Flag Hunters Golf Podcast
Hello and welcome to Flaghunters ! It is a privilege to bring to you this powerful insight into playing better Golf. In all my years of being in the game of Golf from competing at a high amateur level, to caddying, teaching, and being a overall Golf geek, I have an insatiable, curiosity driven desire to get down to the bottom of what it takes to truly get better playing the game of Golf that we all unconditionally love. This has been one of the greatest journeys of my life and I am deeply grateful for all that Golf has given me. Thank you for joining me in this incredible journey. This is my ever evolving love letter to Golf. Jesse Perryman P.S. Please Rate, Review and Subscribe !
Flag Hunters Golf Podcast
Unlocking Revolutionary Golf Techniques: Bradley Hughes on the 430 Path, Ground Force, and Equipment Impact on Your Swing
Feel free to text me at (831)275-8804
Unlock the secrets of a revolutionary golf swing with insights from legendary golf instructor and former PGA Tour player Bradley Hughes. What if mastering a few key movements could eliminate swing thoughts and lead to more consistent, powerful shots? Bradley shares his groundbreaking drill series, developed alongside John Erickson, that focuses on muscle awareness and body mechanics. They promise golfers of all levels a path to transform their game by emphasizing target-based play, drawing inspiration from the techniques of icons like Trevino, Hogan, and Price.
Discover how the simple yet profound "430 path" can simplify your approach to golf, allowing for more consistent ball striking by reimagining the swing as a target-oriented movement—similar to sports like baseball and basketball. Bradley and I discuss the science behind ground force reactions, showing how tools like pressure plates and the Down Underboard can enhance your power and stability. Footwork, post-impact awareness, and proper alignment emerge as central themes, with personal anecdotes underscoring the joy of realizing these improvements firsthand.
Bradley and I also explore the impact of equipment on swing dynamics, highlighting how heavier and flatter clubs can aid in maintaining awareness and control. Through stories of golfers who have triumphed by focusing on these principles, we illustrate the immense potential for improvement. The episode wraps up by celebrating the personal growth and satisfaction that come from mastering these techniques, inviting listeners to experience the thrill of a more intuitive and effective way of playing golf.
To reach Bradley easiest, his Instagram is @bhughesgolf.com
I would HIGHLY encourage you to sign up for his Members site ! www.bradleyhughesgolf-members.com
Thank you to TaylorMade and JumboMax grips for their support
Hello, this is Jesse Perryman of the Flag Hunters Golf Podcast, welcoming you to another great conversation this week.
Speaker 1:This week we have the man, the myth, the legend, former PGA Tour player, two-time Australian Masters champion, played in the inaugural President's Cup. His partner, notably that week, was Nick Price, when Nick Price was number one in the world. That week was Nick Price when Nick Price was number one in the world, arguably Bradley was probably playing some of the best golf in the world leading into that event at that time. But if I haven't tipped the cap already, it's or my hand excuse me it's Bradley Hughes. Brad Hughes originally is from Australia, lives in South Carolina and now teaches at the Hawley Tree Country Club. And a great instructor to the world's best, both men and women, and a lot of great amateurs, and he could certainly teach you how to swing the golf club much better than you thought possible. In this discussion we talk about the drill series. The drill series originated with Brad and a man by the name of John Erickson, and those who are longtime listeners of the podcast know that I am a member of the ABS community, advanced Ball Striking and it has revolutionized my game and changed my game after the age of 50 for the better. It's notable for me to say, and I'm sure a lot of people in the community in the advanced ball strike community can honestly say that they've never played the level of golf that they're currently playing right now. As long as they adhere to the information and work the steps, work the drills. And it's hard for me to put into words, but when you listen to Bradley speak, I'm sure that there's going to be a lot of resonance there, because what he has to say makes sense. It's based on common sense. The methodology is based on the greats and what John and Brad have done have taken what the greats have done and narrowed them down into tangible actions. You may not swing like a Sergio Garcia or a Nick Price or a Nick Faldo, but it's entirely possible to have the same dynamics that they have, hence exploding your game beyond what you could possibly imagine.
Speaker 1:So sit back, relax, enjoy this episode. I always love talking to Brad. I'm a huge fan. I'm grateful to call him a friend and somebody that I ask advice for quite a bit. He's helped me with my game more than I could possibly imagine, so I will make sure to have all his contact information. He's got a phenomenal, members-only website that I'm going to highly encourage everybody to check out. So, without further ado, enjoy this conversation and I'm sure it will find you very, very well. And lastly, I want to give an extra special shout out to Jumbo Max Grips. I am now an ambassador of Jumbo Maxbo max grips and our great tagline is are you curious? These grips are phenomenal, folks, and we've got many different sizes and variations to fit your unique swing needs. So check them out jumbomaxgripscom jumbo max and enjoy the episode.
Speaker 1:Folks cheers oh, I almost forgot. Please remember to rate, review and subscribe and, if you ever need to bs with me or get a hold of me, my, make it a fantastic week. Hello, this is Jesse Perryman. Thank you for tuning into the Flag Hunters Golf Podcast. I have one of my main and direct influences in this game, deeply influenced by this man. The regular listener knows who he is. His teaching has really helped to shape how we learn how to create a golf swing and how we go out and play. His name is Bradley Hughes. He's a friend of mine. I respect everything that he says and I would encourage you, by the end of this, to reach out to him and check out his website because you're going to get a lot. You're going to get a lot of information, and a lot of really proven information that has been tried and tested throughout all the great tours in the world. Bradley, thanks for coming on, pal always a pleasure.
Speaker 2:Always a pleasure, jesse, love it, love talking to you, so we're gonna get at it, we? I'm not sure how long ago it was, maybe at least a year ago, before our previous one. So, yeah, let's crank out it and give out some more great info.
Speaker 1:Get everyone better, absolutely I'm excited about this, brad, you know I I think. Uh, before we get into the drills, I wanted to ask you this, while it's on my mind, and the two parts first thing is that the drills work, but but what's interesting in my own game and what's manifested, is that when I play golf it is almost impossible for me to think about my golf swing. I literally don't have swing thoughts ever since I started doing the drills. And I kind of have a theory and I wanted to get your two cents on it that when you're doing the drills we use an impact bag, we use a board to help build our pressures.
Speaker 1:There's a distinct difference between working on the movements versus hitting a golf ball and seeing either positive or negative results. And for me it's exponentiated my learning, like I was able to revolutionize my golf swing in six months and I think if I would have do it banging balls and whatnot it would have taken a lot longer and the process would have been a lot more frustrating. So do you think that by doing the drills, it kind of re how can I word this You're focused on doing the movements, movements, and then when you get on the golf course, it's almost impossible to have a swing thought, so I don't know if any of that makes sense.
Speaker 2:There's a hundred percent makes sense so you know, I I often use this for an example when I'm out doing a lesson with someone on the range or so forth, and I'll say to them, let's pick up that ball and throw it over there towards the golf cart or towards the bin, and they'll say to them, let's pick up that ball and throw it over there towards the golf cart or towards the bin, and they'll hit it or come really close to it and I go, what did you think of? And they went well, nothing. I just looked at the bin and I kind of trusted my instincts and my form was there and I I've learned how to throw it. You know, from a young age you learn how to do some type of motion.
Speaker 2:But the difficulty with golf is well, there's several difficulties. One, the golf course is never the same. So you play a different course all the time and that may mean, even if you're playing at your own home course, sometimes the tees are in a different spot, the wind is a different spot, you're on the left side of the fairway as opposed to the right side of the fairway, so you've got kind of different lies. So there is no real sequence of events that you can strictly adhere to playing on a golf course, because no two shots are the same. So you have to become ultimately the idea of playing a good golf game and you'll hear this on tv. Let's you know you. They'll interview one of the pros at the end of the round. He's just shot seven or eight under and they go. Well, uh, ernie, you know, that was pretty easy. What'd you think? How are you going? And he goes uh, I don't know nothing. Like they're not, they're not invested in how they're doing it. They're just in a basic rhythm of making a swing, letting the ball get in the way and trying to hit it where they want to hit it.
Speaker 2:So people overanalyze too much and they especially overanalyze, you know, if you think of a practice swing is really. You know, I tell a lot of people when I'm working with them now, let's do the practice swing, here's our focus on. A practice swing is really. You know, I tell a lot of people when I'm working on now, let's do the practice swing here's. Here's our focus on the practice swing. We might do a short and we'll talk about the drills. Some people that don't know. We'll talk about them later, but we might do a short practice start from the 430 and swing through to the finish with a you know an accelerating pivot to the end. Or we might do a bit of drill five, where we need to feel that the right shoulder go external because of the arm rotation, that the shaft stays behind us. So we're just going to push our feet. What we're going to do is we're going to liberate ourselves into doing that in the practice swing, and when you stand over the ball you just trust that that swing is going to work.
Speaker 2:So then you don't think of the swing. It's very hard to think of the swing. Well, maybe Shaquille O'Neal used to think about what he had to do at three throws because he was awful at them. But if you watch a lot of the basketballs, they have a routine and they just shoot. They're not thinking of I've got to put my elbow here and I've got to have my palm at 45 degrees and I've got to flick my wrist at the end and snap it. And they're not really thinking of that. They're just executing a motion that has they've basically worked on and worked on and worked on until it becomes a habit.
Speaker 2:And, like I said, that's hard with golf because no two lies are kind of similar, unless you're on the range. But the other thing about golf that makes it quite difficult in this kind of technological world is that there is so much shit that gets in people's heads that they watch something, they go oh god, that looks good, and then it could be to the total detriment of what they really need to do or trying to do, so they're. They're basically just dropping a spanner in the engine and turning the key on and hoping that spanner doesn't catch something and mess them up. So it's a hard world, you know. I think growing up, and if you think you know players long before me, if you ask people who's got the best swings in the history of golf, you're going to have Hogan and you're going to have Snead and you know, maybe Trevino as a ball striker, maybe not as a swing. But a lot of the great swings that people revere were built in the past when there were no cameras and there were no nothing. It was trial and error, it was feel and pressure and force and with ball reaction, to see what the ball did. And then they learnt well, what did I feel? Actually, I felt this or I did that, and then they started going about recreating that. So that's kind of what the drills are.
Speaker 2:Myself and John put a lot of time and effort into working out and I wouldn't call it a system, I would just call it a learning tool of how the swing should function, based on, you know, kind of what the most elite ball strikers did. And, as we always say, you can't build a swing in one fell swoop. You know people are looking for that one magic potion, which really doesn't exist. You know it may work for a week or two or maybe a day or two, but every alteration you make to your swing this is where the drills get very interesting Every alteration that you make to the swing has a bearing or an effect on some other part of the swing. Now that could show up a day later, the back nine or a week later, but it's going to show up and then you have to attack that new aspect because that's now changed based on the original intention of what you did. So that's what the drills take care of. Myself and John have really worked out. We know if you do this in drill one, drill three is going to be the opposite effect to it and it's all going to tie up. It's all going to work together and you just keep getting better and better at repetition so your body can deal with the force of the club.
Speaker 2:It's not even the look of it really. A lot of great players just don't really have a good look and swing. But if you look at the correct parts let's say, from 430 spot, hip-high entry at least, to hip-high exit and then maybe the finish they're all very similar and that's the important part of the swing. But you know a lot of golf instruction. Where I think people go wrong and I've had several arguments with people about this online just because one I don't believe in it and two everyone seems to is that you everyone gets taught a backswing. But if you look in the hall of fame there's a hundred different backswings that were really good players, so you can throw the backswing out as a fundamental.
Speaker 2:I mean, there is an obvious way that it has to work or should work, but that's really based on each individual. It's not. There's no set pattern to. You have to be on play in here, or you have to have a flat left wrist, or you have to have a bowed left wrist, or you have to have the arm you know close to you, your right arm close to your side, you've got to be pointing the club at the target, because for every four people that you tell some that they have to do that, I can show you 10 that don't do it.
Speaker 2:So the method of the way that we teach is the most important part of golf is impact. So if you know how to get to impact, then you stand a chance, and that what it means is it doesn't matter where you go, as long as you know where you're coming from. You can kind of go in several different places to get there, and I'll show that on doing a lesson with someone, because I always get that you know. What should my backswing do? What should my backswing do? I go, well, let's not worry about that, and I know that sounds really strange to people and I know I've had many arguments over the years or got crazy emails and stuff online from people like how can you not care about it? I go, well, I do care about it, but there is no set backswing. It's it's going to be a little bit different for every person and the reason being is we all see things differently. Someone's right eye dominant, someone's left eye dominant, someone you know, right eye dominant may play from more of a shut stance. A left-eyed dominant may play from more of an open stance and that's all going to dictate the way the club goes away and where it points. So you know there's so many variables of the swing that, if we could pardon me, eliminate a lot of the concerns about that and put the concern closer to impact and beyond.
Speaker 2:Golf then becomes a target game rather than a golf swing game, because every other sport, like we talked about before, if you're throwing a ball, you're looking at glove on the first baseman. If you're shooting a hoop, you're looking at the rim. If you're playing snooker, you're looking at glove on the first baseman. If you're shooting a hoop, you're looking at the rim. If you're playing snooker, you're looking at the ball. So you are not paying attention to what you're really doing. On the first half of the action You're reacting to a target. So really golf and people hate it when I say it, but golf becomes really simple and easy when you understand that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it certainly did for me. You know, being a student of yours and John's, the one question that I get when it comes to everything with us what we're talking about right now within the, within the halls of advanced ball striking, is the number one question is what is 430? What is the 430 path? How does that correlate to the greats? And then let's go right into drill one how we start to train that into our nervous system and the positive effects that it has, not only coming into the strike, also beyond the strike. We're starting from impact drill one and the 430. Correct, so the 430 path.
Speaker 2:The way John and I go about it is, you know, obviously I'm going to stand behind you. I don't do a lot of filming. When I do lessons I might film two swings, one from behind or down the line, one from face on or caddy view, and I have them as reference and then I kind of show the people. Here's what we see, here's how we're going to fix it. Let's do this drill and we'll compare the two. So when you're watching someone or you're doing a lesson, you are viewing it from your vantage point. But the golfer needs to understand it from their vantage point, because when they're looking down at a ball, they're not looking back at me, they're not watching the club behind them, they're looking downwards. So they have to, they have to visually see where the club is coming from from their perspective. So the way to understand 430 is if you're a golfer and you're looking down at the ball, we're talking bird's eye view. Let's call the ball the golf ball, that's on the ground and in front of you, the middle of a clock, and then your feet would be at 6 o'clock because you are lower than the middle of the ball. So 12 o'clock would be, you know, an extension out the opposite direction. Three o'clock would be the target line, so the club to hit the ball straight and this is where it's very difficult for a beginner to hit the ball straight the shaft actually has to line up at 4.30 to make the ball go in the direction of you know, left of you, at nine o'clock. Because if you get the club out to three o'clock path which would in essence be steep some people would call it on plane, but to me it's steep you're not just going to stop your body and try and hit the ball with your hands, your body's going to try and move at the same time as that is happening.
Speaker 2:So what really happens is when you see a novice golfer, a new golfer based on other sports. They know they want to try and hit the back of the ball, but what they do is they start seeing the back of the ball from the top of their backswing, so they start heading out towards the ball. They get the club out to three o'clock but as their arms release, hips start to open, the shoulders start to turn left side balls, their feet transfer more. They actually hit the ball if the ball was a clock also, instead of hitting the ball around 3 o'clock. They hit it at 1 o'clock, so they're just basically pulling across the ball with a big slice.
Speaker 2:Action on the ball Now, where the face points, you know, is going to dictate what that ball does. It could start left and cut back, it could just go straight left or it could start right and cut or it could. You know, there's a number of things, and I'm not trying to be funny when I do this with people, but you know I'll watch some people hit a few balls and they'll go slice and pull and snap, hook and top and then they'll hit a great one.
Speaker 1:They go see, I can do it.
Speaker 2:Why can't I do that all the time? And I don't mean to be rude when I say it to them, but I just say well, that was actually pot luck. You're not going to do that all the time. It was an actual. All the other crap is what you should do. That's more reasonable based on your swing, because the physics of your swing, all you're doing is making alterations in an attempt to hit a ball straight, and half the time, or more than half, that's not going to work. So let's learn how it really works.
Speaker 2:So the 4.30 path from the golfer's view, as we talked about, would be the shaft is aligned to 4.30 on a clock. If there was a clock sitting down on the ground, a sundial, you could see where 4.30 was and you had a shadow of the shaft there. That's kind of what you want to see and you can kind of see that out the corner of your eye. So you can see that obviously things are moving quickly, but you can see a shaft lined up to that point. So what happens to make that happen is you need to have your arms rotated clockwise, because what that does is it keeps the shaft behind you as soon as you lose arm rotation and I'm showing it on the screen here, which you probably won't see. But as soon as you start to lose arm rotation, immediately the shaft pitches steep. It comes out the other way. That's for.
Speaker 2:You know, it's not for everyone. That's kind of a poor golfer. A good golfer may lose arm rotation and realize, hey, I don't want to come over the top of it. So what they'll do is they'll drop their hands behind their hips and the club will get really low and then they'll like sling it out of there with a big push hook or a block type thing. So there's different variables to it. But you've got to understand the 430. As long as you've got enough shoulder turn or torso rotation, that's sharp. So let's say you want to hit the ball to second base. If we use baseball's analogy, your shoulders at 430, you're going to feel like they're aimed at first base and that gives you the avenue to put the arms not behind your body but in front of your body. So if I was already square to the target and I tried to put my hands behind me now, I'm stuck, what people would call be stuck.
Speaker 2:If I have body closure and my arms are in the same spot, they're actually in front of my chest again, they're not dropped behind me and, you know, slowed down. So we teach the player to understand that these are the visuals you have to see, and to be really technical. When I said the golf ball, you want to hit the golf ball right in the middle of it, at the back. So the middle would be three o'clock. But in, uh, in hindsight you actually hit the ball at 3, 15 ish or something like that, because, remember, the ball stays on the club face for I don't know how far, a few inches. Um, we'll talk about that later because I did a funny video the other day about that but um, the ball will separate off the face at three o'clock. So you actually don't even want to hit the middle of the back of the ball, you actually still want to hit it slightly in inside of the middle and the ball, when it jumps off the face, would then spit out straight at three o'clock visually. So you'll never understand a golf swing unless you see it through your own eyes. And that's how we go about trying to teach people, because then you have a better understanding. The guy that starts, you know not doing that, and has his camera there for an hour filming himself and, you know, runs out of battery and storage on his phone, just filming every swing and trying to look at what went wrong. You're never going to see that, because things look slightly different.
Speaker 2:Also with, if I had a tall posture, my Nicholas, you know you've seen the photo that we show of Nicholas at 430 from overhead. When you look down he's at 430. Everyone says, well, nicholas was upright and his shaft does a little. Everyone says, well, nicholas was upright and his shaft does a little. It's not 100% 430 from the coach's view because he stood so tall in his torso His arms are getting out in front of him, the shaft is actually pitching out. It's way more out than a Hogan would be, but you can see it from above.
Speaker 2:It's still 430. So that's where the camera plays tricks that you've because someone would watch that in film. And they go oh no, jack, you're too steep dude, you've got to get more inside. And Jack, if he had any sense, would say, well, I'm just going to go win 18 majors and win everything, so it doesn't matter. But from his view. He's probably trying to say well, it is 4.30 from my view. So that's one of the key components is, you have to understand the swing from the sockets in your eyes, not the coach behind you or someone out in front of you.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that was a big revelation for me when I first got started doing the drills and understanding the 430 line and how it relates to coming into the ball. Just seeing that, uh, from from my eyes doing the drills, lining up the shaft with the shaft that was lined up at at four o'clock, uh was huge. I mean, it felt to me that, uh, you know where, where, where we place our shoulders doing drill one and where we have our start in doing drill one. It's exactly what you said. I felt like I was going to hit the ball right over the first baseman, correct.
Speaker 1:And what was interesting is going out and playing golf while doing drill one, where my primary miss was right. But one thing that wasn't happening was there was no early extension and we're going to get into drill two and drill three because this will explain straightening out that right push. But it really felt anatomically correct. It really did. It felt anatomically like, oh okay, so what I was doing before was going against my own anatomical correctness and I was manipulating the shaft and club to get the club back to square, which is what a lot of people do. But now I'm actually putting physically, putting my body and the club head and the shaft in an environment where it's literally now forcing me to use rotary motion to come into the strike and out of the strike.
Speaker 2:So my hands and arms aren't acting independently trying to save the shot, and this was the genesis of it, absolutely so you know, drill one is also called the hand velocity drill and that that's kind of a double entendre because what it does is via the forearm. I get so many questions from people about forearm rotation that they just don't believe me. But when you use forearm rotation you uncock your wrist. So if I had my, let's say, my left hand just talk about left hand initially if I had my left hand and the palm was almost pointing at the ground and my watch or my logo on my glove was pointing almost to the sky, if I rotate my forearm it all squares up. Yeah, it uncocks the wrist. So the hand speed actually comes out of forearm rotation and people will see this on my website and Instagrams and stuff. I actually have a picture of me when I was 14 years old and both my arms are fully rotated and my hands are probably three inches from the ball, almost level with the ball, and it's like my left palm is down and my right palm is up still. So I have a massive amount of forearm rotation. So what happens from there this is why it's called the hand velocity drill is, if I even got to that, nice 430 and I was getting into that position. I'm talking about if I tried to use my hands and you can see this on the video. But if I try to use my hands, all that happens is the grip just stops and comes backwards and the club just goes flinging by. Yeah, and next minute my left wrist is bent and my right wrist is flat. All I've done is use hand manipulation to try and hit the ball straight. But the reality is, if you rotate your forearms it quickens your hands up. So now you maintain the wrist angles through impact and by that point the ball's gone. So that ball is not going to go hardly anywhere except pretty straight where the face is pointed at impact.
Speaker 2:But you know the forearms uncock the wrist. So it's not. You just don't hit the ball with the hands, and the hands have always been talked about that that's what hits the ball. But we kind of John and I now you obviously realise it's not what hits the ball at all.
Speaker 2:You will feel it in your hands because as your forearm rotates you are flying pressure from you know, into the wrist cock and you're going to feel the pressure in your hands that are going to intensify and probably grip pressure and awareness that you know where the club face is. So you're going to feel it in your hands that they're not the engine, they just basically hang on. And you know, I did a lot of stuff with ste Steve Elkington and Secret Golf back in the day and got to hang out with Jackie Burke who was a great thinker and talker about golf, won the Masters, won the PGA, and he would always say the hands do nothing in the swing and it totally makes sense to me. But you know, and people would listen to Jackie Burke say it and they go hi Jackie, yeah, he's a legend, yeah.
Speaker 2:And it just goes over their head?
Speaker 1:And if one of us say it, they go oh, you're a dickhead Like. What are you talking about?
Speaker 2:Of course your hands do it, but they don't, and it's the hands' reaction to how your arms work.
Speaker 2:And really, your lower arm can do a lot more rotating, yet upper arm doesn't have to do much at all. It's all like I just saw a great video that I'm going to put on my member site somewhere Johnny Miller. He was talking about the same thing that I was talking about. He's almost near impact and his left arm is fully rotated and his left thumb is pointing straight backwards. You know at 3 o'clock. And then he said what happens to good players from here to there, they just basically rotate their thumb. So what he's talking about he's not talking about hands, because you can see that would go backwards. He's rotating his thumb, which is really using the forearm. So all these guys knew it. Maybe they didn't explain it as well, pardon me, but they knew exactly what was. So it it makes a lot of sense to listen to the jackie burks and even johnny mill, even though people said he was a pain to listen to commentate. He does have some good ideas and I think gary player has some good ideas.
Speaker 2:I just posted something this morning. He had a thing and he talked about the forearm. So Hogan's books, you know world-renowned. And again, maybe he didn't explain it all perfectly, but if you read between the lines and think of it in different verbiage. It totally makes sense, all of it. So drill one's a starting point, because impacts are most important and impact is not over at the ball. You've got to keep things moving. So that's why you need hand speed to keep moving through the ball without the club trying to flip past the hands. So that's drill one, that's 430 path and why it's also called the the velocity drill. But it's not the hands that are actually doing it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's powerful. That was a big revelation for me, and it also makes sense that we're talking about some of the greats. I mean when I was growing up, especially in the 80s. I mean Hal Sutton, craig Stadler, hale, irwin, curtis Strange these guys all had Popeye forearms. All those guys had huge forearms and now I know why. You can never figure out why 100%?
Speaker 2:So I've been teaching one of Arnold Palmer's grandsons for the last three years or so. Very good kid, perfect kid, like very knowledgeable, loves working at it. It loves doing the drills. And the reason that he started to come and see me is he started to listen to me reading my stuff and he went. That's exactly what grandpa used to tell me. So it's fascinating to hear from him what Arnold Palmer was telling him to do. And Arnold Palmer was not an instructor, but he knew what had to happen to make the shot go where he wanted to do it.
Speaker 2:So I love hearing stories like that, you know. I'll tell you one more. It's a little bit of a brag, but I was down in Florida working with Vijay Singh and his son. I think I might have seen Russell Knox at the time too. When I was down there and JC Sneed was there, he was out on the range practising. He couldn't hit a lot of balls, he was sort of struggling with something and he would come over and watch a little bit. And after a couple of hours and we had a break he came up to me, sat in my golf cart with me. He goes. I just want to tell you, son, he goes. You're the first person I've ever seen that gets it he goes.
Speaker 2:Everything that you said is what sam, uncle sam, used to tell me. So they're the kind of things that I love to hear, because I'm not out there trying to make money or to try and just sell snake oil. I'm actually trying to make people better, and to hear those stories come from people that lived it. You know, had relatives or grandparents that were famous golfers and were great players. It's pretty cool to know that. You know, I think myself and John have the formula and that's why you harp on that. It's 100% success rate, because it is because physics don't lie. The ball doesn't know who's hitting it, it can only react to physics. So if you're doing the right things to it, you're going to become better and hit way more better shots more often.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely no-transcript ambiguity. Information about ground force reaction. This is a whole thing now. Ground force reaction. You got pressure plates and these tools are useful. However, what's not being said is actually how to teach your body how to use these ground forces correctly where they're working for us, both in producing power and stability, and I think that latter part is what is really missing with the sort of the understanding of how to use the ground better.
Speaker 2:Drill two Drill two is it's basically drill one. Again, if we're doing the drill itself with the impact bag and we didn't touch on that. But the impact bag is there because it's heavy but it's soft, so it creates a lot more force and resistance in your muscles that are going to train them quicker than you know. It's like a 30-pound bag. Rather than hitting a golf ball, that's like one and a half ounces or so You'd have to hit. If you hit the bag 30 times, you'd probably have to hit 1,000 balls to create the same strength awareness. So when we do drill two, it's with my John calls it a power board. I have my own product called the Down Underboard and you put it between your feet and what you learn now is you learn to create pressure. So most of today's instruction is based heavily on hitting the ball a long way, trying to create as much speed as you can with the club head. So we've also got to understand there's a velocity and there's an acceleration speed. So a club that is maybe, let's say, two foot before impact if it's 90 degrees. But we're doing drill one really well and we're actually picking up hand speed uh, 90 miles an hour sorry, not 90 degrees if, if the club is 90 degrees and we're picking up hand speed by that forearm rotation and that club now moves up, you know it picks up speeding against a system that is trying to slow it down. Angular momentum is trying to slow the hands down and throw the club head. But if we can get the hands to move and the club head to move, there's your stability and your control of the club face and that 90 miles an hour, you know, a few feet before impact may start to accelerate up to 91 or 92. Hopefully, if it stays at 90, it's still still okay like you're not losing speed. Now everyone's kind of teaching create a lot of speed and then let that angular momentum happen. But really what happens is they'll reach, let's say they reach 90 miles an hour. At that same point they're probably going to be faster than that. But as the handle slows down, the hands slow down and the clubhead tries to pass. Even though it feels like the clubhead is picking up in speed, it's actually slowing down. So they may be hitting from 90 miles an hour by the time they get to the ball at 88 miles an hour, whereas what we're trying to teach is you may be 90 miles an hour and you're still going to be 90 or maybe increase it a little bit.
Speaker 2:So an accelerating clubhead, even if there is a variable of five miles an hour, an accelerating clubhead is going to propel that ball better than a decelerating clubhead, because the drill one and the drill two are using the foot pressure to basically not just create a vertical force in your swing. You don't just push down and jump up, you push down and squeeze in horizontally as well. That keeps you down in the shot. So one, you're staying closer to the ball, you don't have to straighten your right arm to hit it and your wrist can stay more normal, whereas if you're vertically jumping, your right arm is going to have to extend. It's a banded address and you're getting further from the ball're vertically jumping, your right arm is going to have to extend you know it's a banded address and you're getting further from the ball by vertically jumping. You have to extend your right arm. So you're going to mess up the low point, you're going to mess up the club face and you're also going to limit the amount of rotation your body can do beyond that spot. So the ground force is really important.
Speaker 2:You know Mo Norman and Ben Hogan and George Knutson again, it's living in the dark ages, but tell me three of the best ball strikers ever and their names are going to come up and they all talked about filling the left shoe. Mo didn't even want to crease in his left shoe at the finish. They wanted that left foot to be as flat as they could get. It would probably roll a little bit, especially with longer clubs, but their intention was to push into that and keep it flat and not jump it away or roll on the outside of the ankle like a lot of guys do today, because if you're pushing into your left foot it now starts to extend your left side away from the ball beyond impact, not only vertically, but you know, behind you as well. You can turn faster and that's kind of the idea. We want to be able to keep the torso turning, not just into impact and then stopping. We want it to keep turning from that 430 closed off position to a quite open exit. So, using the analogy of baseball, again, the ball's going to go we hope and hit the ball at the second base. Coming down, we're going to feel like we're going to hit it to first base and on exit you're actually going to feel like you're going to hit it to third base even though the ball's already gone.
Speaker 2:So that's really the reaction of opposite forces. You know there's sheer forces and there's all this other stuff, but to be honest, a lot of that stuff is superficial. You don't. You don't need to do it all. You want to. You want to create as much stability in your swing as you can because you need to control the rate of closure of the face. You've got to get the exit to match the entry really, because the swing's an arc, it's not in a straight line.
Speaker 2:So the foot stuff is very, very important because it pushes you into the ground for your release. It becomes better and stronger and faster. But it also provides all the resistance for you to then just rip your body off on the way through. And if your body's ripping on exit, it's overtaking the hand. So you're not going to flip the club head past yourself. And I often tell people this doing lessons, because they go I'm flipping it and I go not really. And I say there's actually a flip in every golf swing. It's just where it happens and how you go about it that you don't see it in some people.
Speaker 2:So drill one is basically a flip. We're trying to rotate. You know no shaft lean, no hand action that the club flies off playing. We're basically trying to get very aggressive forearm release onto the ball. So there's the flip. But because the body is, the hands are moving faster and starting to clear the left side out and then the left side of the post impact is going to overtake that release. You don't see the flip, so you've got to flip it.
Speaker 2:But if you're going to flip it, do it properly, like do it in the best spot, because we know how many people complain about flipping and they see it and they look at it and it causes inconsistencies. But it's because they're doing something wrong. The foot pressure is wrong, the path, you know the entry path is not 430 and the body is just given up or it's over-rotated too soon that people are trying to teach. Also, you know, get way open at impact. You don't have to. The key to being consistent and hitting it far is to keep rotating beyond impact. You don't have to get way open at impact, you've just got to keep rotating beyond it. So drill two sets us up for that, which is basically foot pressure, ground pressure, to build resistance, for now the body to overtake, which is drill three.
Speaker 1:So I need to make a comment before we go into drill three. Drill two and drill three were such a revelation for me, especially drill three. But one thing that I noticed looking at my swing on video over the last three, four years, brad, is because of the however many thousands of repetitions I've done with drill one and drill two, that the butt end of the club is lining up at impact with my center, which you were the one who first introduced me to Chi energy and how that is actually trained and used through drill one and drill through and ultimately into drill three. Talk about that, because I think you and John are the only people I know that have talked about that, by the way.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so John was. John was fascinated I think he tried it or did a little bit with martial arts and the chi is kind of your energy centre. You know, when people stand in their stances doing judo and karate and all that, you know they can chop a brick out from. You know, break three bricks from nowhere, basically, or the Bruce Lee one-inch punch. If someone ever looks that up on YouTube, they're providing all the energy out of their centre. They call it Danchian Chi, we call it, and it's basically below your belly button and in that area. So if we think about how drill one works, when we're rotating the club from 430, the.
Speaker 2:The shaft does not stand up, the wrist cock gets maintained, kind of. So you end up very close to where you started with your hand position and shaft alignment. So you can look at that and see that the shaft will be aligned right to that spot. Now people that get steep or extend, they'll tend to stand the shaft up much higher than its original setup position so that shaft is now not lined up to their chi dan shen. So they're losing energy out of the whole system there because basically the space between where their hands are and their body centre not only has it lifted, it's got further away.
Speaker 2:You know you kind of see the hands get way further away, people that stand the shaft up. So when you can rotate the club around and pack your arms back to yourself, you line the shaft up better to your dancer and then you can kind of do like the figure skaters or the dancers do. You know, the tighter the radius, the faster the motion, so they can spin really quickly because they've got their arms tucked into them and then they slow down and just kind of move their arms away. So again, that kind of gets back to acceleration velocity idea that you know, the more I can keep my arms closer, the faster I can keep rotating and keeping speed and pressure on the shaft, and the further my arms go away from me, the more everything is is stalling. So it's a very important thing and it's no I I know I had it in one of my books somewhere, but there's no, and I definitely had it on a video on YouTube that I used to do. It's no coincidence that when you look at Trevino, hogan, sneed, you know all those guys. Again the same guys. Even Duval did it great. Nick Price did it great. They lined the shaft back up to where it started. So it's at their chi and their power centre at the middle of their body there so they can just keep moving. Who moved faster through the ball than Nick Price? Not many.
Speaker 2:Hogan did it and it's why. Because you've got your foot pressure in and you've ripped that core and left side away from the ball and it basically just keeps you slinging through it and if the pivot is trying to move faster than the hands are or the club is, you'll never roll the face over. So that's kind of the production of now you have a shot, you just can't hit left. That's why Sheff was so good. You watch his. He's doing it all his footwork, the left side pull. I guarantee he's lining the shaft up very close to his cheek and he just rips through the ball and the face just never shuts over. So he hits it straight or he hits a little five to ten or twenty foot cut or something. That's never going to get out of trouble.
Speaker 2:Now I have seen him hit a few shots left, but they're more the long shot and I think that's just when he gets a little bit on top of the ball he doesn't quite turn behind it. He'll tend to do it when he's knocking down an iron and he'll tend to just get on top of the ball a little bit and he'll drive the the face de-lofted a little bit with the face point and left. He doesn't hook it, but he he did it on 10 at augusta and he's done it somewhere else that I've seen where he goes long and left and that's his bad shot. But for the most part all he does is hit it straight. So he can aim left, cut it back, he can aim straight, cut it a bit to the right, it doesn't matter.
Speaker 2:He knows he's not going to overcut the ball too much and that's why he beats everyone, because he can aim better than everyone else, because he knows where it's going. The others don't know where it's going half the time, so they're more, you know, faced with more trepidation on a tee shot or some type of approach at times because they go shit. I don't know if I have to aim a bit right. I've got to aim away from that trouble or whatever. That's why he's so good, you know. Obviously he's putted better in the last several months, but if you hit it like that you don't have to be a great putter. I mean, obviously, putting a little better helped him win, but more tournaments. But he's going to be there all the time because he just has no miss or no badness yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and you know, maybe we can demystify since we're on this subject with Scotty, Because I got a chance to spend a day with Scotty last February when he was here for the AT&T and I asked him about what he does through the strike and he says that he's got an old school coach, Randy Smith, and all they try to do is return the shot back to impact, I mean, back to how was it addressed? Because that's one of their mechanisms that they do. And it makes sense Because from there we're perfectly lining up. Drill three, which probably has made the biggest difference in my golf swing, in my golf game.
Speaker 1:Drill three, Because when you start marrying drill one and two together, you're coming in deep from the right hip pocket. John would call you know we're coming in at the 430 club heads, nice and shallow, it's open, we're ready to use our forearms. Boom At impact. What we do beyond that, I get pretty tired of hearing people say it doesn't matter after that. I heard that the other day and it just drives me absolutely crazy because this was such a big revelation for me.
Speaker 2:Drill three Well, it does matter, because the swing's an arc. If you don't care what happens after impact, you're not going to keep the shaft on plane and you're not going to keep the face on plane. So, really, what you see, let's say, two foot past the ball and beyond, even where the club starts exiting, up near the shoulder, if you can see that face staying very neutral, you're not going to hit a bad shot, really, are you? And a lot of the things that you see on post-impact are a result of what's happening on pre-impact. So it does play a role. And I know from doing lessons, lessons and I don't do this to shut off, I do it for the non-believer that I will show them how I can hit with my post-impact. Only my just a thought of what I'm doing. Three foot past the ball, I can hit a high shot, I can hit a low shot, I can hit a draw, I can hit a fade, I can hit it straight, I can sometimes do a combination of low draw or high fade, and all I'm thinking of is what I'm doing after impact. So the reason why that works is if I'll stand there on the range and I'll set up to a golf ball and I'll just say to him, like once I take the club away, two foot after I take the club away, just yell out one of those draw, fade, hide, low, straight, whatever, and I'll do it, I'll hit the shot. And they look at me and go, wow, that's like magic, what did you do? I go.
Speaker 2:Well, as soon as I heard draw, I knew after impact to use my right shoulder more so I would shift the path to the right by rotating my right shoulder. I wouldn't, and I remember I'm aiming straight, so I can't change my aim mid swing, so I'm just aiming straight. So I shifted my path with the intention of my right shoulder kind of hitting like a top spin on exit. Now what happens is, because I know I'm going to do that right shoulder, as soon as I had a draw my path shifts. It starts to maybe go a little bit lower than 430 so I can shift the path into out, but be aware that I'm not hitting the draw just by stopping the handle and flipping my hands over. I'm still keeping the same swing, but I'm making the path move a little bit more to the right, with the face staying where it is.
Speaker 2:And if I heard a straight shot I'd pull my left side abs and obliques, which is kind of drill three. If I want to hit a high one, two or three foot, I'd feel my hands go high. So your body reacts to what you are going to do. So it's way simpler, like I talked about earlier, once you start knowing that you can think about playing golf in front of yourself rather than behind yourself like everyone else tends to want to do. You know, thinking about their backswing and their downswing, and all that. If you can produce all those shots from just thinking about what you're going to do on exit, how much simpler is it?
Speaker 2:so I could I could basically just pick the club up over my head like matthew wolf and play golf, or I could take it. I could take it any old where I wanted to, because where I'm going doesn't matter. Where I'm coming from is important, and where am I coming from on entry is going to be affected by what I want to do on exit. So I mean that probably blows too many people's minds, but it's just common sense. Yeah, it is. It's just where am I golf?
Speaker 2:You know, when you line up to a golf ball, you are looking down and ahead of you or not ahead of yourself, down and out, but your target is down and ahead of it or not ahead of yourself, down and out, but your target is left and forwards of you. So why not give that part the attention rather than the back bit? The back bit? You haven't even hit the ball yet. So you want to know where you're going and to do that you have to think left and forwards of you, out where the target is, just like all those other sports.
Speaker 2:So it becomes a very simple concept when you understand it, and the great thing about that also is, if you're not swinging it, great one day. But you're very aware of where the club face is now because you're not flipping your hands over and you're not jumping away vertically and stalling your body. You can almost make a slight alteration if the swing feels off a little bit, just by focusing on what you want to do. After you struck it and I know that sounds crazy because the ball's already gone, but it's not it's like putting your hand on the stove and like a second goes by and you go. Oh shit, I just burnt my hand, like you don't register it straight away.
Speaker 2:So you are preparing your downswing with what you're thinking out in front. It doesn't just happen out in front, but you've got to think of it out there because things are preparing and circulating and producing the shot for you to do what you're actually thinking of out there. I know that that'll blow some people's minds, but I could stand there all day on the range and do it for you and it's you know. Sure, I'm an advanced golfer over some people, but I've taught people that were 20 handicappers to be able to do it. And then not only that is when you can do that. If you get on a hole that you don't like, you know on this hole and you go shit, every time I play this I'll slice it into the trees. Well, now you've got to get out of jail card. You go, I'm not going to slice this, I'm going to right shoulder on exit and hit a nice draw up there and no, I'm not going to overdraw it because I'm not using my hands and and you can start playing around the the bad stuff that gets in your head on the course. You know if, if the wind's left to right everyone hates left to right wind Every now and then a lot of the time I'll just draw it against the wind to keep it straight or drop some yardage off the shot.
Speaker 2:I mean, everyone thinks pro golfers just hit the same shot over and over and over. But it's so much more to that. And I remember doing a nine-hole lesson with someone and we got like the six holes. And I remember doing a nine hole lesson with someone and we got like the six holes and I said to them uh, so what do you think so far? What have you learned? And the guy looked at me, goes I learned you just haven't hit the same shot twice yet and we're on the sixth hole, because it's not that you're trying to hit. Yeah, maybe on the range you're trying to hit all these perfect shots, but on the course every shot's different. Everything calls for a different mindset or process, and that's that's why trying to be perfect um is very difficult. No one's done it yet. So why does everyone try and be perfect?
Speaker 2:You know you've got to play within capabilities, understand how I can do these things, and then it opens up a whole world of opportunity on the course because you start seeing things differently. You go well, I'm scared to death of this hole. But I know I can do this and it may be the total opposite to what you do, but that's a good thing, because why keep doing the same stupid thing over and over? That doesn't work. So post-impact and I've always said this, I'm sure when you watched my first drill videos when we were going through it, I think I said on the drill three video this is the key to golf, like not only because it's important because of you know where the target is and where you're going and how you actually can affect impact.
Speaker 2:If you do drill three post impact well, you get better at drill one because you have to come from the drill one spot to be able to do drill three. Post-impact well, you get better at drill one because you have to come from the drill one spot to be able to do drill three. So that's how they all manifest into one another and produce the straighter flights that are better low points, better struck shots and less curves.
Speaker 1:Yeah, drills one through three are kind of my ABCs. You know of the golf swing um, for me when I'm, when I'm drilling, consistently drills one through three.
Speaker 2:Everything else just kind of, you know, take shape on its own, yeah, and doesn't have to be perfect, because you know where you're coming from, know where you're going, the other stuff, like I said, you could pick it up over your head if you wanted to. But yeah, obviously there's better options than that. The less arc motion or swing plane motion you feel, the better or maybe not the better there's got to be some plane shift. You can't swing on one plane no matter what people tell you. Yeah, because you know if you've set up at address, the club is outside your hands and then it's kind of outside your hands until it wastes time. When you come down the hands, the club's down behind you. So there's no such thing as a one-swing play. It just doesn't happen. There's some type of shift.
Speaker 2:But you know, you could imagine telling I bet Lee Trevino feels like he swings straight up and down, but when we look at it he doesn't.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but the forces of you know the pressures of it all are just in sync that he knows how to keep the shaft on plane into and through exit in his way, that he does it. So Hogan was great too, and Nick Price you know all those guys that really the premium ball strikers all did it the same way they. They had it slightly off playing. 430 is slightly off playing because the part of the club points across the ball, not down at it, and then you pressure it onto playing with the one drill, one, two, three and keep it on playing through impact. So that's your, your forces and pressures and it and it puts all feeling into your whole body, like into your legs, into your core, into your hands. You know, into everything, you feel everything, whereas if you're just slapping away at it from a steep position and just throwing the handle at it, and club it at it and have no body action.
Speaker 2:You're not going to feel much it's you know, certainly not on a day-to-day basis.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and and really I want to, you know, point out to something that you've said in the past, brad, that you know, even even the great players in the world that have more of a horizontal flip release, just say you know, I know that it's driven. Bj nuts, you and I have talked about it. You know, I know that it's driven. Bj nuts, you and I have talked about it. You know Fred Couples and those guys, I mean, although they're great players and they're very talented and they have educated hands, they tend to disappear. You know, it's like you know, scotty. Here's a prime example of Scotty Shuffler If he has a bad week putting, he's still in the top 20. He's not missing cuts. If he has a good week of putting, he's winning. Why is that? Because he's doing it with his ball striking. He's doing it literally with his ball striking and that's what all the greats have always done. But they never disappeared for months. They would be around. You know, they have good putting weeks and bad putting weeks, and what's cool about what we're talking about, folks, is that this is tangible and it's achievable through doing these drills. I mean, you do them over and over and over again.
Speaker 1:Next thing, you know the same thing that happened to me is I didn't play in a tournament for 10 years. And you're the first person I messaged saying all of a sudden I didn't play in a tournament for 10 years. I've been doing the drills intensely for six months and I went out and played, didn't miss a fairway for two days, two-day amateur event, and I hit 30 out of 36 grains, first tournament in 10 years. I didn't even realize it until I was driving home and I thought to myself this is absolutely tangible, it's achievable, it's no longer a mystery of how the hell do these guys do this? And you know, it's no longer looking up at the mountaintop saying there's no clear path to get up there, but there really is. It's trainable.
Speaker 1:And also too, as we go into drill four and we leave drill three, then hopefully you all listening are getting a real good mental picture of what we're talking about. You know, scotty, we talk aboutotty because he's the best ball striker on the planet. But his footwork I mean, oh my god. I have never heard anybody whiff on scotty's footwork and I've heard teachers and commentators on tv just flat call it idiosyncratic. But Tiger did it when he was younger, greg Norman, you did.
Speaker 2:I didn't even know. But well, I know now how it happened. So again, it's a lot to do with force and pressure. So if you think about, if you're pushing into your legs, your hands are kind of trying to get in front of your body, the club is laying down behind your body, your body's moving, lower half's moving lateral, your top half's staying shut. It's like you're in a pretzel, like you're in a pretzel move. So all forces are going to get expelled out somehow. So it's no again, no coincidence that Gary Player, ben Hogan, even Nick Feldo to a little bit Greg Norman, like you said. Now Scotty Sheffler, camillo Villegas did it. I'm not classifying him as great, but he did it, I did it. Peter Senior did it.
Speaker 2:It's not an intentional move, it's just something that happens out of having the correct forces in the upper bodies doing a pretzel thing and eventually you just keep pushing, grinding down and start pulling away from it and it all spits out. I call it like your feet, your feet kind of work, like an infinity symbol. You know, the weight shifts from um in the left toe into the right heel, back into the right toe, into the left heel. It's kind of just a constant infinity symbol, round and round and round when weight shifts because you're turning with it and sometimes it just exerts more in some people. But I know from my experience. I'd learnt, you know I didn't have many golf lessons growing up, but I would go to the golf tournaments and I had the chance to meet Greg Norman when I was very young 12 years old and walk around practice rounds with him and watch him and ask him a few questions and then I'd go home and practice it. And it's no coincidence that for me, my feet did the same as him. And it wasn't trying to do it, it just happened because I was pushing a lot more into my right foot, pulling a lot more out of my left side, and that would basically, if you think, if you push hard into your right foot and that doesn't mean your heel has to be down You're just pushing pressure into it and at the same time you're releasing and pulling your left side. If you've still got some resistance in your right foot and your left side rips behind you, your foot's going to get dragged backwards in the direction that your body's going. So it's all about pressures. It's not standing there, you know, light-footed and trying to slide your foot around. I guarantee none of those guys had any intention of doing that, it just happened from the proper forces.
Speaker 2:So it is pretty cool when I see it in some people's swings, because every now and then during a lesson I go, hey, did you just notice your right foot there? And they went yeah, I thought that was a little bit different. So they just get accustomed to it and they weren't trying to do it, but it's actually a good thing. They just get accustomed to it and they weren't trying to do it, but it's actually a good thing. I mean, maybe Scotty's a bit more extreme than some people. He looks like he falls over sometimes, but you know Gary played it and ended up walking through shots and kind of sharked it a very big slide backwards and keep going. You know Hogan was way more balanced in it, but it's actually a good thing if you do it.
Speaker 2:So if listeners start using their correct pressures and it will come from doing drill one, two, three, for the most part, if you very conscious or not, uh, if you're very perseverant with it and do the drills, you're going to train your body to do that type of stuff and one day it'll appear and you won't even recognize it or know that you're doing it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you just do it and all of this just seems very natural. You know, for me doing the drills I'm going into year five next year of doing the drills it seems like my body accepted the movements right away. It didn't seem as if it was ultra contrived At first, maybe a little bit awkward, especially with drill three. But drill three, really I learned how to cut the ball. So I mean, I know that we have in our community Brad, we hook our way in and we cut our way out. Yeah, net zero. So it produces a net zero.
Speaker 1:But ultimately you the listener, if you can imagine it now it may start to make sense when we talk about post impact intentions and how those start to become new neural pathways by doing drill three, that you literally start to go oh, I can hit it high from here while still accelerating like a crazy man, or I can hit it low, or I can hit a slice, I can hit a drop, I can do whatever I want based on post-impact intentions. But I don't think any of that is possible if you're decelerating and you're standing up the shaft and you're chucking your right arm out.
Speaker 2:Absolutely not. You can't do it, yeah. So, like you said, it is a natural thing. If you think of an ice hockey guy again, a baseball player, a tennis player, a cricketer, you know people that are from Australia or England or whatever. You watch what their right foot does when they try and hit a shot or a slap shot.
Speaker 2:Their right foot's going backwards behind them because they're starting to put all their pressure and pull away. You know, snap away from the impact spot, so their right foot's behind them. It's not out in front, so it is a natural move, like you said. So it's not. It shouldn't be foreign to a lot of people. It's just frightening when it first happens because they probably never done it before and not aware how to do it. But it's, it's technically sound and the way the body should move. It's, it's how it should do it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, it makes perfect sense, and we'll, we'll marry before we get into drill throw. I do, I do want to make a comment and then we'll, we'll ask, we'll, we'll circle back to it. But, um, you know, uh, flat angles play a massive part in this too. I just want to throw it out out there to get the listener preemptively prepared for, uh, for that part of the conversation, because that's a big one. I mean, that really facilitates everything. It's a massive assist. Yeah, it really does. But let's talk about drill four, where we actually do start to work on the backswing a little bit, but it's primarily setting us up to properly plane shift and pressure coming into the strike Drill four.
Speaker 2:So I think drill four is a good one properly plane shift and pressure coming into the straight Drill four. So I think drill four is a good one. So there's two ways you can shallow the shaft, or a combination of both, which are drill four and drill five. So you can shallow the shaft by down, cocking the wrists and normally, if you think about throwing a ball, if I had a ball in my hand and I took my hand back behind me and then I went to throw it, what's really happening is my wrist is kind of downloading and my elbow is going in front of me. I'm not going to throw the ball from behind myself. So drill four is kind of like you're throwing a, and probably drill five. You feel it in that too. But it's basically teaching the wrist to be supple.
Speaker 2:People that are stiff-wristed, you know you're never going to hold angles in your swing on the way down or even at impact. So there has to be some suppleness to the wrist where they can load the club. And if you, it's basically like if you just had a I can't remember the name of, well, maybe cracking a whip if you just held your hand up above you and just started doing, you know, cracking a whip with just your wrist. That's kind of what it feels like that you're loading the, letting the wrist load, and what that's going to do is it's going to actually start to drop the hands and keep the shaft and club head up. So you're not going to throw the club away. People that are stiff-wristed you know they obviously throw the club away pretty soon. So drill four is basically training of the wrist, because your wrist can go, you know they can open up and really the more you know, the more forearm you have open, the more wrist cock you get. So it's very important to train the wrist to be able to handle these situations. They can go I don't talk about ulna and radial and all that, but people can. But your wrist can go up and down, they can go open, they can go close. There's all types of different motions they can have. So you're training your wrist to be able to kind of deal with all those subtleties of of accepting the load of the club as your probably completing your backswing.
Speaker 2:Really, I mean transition is you've got a backswing, you've got a downswing, but transition means there's a crossover. You're actually still doing your backswing as you're doing your downswing. That's typically the transition and a lot of that is the wrist action and the feet pushing and all that. You start loading the club pushing and and all that you start loading the club you start putting a lag angle into the, the swing that you can save for impact, you know, for later on to release it a little bit later. So drill four is a lot about the wrists doing that.
Speaker 2:Some people will still tend to not get enough their hands or arms working out in front of them with the wrist action and they'll still probably get wrist cocked but they'll pull it downwards so they'll still get steep. So drill five is kind of a very similar drill. But drill five you're adding a lot more forearm rotation. That in essence doesn't happen when you swing. You know we have a drill where you put the bag up high behind you and you try and use a lot of right leg and a lot of forearm rotation.
Speaker 2:Drop the club more at 6 o'clock than at 4.30, but do that? Do that train your forearms to stay open? Anyone can test this. If you just put your right arm out in front of you about waist high or chin height and you rotate your forearm clockwise, all you're going to feel is your right shoulder is just going to externally push back. So you know, I kind of laugh at some stuff and I don't want to be mean to people because they you only know what you know. But a lot of people are talking about keep that right shoulder external, keep it external.
Speaker 2:I go, holy shit, all you got to do is have forearm rotation and you keep it external, like it's very simple way to do it. But you got people trying is have forearm rotation and you keep it external, like it's a very simple way to do it, but you've got people trying to push their shoulder back and keep it down and it's not really how it's done. Again, it's going to have repercussions through impact if you're trying to do it that way. So drill four is wrist load to create lag. It generally comes from width. So the wider kind of the backswing is, the more your wrists are going to try and down cock. The narrower your backswing is, the more you're going to try and uncock your wrist. So it's just teaching people to feel a little bit more extension and a little bit more load in the transition with the drill four and then drill five.
Speaker 2:If people still get a little bit steep or steep would be kind of narrowing the radius where their right arm would not stay wide coming down. It would get closer to their shoulder. You know you'd lose space between your right hand and your shoulder. That would be steeper. So the forearm rotation keeps the radius of your right arm pretty constant as you come down. So you're not. You know you're not. Lag is not narrowing the radius of your swing, it's basically just having arm rotation, wrist, cock. That puts the club in the third dimension behind you. So it looks like you have a lot of lag, but the reality is you still only have 90 degrees. Whether you're pulling on the club or whether you're doing it like Sergio, there's only a 90-degree shaft angle, but it looks 150 when it's behind you rather than when it's in front of you. Like that it's too steep. So they're the fun drills, but a lot of that stuff does get worked out quite well just from doing the first three drills, like you said.
Speaker 1:Yeah, those are the ABCs of the drill series, in my opinion. So now that we're building a golf swing and we're building a golf swing to last, that doesn't require a lot of mental thought, particularly on the golf course. It's almost impossible to think about this stuff. Thought particularly on the golf course, it's almost impossible to think about this stuff. One of the things when I found you and John Brad, one of the things that blew me away was the effect that equipment has on your golf swing, whether you're aware of it or not, and that really scared me because I was completely unaware of the effects, positive or negative, on how you set your gear up. So let's talk about that. Let's talk about that and the advantages. I mean you and I both know, and I've actually I continue to get a little bit flatter as each year comes.
Speaker 2:I just did mine another half degree or so.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. So what's interesting about that is that it really brings to life the pressures that we're talking about, the advantages of flat lie angles and a little bit heavier equipment too. Brad, let's talk about that.
Speaker 2:Well, heavier helps for sure. I mean you may not be able to move a heavier club as fast as you think you can with a lighter club, but you're probably less prone to throw the club head away on a heavier club than you would on a light club. Also because you can feel the head weight. You know where the head is. So it's important. But remember, even if you're a bit gentler on the downswing and transition, you've got the firepower now at the bottom of drill one and drill two and drill three to keep that club accelerating. Through that, even if the club's a little bit heavy, you can still move it fast. And remember, we're only looking for an accelerating club. And the later you can expand that speed into the hands and arms and body and club, the more you maintain the shaft. So basically, people that get steep and just toss their hands at it, all they're hitting the ball with is a club head. Yeah, someone that's done the drills is hitting the ball with the grip, the shaft, the club. They're hitting it with the whole club and that's where it creates all the feel. But you use the whole club. I mean we've got a whole club, so we may as well use all of it. And then the flatter lie angles you start seeing arcs better. So you know, club fitting is very strange in that most people, if you ask them, they would think that to get their club set up properly, it would be how they address the ball. But it has nothing to do with that. The club lie angle is how impact works. So what you'll find is, if you want to stand the shaft up, you want to have a higher uh, a greater lie angle day, a more upright lying, or if you want to try and return that shaft back to your, your chi, and rotate it around you, a flatter club's going to help. You do it now if you, if you are, grab the club in your this is people can test this simply you can do it in the lounge room. If you just grab the club doesn't matter what club it is, longer club's better and you kneel down on the ground and you put the club head on the ground and you just let the club stay on the ground. You'll see a very big arc, but you'll also see the face never change. So the club face stays very true to the arc.
Speaker 2:So that's what we're trying to see. We're trying to see that in the golf swing. But when we're making a golf swing we're not on our knees, we're five, ten or six foot two above that. So you don't see it that way. And people start getting more vertical because from their vantage point they think they've got to go at the ball, rather than that arc is actually going to hit the ball for them. So that's an important step is to even if people don't do it immediately get a six or seven iron, an old club that you have at home and bend the heck out of it four or five degrees flatter and use it as a practice club and watch what happens. So what you'll find is you're not going to stand the shaft up as much. If you did, the toe would hit the ground because the club's flatter and when the toe hits the ground the face stays open, so you're not going to hit the ball left.
Speaker 2:Basically, upright clubs are a band-aid for bad swings in that a person that comes over the top the heel hit. You know they start making the club more upright, so the heel hits the ground first. So instead of hitting a big slice, they hit a draw or they hit a somewhat straighter shot. But the more you keep doing that that the more your swing starts gaining in steepness. So it's not going to help you long term. It'll be a short-term fix possibly, but long term you're going to basically start steepening the swing more and more, trying to solve that more upright club out. And if you have a flatter club where the toe kind of sits up, you're going to work harder down into the 430 and the chi area for the impact and really rip your pivot away and solve the club out that way. So it's a definite advantage. You don't have to go crazy on it.
Speaker 2:Mine clubs are about two and a half flat, not crazy, but at one point I was using one or two ups. So I know it's a significant change. Now that was not um on my doing. I actually used to use flat clubs. But then I got my swing messed with a little bit when I was in this uh instructor. I didn't know what I was doing, I was just listening to people. My swing got upright, my clubs got more upright and it just made it worse and worse and worse. So I went down that path of holy cow. This is not good and could drag myself back again helpfully by flattening the clubs down so I could see the arcs and the circles better than the straight lines, and we don't want straight lines in the swing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's well said. You know you did a great video. Uh, you did a three-part video, uh, three-part series on flatter lie angles. And what's interesting about that is I saw the the champions tour instagram feed they've been showing for they sh. They showed like a collage of videos of freddie couple's golf swing from when he first got on tour. Did you see that? And what a difference, a massive difference. And and I mean it has nothing to do with his age, when over time you can see Longer lighter.
Speaker 2:More upright. He's got white hybrids in his bag now.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, but you can really see the swing deterioration If you know where to look. Less and less rotation. Less and less rotation through the strike. More flippy, more handsy kind of more lazy actually.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and if you're using weight, you're actually keeping your muscles in check. You know, without even going to the gym, if you're using heavier clubs, it's going to make you keep your body in tone. You know you're going to have to work those muscles that the drills teach you. Keep on doing it. You know it's going to have to work those muscles that the drills teach you. Keep on doing it. You know it's going to make you want to keep doing it, to swing that way.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I mean my, now my drill club. I had to get an X200 because I'm snapping the shafts, because I've hit them so hard. So this thing is like a Franken club where it's a a, it's a dynamic gold x200. I mean it's like swing way to f something and I've got it at six degrees flat, just so I I continue to use the ground properly and make sure that I'm. You know I'm I'm coming in in a shallow entry from the 430. But for me, brad, that was such a massive revelation.
Speaker 2:It was a huge revelation my first teaching club that I would have. For the impact bag it got broken a couple of years ago but I had it for 10 years or more. I had bent it 10 degrees flat and no one even knew when they were hitting the bag. They paid no attention to it, but it made them want to see the arcs better.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah, that's an interesting comment, seeing the arcs better. Yeah, I didn't even think about that until you said that, but now when I'm over the golf ball, I do see the arcs, right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and that's what we want to do. We want to see it from your perspective, not from a calorie or a coach's perspective.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely yeah. I mean I got to tell you just the information that you and John have put out and we'll get to your members' website in a minute, but I do want to touch on how this is impacting the world's best. So you've been working with Peter Malnati. You've got some guys on the champ tour now and I know that you've worked with some of the gals out there. You've got some good collegiate players coming up. So this information is touching and has touched the world's best. You've worked with Vijay is touching and has touched the world's best. You've worked with Vijay. You sent me some pictures of your work with Vijay and it's great. So you know, let's talk about Peter. Peter won this year, that's right.
Speaker 2:So that was fascinating because Russell Knox, who I worked with for a year or so they're best buddies and Peter was struggling a little bit. He wanted to try and improve his hitting of the ball. So we set up a meeting and the interesting thing was, even though I don't work with Russell, russell told me he goes like if you want to get better you've got to go see Hugo. So it was fascinating that Knox would send him to me. Even though we don't work with one another anymore. He kind of valued what I did with him and thought that'd be great for peter.
Speaker 2:So we had a chat, talked about things and his first comment to me was I put great, my short game's great, I just got to get to the green quicker. That was his, that was his main goal just get on the green faster than I have been able to. So he came to uh, greenville, where I'm at, and we did a couple of hour session and a lot of it was just drill one. So we did a lot of the bag work because he gets steep and he gets a little bit right arm throwy. So we did a lot of drill one and he really liked it because it felt very different, and then we didn't do any other drill. But what I also did is I put the stick out in front of him, which is part of drill six or drill three really and made him feel that to get better at the 4.30 drill one he had to understand where the club had to exit.
Speaker 2:So the stick was out in front and I said you've got to exit the club up there. So think of it this way. He only did drill one and his game thought on the course was not to do drill one, it was to rehearse drill one and then think I'm going up that stick. That was his only swing thought, which again coincides with thinking out in front of yourself, doesn't it? Yep, so he goes. His first time he did it.
Speaker 2:He came ninth at whatever used to be the Honda I don't know what it's called now in Palm Beach and tough course, and he said I've never played good. He said there's water everywhere. Every hole scares the death out of me. And he came ninth. So I went the next week to the players and saw him there. We did some work on the range and he shot 66 Saturday and he was like coming six with one round to go, had an awful Sunday, something how he said I don't know what happened, I just lost it all. I was probably too nervous, excited, jumpy, just lost all my bearings and he shot like 80 or something like that, and fell way down the path.
Speaker 1:So I spoke to him that night.
Speaker 2:He goes oh, hugo, I don't know what happened. You know it was all so good last week and the first three days here and I said to him I said, look, maybe this was just happened for a reason. I said you've done well, you've done really well, and seven out of those eight rounds you've done really well. Who, who knows? Your next opportunity may just come next week and you'll be better prepared for it and do it. And lo and behold, he went to Velspa in Tampa. There he's played it six or seven times, missed a cut, like every time, and came 60th one other time. And then he wins on one of the really tough, striking courses. And he rang me that night and we spoke for a little bit and he goes Hugo, you got me on the green quicker, that's all I needed.
Speaker 2:So you know, what I'm saying there. He really only had a month. You know it was four weeks after we first met. He had a month of doing drill one and his swing thought when he was playing was drill three, you know, up the stick. That was it. Month of doing drill one, and his swing thought when he was playing was drill three, up the stick. That was it. So you can get good very quickly based on you know what your current swing does. If this really outperforms your old swing, you'll hit way more better shots. Yeah, you know it's immediate for a lot of people. You don't have to do the practice, go away and be, you know stink for a month or more before you start seeing the progress.
Speaker 1:It's quite immediate in a lot of cases yeah, in the in the initial six months that I started doing them brad um, my golf, my, my ball striking pretty much was improving. During that time I never felt like I was going backwards, never, never felt like I was going backwards.
Speaker 2:Well, you can't because the physics are bad. The physics of it are truer to what the ball wants to. You know, the ball doesn't care what your swing looks like, it wants the physics. So if you do better physics on it, then obviously the ball does better, but you also get a better swing looking-wise as well.
Speaker 1:Indeed. So you know, with all this information, you also have something that's really unique and special. I've been a member of it for quite a long time. I've gotten a lot of great thoughts and great tips, from everything to how to prepare for a tournament, but short game thoughts, course management thoughts, drill thoughts, swing thoughts, and you've got some videos with some professionals on there and that's your members' website.
Speaker 2:It's a happy deal. Yeah, the members' website is pretty good. I think right now there's. I normally add four a month or five a month, depending on how much time I have to do stuff, and some of it's repetition, but some of it's all different, you know not.
Speaker 1:The reality is that.
Speaker 2:I don't really teach a lot of different things. I teach like five or six things, but I have 40 ways to explain each one. That may help one person see it intellectually or see it visually or, you know, understand it better. So you know, if you can't, the golf swing is not 100 things, there's a few main things and you work your way around it. So I think currently there's I think there's over 600 videos and articles on that website, bradleyhughesgolf-memberscom. It's quite cheap. Maybe next year I'll raise the price a little bit, so get in quick, but it's. Yeah, there's so many.
Speaker 2:It's all categorised, there's all different things and if you like, listen to Jesse's podcast and you hear the 4.30 stuff. You can go to the 4.30 category and you'll see like 45 videos or more. So you know how to jump around and see the things that are pertinent to each one. You know the drill two would be the footwork and ground forces area. The post-impact would be the drill three. The transition down swing would be the four and five and then, like Jesse said, there's lessons that I talk about things. There's some stories of playing with people and President's Cup and playing with Jumbo Ozaki and all these different things. So it's a pretty good collection the course management, the specialty shots, there's all these different categories where it's quite easy to find. No video is repeated, Some of the messaging is, but there's all different ideas and I really have had a lot of great response to it and I know it's one of your favorite spots.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's fascinating, Brad. You've got anything that a player wants to inquire about. You've got anything that a player wants to inquire about. You've got it on there. I mean, and one thing that I learned from the website was how to use the bounce for wedges you know so that to understand the bounce and how to use the bounce.
Speaker 1:I mean, that was cool, so you've got. You're checking all your, your, your, your checking all the boxes in that website. I want to make sure that the folks that are listening really know that there's a resource. Bradley's members site is a really, really, really valuable resource to go on and to check out. There's a lot of answers on there to a lot of questions and to check out. There's a lot of answers on there to a lot of questions and it's quite simple which is great.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I've enjoyed doing it. Every now and then I'll be doing a lesson I think God, that was something I've never said that that was pretty good. Let's film that, or come back home and film it. So you know, some of them are just born out of doing a lesson and coming up with some whole different ideology or tech term to make someone understand it. So it's pretty fun doing it. Yeah, like I said, there's over 600, and I'm pretty certain I can come up with four more a month. And not only you know new members, not only see the new ones. You've got the whole archive to spread back through.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's very powerful information, Very simple, very powerful, very understandable and immediately applicable. There's nothing that's ambiguous that you've got on that website, which I really appreciate Because you know you got to. Let's look at it from the eyes of the seeker. I mean the seeker is going to go on to YouTube. I mean, good, goodness, gracious. I mean there's every possible methodology and way to get there, whether it's correct or incorrect, but it's on there so you can really misdiagnose yourself and go down some wrong rabbit holes. You can really. You can really misdiagnose yourself and go down some wrong rabbit holes. You can really. You can really. But on Bradley's members site that's, that's not going to happen because everything is is tried and tested. You know a lot of it comes from your spirit, your experience playing as a professional at the highest level, so you know what works and what doesn't under the gun. And you know for those of us, us amateur golfers, we don't quite know what it's like to actually play for your money. It's a different ball game, you know.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think that was. I guess I have a slight niche or differential between some of the coaches that I did play, you know, in all majors and President's Cup and one tournament. So there is that. I did play, you know, in all majors and President's Cup and one tournament. So there is that experience. When I was playing I didn't know a lot of what I know now, but it was easy to figure out with John's talk and getting our heads together and understanding some old videos and watching things and how we came about divulging everything. I did pretty much everything that I now teach unknowingly. So now I know what I was doing and I know how to teach people to do it. It's a pretty fun thing to watch.
Speaker 1:Well, I for one have enjoyed our friendship, Brad. Your tutelage has been a massive influence on me and others. I mean, gosh darn, you've helped out a ton of people out there and you know, for those who are searching and you're looking for something that is, quite frankly, it's common sense, you know, the answers to the riddle have always been in front of us and you and John are the only ones that I know that explain it. That's in a way, that's really uh, it's, it's reasonable and it's easier to understand. Um, you, you don't talk in terms of, uh, anatomical sayings. Uh, you keep things very simple and uh, you know, I, if I, if I call you up or I call John up, I'm not getting an anatomy lesson, when I'm getting thoughts on the golf swing, which I really appreciate. So, once again, how can people best find you, brad?
Speaker 2:So I have my regular website, bradleyhughesgolfcom, the members' website that we mentioned. That uh gives a lot more. You know, full videos. I used to put videos on youtube and stuff, but I stopped doing that because one I couldn't divulge as much as I wanted to. But on a member's site, because people are very attracted to it and they're giving you a slight fee, I can really get into the nitty-gritty of a lot of stuff. So that's bradleyhughesgolf-memberscom.
Speaker 2:And then on the social media, I'm probably the most active on Instagram. Some of that spreads over onto the Facebook and they're like bhughesgolf or bradleyhughesgolf. Twitter is a little bit difficult. I try and avoid as much of that. I may get on there and answer some things or some interesting stuff that I see, but I don't divulge much on there because there's a few too many loonies out there on that one. But it's, yeah, you'll find me. There's a lot of good stuff out there. You'll just search Bradley, hughesley, hughes and golf and then you'll. You'll find your way to most of those outlets and I appreciate you for helping me. Uh, talking about us and spreading the word. It's, it's. I know you're very excited about it and I appreciate the the help, but you wouldn't do it if you didn't uh appreciate what it's done for you. So thanks very much, man.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's my pleasure, brad, and we're going to continue to promote. And you know one thing, on a personal level, I mean, I've been playing golf my entire life and some of the greatest joys that I've ever had is improving in this game. You know, I mean getting married, yes, having children absolutely are great joys, but when this game is in your soul and you improve, ah man, it's really hard to describe.
Speaker 2:It's fun.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's really fun, especially if you see it come out the other end in competition and you start hitting shots under the gun that maybe you haven't hit or you haven't hit in a long time and it's coming off the club purposely and where you want it to go. It's just a joy. It really is, so thank you.
Speaker 2:Brad, and that's what we all want to do. We all want to improve Absolutely. Hopefully we've got the tools to do it.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. Hit Brad've got the tools to do it. Absolutely. Hit Brad up, I promise you. You can send him a note and tell him that you heard us here on the pod and he would appreciate it and I would appreciate it. Brad, thanks again for coming on.
Speaker 2:You're welcome, mate. Thank you.