There’s nothing better than giving your golf friends that look when you have knocked one past them, or are you the one struggling to keep up? It’s no secret that gaining a few extra yards from the tee or taking less club into the green is becoming an advantage within the game. Let’s look at some areas to focus on when trying to increase your clubhead speed.
Firstly, I think it’s important to change your mindset on the golf course and let go, we sometimes don’t swing fast enough because we feel a loss of control or fear of hitting a poor shot.
Squatting and jumping – Try to get low in the downswing and feel like you are jumping out of your shoes at impact. To be more precise try and get the hands at their lowest when the club is parallel to the feet in the downswing and then start to extend up and jump where you feel you are pushing up off the ground and your lead shoulder is getting further away from the ball. The pull up on the handle and the change of direction on the grip will cause the clubhead to speed up. Its known technically as parametric acceleration. This movement will also have a 2 for 1 effect on the distance you create as it will help create a nice shallow angle of attack which is also important for helping maximising distance with your driver.
Let’s make it longer – think chip shot to full shot. If we are swinging too short, we are missing the opportunity to increase clubhead speed and also increase the separation between our centre of pressure and centre of mass in the downswing. However, a longer backswing needs to be combined with the below as we could create a longer backswing but slow down our change of direction. ingre
The change of direction – this is probably the most influential ingredient for higher clubhead speed, but what does it mean? Firstly, how quickly can you shift the pressure in your feet in the backswing and then the downswing. The quicker you can do this the greater the opportunity it creates to increase your clubhead speed.
In the backswing we want to try shift our pressure as quickly as we can into the trail foot as the club shaft is parallel to your toe line in the back swing, also known as P2 in golf positions. Completing the backswing quicker creates opportunity to change direction quicker in the downswing, allowing you to create greater force on the golf club resulting in increased clubhead speed.
As this happens quickly you want to be trying to shift your pressure into your lead foot as you the club is parallel to the ground in your backswing. Just try doing this without a ball to start and you will feel a very early change of direction for some.
It's not easy to sequence these things together and thanks to research we have lots of evidence to now back up these changes in speed creation. I have use of a pressure mat to help us understand and improve this element more easily so please do reach out if you need further support in this area it needs to be managed alongside your other swing tendencies.
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