it in the air. So you want to try and think in terms of landing the golf club down and taking that divot in front of the golf ball. If you don't want to do that, sometimes I want to hitting golf balls. I'll take a golf ball, and directly in front of the golf ball, I'll stick a t in the ground, push it all the way down. So imagine that you're on a parth three, Go ahead and tee your golf ball up. Then take the golf ball off the tee and move it back to If you're a right handed golfer, so tee it up and then just drop it off the tee right behind it right. So now you are going to hit your iron and the goal is the tee that's in the ground, press down that's in front of the golf ball. You're going to try and hit a shot and move the tee in front of the ball right again. That's all designed to try and help you get that angle of attack to hit down on it, to get that feeling of the weight being more forward, another good way to feel, and I ask players to do this all the time. And lessons is go ahead and take a setup, set up to the ball, and then imagine someone has asked you that has never played golf before, what is impact? But what does impact look like? Can you just show me what impact looks like without making a backswing. That's the important part here. We're not going to ask you to make a backswing. So if you've got a camera and you can film yourself doing this, go ahead and set the camera up if you've got a tripod, and put it on a tripod and rest it. But you're gonna want to take a look, and you're gonna have the camera facing your chest right, And then imagine someone was going to ask you to explain to them what impact look like. Just go ahead and get into what you think would be an impact position, and then go ahead and hit one, and then go ahead and look at the two. I'm guessing that if you're not a great ball striker, if you don't take a ton of divits, if you're not a great iron player, your impact position with a golf club and a ball is going to look very different than your impact position with no ball, right, if you're just getting into impact, and I'll be honest, I don't think I've ever had anyone do this drill. And we're talking from elite tour player down to regular average fifteen twenty twenty five handicappers trying, you know, someone trying to break a hundred for the first time. There isn't anyone whose impact position looks bad. They all get into good impact positions that the club goes, the handle goes a little bit forward, the weight goes forward, the hips turn whatever, the head goes a little bit forward. Definitely, the weight goes forward. I have never seen anyone when I say show me impact and we're able to measure how much percentage of weight is on the left and the right. I can't think of anybody that's gone sixty forty right leg versus left leg. Everybody say when I say say just show me impact, you know where impact is? What would impact look like? Everyone tends to get into a good impact position. And I think if you can work backwards from that and say, okay, I've got an image of what my body looks like when I'm in a good impact position, right, so man, maybe I can try and make my regular golf swing look like that getting into that really really good impact position. Impact contact, the quality of the strike, the quality of the interaction between the golf club and the ball and the ground is massively, massively important to become a better iron player, to become a better ball striker. One of the things when we're looking at launch monitor technology as well, When people's contact and impact gets better when the quality of the strike gets better, when they start to take a divot with their irons, I see the speed. Right, there's two things we're looking at speed wise in the golf when we're looking at clubhead speed and ball speed. But when I see players contact improve, the number one thing that I see is the ball speed increases. The speed the golf ball is coming off the golf club increases because you're going to be hitting it more in the center of the face, You're going to be creating a better impact position, You're going to be creating better contact. So the quality of the strike. We will tend to see that in ball speed right, in the speed of the golf ball coming off the golf sometimes right if we look at when players are struggling, we'll look at their club head speed on a bad shot versus a good shot, and sometimes the good shot, the clubheads speed actually goes down maybe a mile per hour, half a mile per hour, two miles per hour, but the ball speed jumps five ten miles per hour, and they hit the golf ball fifteen yards further with maybe one mile per hour less clubhead speed, but the ball speed jumps. That's contact, that's quality of strike. One of the biggest differences not the single I was gonna say the single, but one of the biggest differences between regular average golfers non elite elite players is quality of strike. I mean Roy McRoy doesn't hit the golf ball thin, right, John Rahm. Every maybe a couple of times a year you might see an elite elite to where a player hit one. I mean Scotty Scheffler doesn't hit the golf ball thin the five iron. It's not blading it over the green right, he's not hitting six inches behind it. Quality of the strike is good. So in the offseason, if you're going into that or if you're ramping up your golf again and you're going to be playing a lot of golf, think about contact. Contact for me is the single most important thing you can improve to improve the quality of your golf shops and the quality of the direction. I think if you're hitting the golf ball more solid, it's not going to be moving as much so rather than if you're slicing the golf ball, get good contact and then see what that does to the slice. If the contact improves, the club isn't coming in so open, the weight's not going back, maybe instead of licing the golf ball, we go to hitting a poll, or maybe we just go to hit a little bit of a fade, but it goes further, it curves less, and same thing. If you're struggling with the draw and you're hitting snappook after snappook after snap hook, the impact position gets better. If the quality of strikes gets better, maybe instead of hitting hooks, we just go to hitting straight balls, or we just go to hitting little draws. Something to think about. Hopefully that made sense. But like I said, I gauge golfers off of the quality of the strike because as I said earlier, I don't care if you hit draws or fades, but the quality of the strike. I think if that improves, your golf will improve. I want to thank everybody for listening rate reviews. God, wherever you get your podcast, Son of a Butch, you'll see you sore.

It's the Son of a Butcher podcast. I'm your host Claude harmon solo episode of the pod this week. I think it's an interesting time of year. I think there are a lot of people that are golfers that are going into the winter months. They're going to be maybe going inside, maybe hitting a lot of balls off of mats, and then there are a lot of people that are maybe going somewhere to where they're going to be playing a lot of golf. You know, I live in Florida, so a lot of people from the East Coast come down to Florida. So our season down here in Florida is just kind of ramping up. But I know a lot of people and a lot of places are going to be kind of stuck with regards to weather, and I think it's a really good time. I've talked about this before on the pod, but I think the off season for a lot of players is important. I do think that if you are in a climate to where you can't play golf year round, I think you've got to use that time when you can't be playing golf on the golf course all the time. You've got to use think of it like an off season. You know, other than really the PGA Tour, most people get time off. Most other sports get an off season. So if you are in a climate to where you're not going to be playing as much golf outside as normal, you're not going to be on the golf course as much as normal, and you're in a simulator, you're hitting off a mat, you're on the range, and stuff like that, I think it's an important time to utilize the off season that you're not going to be playing. So it's a time to say, Okay, here are some things I need to work on my golf swing. So I've said this a lot. The most important thing for me as an instructor is contact. It's not the direction of the ball, left to right, right to left. I really don't care about which direction players hit the golf ball. I work with players that fade it, I work with players that draw it. I'm not locked into one shape, but I am hyper focused in my golf lessons and when I'm watching players hit balls, is the quality of the strike and the contact. And I always say this, I'm lucky to have a really amazing teaching building here where I work at the Floridian. We have three indoor bays, and the garage doors open up, and we hit balls outside, hit balls from indoors to out. And I always say this to players that are struggling with contact. If we were hitting golf balls inside and just around the corner, he walked out the building and went to the left. If Roy McElroy showed up and started hitting golf balls and you were inside and you couldn't see who it was by the time he started ramping up, once he got anything kind of past a seven iron, once he started hitting five irons, once he starts hitting long irons, and then once he starts hitting three woods or drivers, you would be inside and you would be hearing a sound that would make you think, who the hell is out there? And if you went out looked and saw it was Rory McElroy or Dustin Johnson or Scotty Scheffler or Max Hoome, it doesn't matter who it is. A elite, elite tour player. You were going to notice if you're hitting golf balls on the range and you're going through your shot process and four or five slots behind you, John Rahm shows up, Scotty Scheffler shows up, and they started hitting drivers, we are going to turn around because of the sound. That is the quality of the strike, and that is the quality of the contact. So I think that's for a lot of golfers, I think it's forgotten because they're so obsessed, hyper focused on the curve in the direction of the golf ball, right, how the golf ball is curving, how the golf ball is moving, which obviously is hugely important. But I always say this to players. If you're hitting the golf ball off line, one of the easiest ways to not hit the golf ball off line is to start to hit the golf ball more solid, to catch it more in the center of the face, to not catch it off the toe, to not catch it in the heel with your irons. One of the ways to hit the golf ball more solid is to take a divot right. Two different types of shots in golf right iron shots where the golf ball's on the ground, and then driver, where we tee the golf ball up. So we have one golf club in our bag that isn't on the ground when we hit it, and that's our driver. We are going to tee it up. We can tee that ball as high or as low as you want to, but the golf ball is on a tee, so effectively, the golf ball is in the air. And when the golf ball is on the ground, it's on the ground right, So if it's in the air, you've got to swing the golf club up to where the golf ball is on the tee. When the golf ball's on the ground, you've got to get the golf club back to the ground. You've got to get the golf club back. I always say this in lessons as well. When you start your golf swing, when you set up to a golf ball, the golf ball is on the ground, it's on the surface, and I'd venture to say most people with their irons put the golf club on the ground on the surface. So the ball and the club are on the ground and on the surface. You've got to get the golf club back to the ground to hit the golf ball in the air. Now, obviously, if you return it back to the ground where you hit behind the golf ball, you're going going to hit the golf ball fat. If you don't get the golf club back to the ground, you're going to hit the golf ball thin. And that is going to have a significant effect on the quality of the strike, on the distance, and on the shape and the direction. So off season, utilize the off season to say, Okay, I am just going to focus one hundred percent on solid contact. I'm going to try and contact the golf ball consistently, so I'm not really going to worry about the direction the golf ball goes. And again I said this a few minutes ago, I think most golfers they never really think about how they're striking the golf ball. They only think and they only react to how much the ball is slicing, how much the ball is hooking, how much the ball is curving left to right, how much the ball is curving right to left. So what are some ways in the off season if you are stuck inside, if you are hitting golf balls into nets, into simulators, into matts, maybe just going to the driving range right, because the driving range is covered and you can hit balls. So some of the drills that I use to try and help players improve contact is first of all, just to explain the difference, like I just did. I mean, there's there's a difference between iron shots and driver shots. Holy grail for driver fitting. If anybody listening has been to a driver fitting on the tour at the tour level, the holy grail. The numbers they want is high launch, low spin. So they're trying to launch the golf ball at the driver as high as they can, and they want the spin to be down. Most of us are hitting down on the driver because we're coming over the top of it. We're slicing it. The angle of attack. That's a word that I think everybody maybe is familiar with, but if you're not, I think it's an important phrase that it comes from launch monitor technology. All the launch monitors now with all the radar and the data, they give you a lot of numbers, right, carry, launch, total carry, spin, side spin, all of this stuff, right, But one of the things that launch monitors do tell you is angle of attack. That's the angle that the golf club is coming into the ball. So when you set up to the golf ball, the club is zero, you swing it back up. Now you've got to swing it back down. How much you're swinging it down is kind of a you know, launch monitor for dummies. That's an indicator on angle of attack, how much you're hitting up, how much you're hitting down. So if you're trying to hit a driver, you would want to be hitting up. So what launch monitors do is they give negative and positive numbers. So down would be negative, positive would be up. So using Brooks as an example, right, Brooks Keepka one of the really elite drivers of the golf ball with his driver, he's one degree down with his driver. Why because he's hitting a fade. When he tries to hit a draw, he's hitting one degree up on it. Okay, so when players are hitting irons, you want that. The reason why I think a lot of players can't take dibots is they just they don't hit down on the golf ball enough. Now, there are a lot of reasons why. I think a lot of players it's optical, Right, the golf ball's on the ground, and what you're going to try and do is you're going to try to get the golf ball in the air. If you're topping the golf ball a lot, if you're hitting a lot of golf balls, thin, I think logically it would make sense to say, Okay, the ball's on the ground, I've got to get the golf ball in the air, so I need to swing up. I think a lot of that is perception. But if we put you in your golf stance and took the club away, set up to a five art, said hey, get into your golf pusture, go ahead and set up to this five art, take the golf club out of your hands, give you a ball, and say, okay, now we're gonna throw the golf ball from your setup underhanded, and you're gonna try and get it into the air. Most people the arm would work up. And I think that I've seen this enough to where I think that's what players are trying to do. The ball isn't getting into the air. They're coming from out to in. Their weight is going back because they're tired of hitting it thin. They think if they go back they'll hit up on it, and they hit it fat. They hit it thin, and it doesn't work. So one of the easiest ways with your irons to start to think about improving your contact is when you set up to the golf ball. You're setting up and ideally we would like your weight to be at fifty percent on the left fifty percent on the right. If your right handed golfer, left is your lead foot, right is your trail foot. Reverse that if you're a left handed golfer, so fifty to fifty. One of the best ways to improve your contact is to think of the relationship between where your weight is on the right leg and the left leg. So, if you're a right handed golfer, at impact, we need you to have more weight on your left foot, on your lead foot. So if you're a right handed golfer, your left foot is your lead foot as you're swinging the golf club into impact and at impact, you need to have more weight on your front foot. Fifty to fifty at impact not great, sixty forty at impact better, seventy thirty at impact better, eighty twenty at impact better. You know, with force plate technology now we swing catalyst. When players are hitting golf balls, I can see where their weight is. I can see how their weight is shifting and how their weight is transferring. So one of the easiest ways with your irons is to feel like at the moment of contact, at impact, you have to have more weight on your front foot than your back foot. So if you're right hand golfer, more weight at impact on your left foot. An easy way to feel that is go ahead and get out, get a pitching wedge, get a sand wedge, get a small club that you can control it. You can't even do this with nine irons, you know, nothing more than kind of a nine iron nine iron pitching wedge, sand wedge. You can even do this loob wedge set up to the golf ball normally. Then if you're a right handed golfer, drop that right foot back so your toes are all you know, almost behind your left heel, and then lift your heel right heel up, so now all your weight is going to be on your left side. Right, all of your weight is going to be on your left side. So if you struggle with contact, if you struggle with hitting the golf ball thin, if you struggle with hitting the golf ball fat heavy, this is a great way to start to change and improve how the golf club is being delivered into the ball at impact, but also improve your angle of attack. So take a sand wedge. You're going to make a kind of a half swing, half swing back, half swing through, and you're just basically going to keep all of that weight on your front foot. I'm guessing if you do that, you're going to feel something different because the reason why we're lifting that back leg. That back foot that heal up is we're trying to put you off balance, right, We're trying to balance you on your front foot, on your lead foot. And I think if you get that feeling, all of the sudden, the contact is going to improve. The contact is going to be different. You're going to be hitting most likely the ball then the turf. Right. That's that's what the best ball strikers with their irons do. They get the ball first and then the divot is in front of the golf ball. Another phrase that launch monitor technology has given us is low point. Where is the low point of the golf swing that you're making. So if you think about your golf swing, it's kind of a little bit of a like a half circle. Right. Start with the golf club on the ground, take the golf club up, take the golf club back to the ground, golf club works back up. So where the club is bottoming out, the low point of the golf club it needs to be in front of the golf ball, not at the golf ball, not behind the golf ball. So that's another thing that during the offseason, if you do have access to go to a range, to go to a club and you know, if they have a launch monitor that you can get on, you could go ahead and take a look at this yourself. But hey, if someone's got a launch monitor at the range or the club and say, listen, any chance that I could book you for a half hour and I could just get some basic numbers of what I do. Right, So, if you've never had access to that type of technology, I think it's really really important to do. You would see whether you're hitting down, whether you're hitting up, So having all of that weight kind of shift it onto that front foot and then just basically leaving there and then that right heel is in the air, hit some half shots and then maybe say all right, let me make some three quarter shots. Maybe start off with a sand wedge and you're kind of in that exaggerated close position, the right heels up, all your weights on your front foot, and you're just making swings. If you try and go backwards, you're not going to be able to do it because that right heel is in the air, right, so you're going to be off balance and you're just not going to make really good contact. You might not even make contact at all. So you would maybe all of a sudden One of the things I think that might happen is all of a sudden, you're taking a divot and the divot's in front of the golf ball. I think that's that's a massive, massive change. Another really basic drill to fix contact that I like is an alignment stick. If you've got an alignment stick in your bag, go ahead and take your setup, and you know, start off with this with sand wedges and work your way up. Go ahead and take your setup, take your stance, and then say, okay, once I get the width of my stance, I'm going to take the alignment stick okay, and I'm going to place it on the inside of my right foot. If you're a right hand golfer, right, so you're just going to place it inside and it's just going to run parallel to your right foot. Right, so the alignment rod sticks out, and you want to kind of have the end of the alignment stick kind of in line with the end of your right heel, so the majority of the alignment stick is now kind of in your field of play. The idea behind this is to make some swings and land the golf club onto the ground without hitting the alignment stick. Right. I think that's a good one. I think it's it's again, it's very similar to the drill where your weight is forth, but it's optical, right, It's an optical illusion that we want to try and we know that that alignment stick is there. So what we're going to do is it's going to force us to cover the golf ball a little bit more with our chest because obviously if we go back and you can start off by doing this and just make some practice wings, no golf ball, just make a practice swing and get this feeling and see if you can make practice wings and not hit that alignment stick. That's kind of you know, running parallel to your right foot, your left handed golfer, it's parallel to your left foot, and the majority of the stick should be out in front of you because we're trying to have it as a barrier. Make some practice wings and just say listen, let me see if I can make practice wings and not hit the alignment stick. If you're hitting the alignment stick, that is going to show you a lot of things. It's going to show you that your weight probably is going back that you know you're trying to move backwards to try and get the golf ball in the air, all of those things right. And again I think you will see in this drill that you're starting to take a divot. So you could do this with sand wedges up to you know, pitching wedge seven iron. You can move the alignment stick as close to the golf balls as you want, right, just to see what that angle is. If you look at divot patterns with tour players with their irons, right, what tour players do with their irons is they hit a golf ball and they take a divot in front of the golf ball. So then the golf ball moves back, so they're moving back right, They're not going forward. What most people do is they try and find on the ground. They basically trying to find a t right. So they hit a ball, they take a divot, and then they address that golf ball right at the top of the divot. The club's a little bit below it helps it get it in the air. So you want to try and think in terms of landing the golf club down and taking that divot in front of the golf ball. If you don't want to do that, sometimes I want to hitting golf balls. I'll take a golf ball, and directly in front of the golf ball, I'll stick a t in the ground, push it all the way down. So imagine that you're on a parth three, Go ahead and tee your golf ball up. Then take the golf ball off the tee and move it back to If you're a right handed golfer, so tee it up and then just drop it off the tee right behind it right. So now you are going to hit your iron and the goal is the tee that's in the ground, press down that's in front of the golf ball. You're going to try and hit a shot and move the tee in front of the ball right again. That's all designed to try and help you get that angle of attack to hit down on it, to get that feeling of the weight being more forward, another good way to feel, and I ask players to do this all the time. And lessons is go ahead and take a setup, set up to the ball, and then imagine someone has asked you that has never played golf before, what is impact? But what does impact look like? Can you just show me what impact looks like without making a backswing. That's the important part here. We're not going to ask you to make a backswing. So if you've got a camera and you can film yourself doing this, go ahead and set the camera up if you've got a tripod, and put it on a tripod and rest it. But you're gonna want to take a look, and you're gonna have the camera facing your chest right, And then imagine someone was going to ask you to explain to them what impact look like. Just go ahead and get into what you think would be an impact position, and then go ahead and hit one, and then go ahead and look at the two. I'm guessing that if you're not a great ball striker, if you don't take a ton of divits, if you're not a great iron player, your impact position with a golf club and a ball is going to look very different than your impact position with no ball, right, if you're just getting into impact, and I'll be honest, I don't think I've ever had anyone do this drill. And we're talking from elite tour player down to regular average fifteen twenty twenty five handicappers trying, you know, someone trying to break a hundred for the first time. There isn't anyone whose impact position looks bad. They all get into good impact positions that the club goes, the handle goes a little bit forward, the weight goes forward, the hips turn whatever, the head goes a little bit forward. Definitely, the weight goes forward. I have never seen anyone when I say show me impact and we're able to measure how much percentage of weight is on the left and the right. I can't think of anybody that's gone sixty forty right leg versus left leg. Everybody say when I say say just show me impact, you know where impact is? What would impact look like? Everyone tends to get into a good impact position. And I think if you can work backwards from that and say, okay, I've got an image of what my body looks like when I'm in a good impact position, right, so man, maybe I can try and make my regular golf swing look like that getting into that really really good impact position. Impact contact, the quality of the strike, the quality of the interaction between the golf club and the ball and the ground is massively, massively important to become a better iron player, to become a better ball striker. One of the things when we're looking at launch monitor technology as well, When people's contact and impact gets better when the quality of the strike gets better, when they start to take a divot with their irons, I see the speed. Right, there's two things we're looking at speed wise in the golf when we're looking at clubhead speed and ball speed. But when I see players contact improve, the number one thing that I see is the ball speed increases. The speed the golf ball is coming off the golf club increases because you're going to be hitting it more in the center of the face, You're going to be creating a better impact position, You're going to be creating better contact. So the quality of the strike. We will tend to see that in ball speed right, in the speed of the golf ball coming off the golf sometimes right if we look at when players are struggling, we'll look at their club head speed on a bad shot versus a good shot, and sometimes the good shot, the clubheads speed actually goes down maybe a mile per hour, half a mile per hour, two miles per hour, but the ball speed jumps five ten miles per hour, and they hit the golf ball fifteen yards further with maybe one mile per hour less clubhead speed, but the ball speed jumps. That's contact, that's quality of strike. One of the biggest differences not the single I was gonna say the single, but one of the biggest differences between regular average golfers non elite elite players is quality of strike. I mean Roy McRoy doesn't hit the golf ball thin, right, John Rahm. Every maybe a couple of times a year you might see an elite elite to where a player hit one. I mean Scotty Scheffler doesn't hit the golf ball thin the five iron. It's not blading it over the green right, he's not hitting six inches behind it. Quality of the strike is good. So in the offseason, if you're going into that or if you're ramping up your golf again and you're going to be playing a lot of golf, think about contact. Contact for me is the single most important thing you can improve to improve the quality of your golf shops and the quality of the direction. I think if you're hitting the golf ball more solid, it's not going to be moving as much so rather than if you're slicing the golf ball, get good contact and then see what that does to the slice. If the contact improves, the club isn't coming in so open, the weight's not going back, maybe instead of licing the golf ball, we go to hitting a poll, or maybe we just go to hit a little bit of a fade, but it goes further, it curves less, and same thing. If you're struggling with the draw and you're hitting snappook after snappook after snap hook, the impact position gets better. If the quality of strikes gets better, maybe instead of hitting hooks, we just go to hitting straight balls, or we just go to hitting little draws. Something to think about. Hopefully that made sense. But like I said, I gauge golfers off of the quality of the strike because as I said earlier, I don't care if you hit draws or fades, but the quality of the strike. I think if that improves, your golf will improve. I want to thank everybody for listening rate reviews. God, wherever you get your podcast, Son of a Butch, you'll see you sore.