How Blake Gained (gulp) 50 Yards!

Blake is your typical 59 year old golfer, he’s had a surgery or two and in the last few years has lost some serious yardage on his drives.

He found out about what I do, and was ready to give it a try.

As a loyal reader, you know it all starts for me with the ‘before’:

Tempo: 26/9
CHS: 97 mph
Ball Speed: 136 mph
Carry: 210-220 yards

What you notice with Blake is the short backswing and it’s slow. Bad Combo.

I knew Blake was going to be a great project, because he’s strong and athletic, plus he told me his two goals were:

1. hit the ball farther
2. not have to think

Good goals for all of us!

So, we started like I always do, fire up glutes and do the band rotary exercises to create rotation and ground force.

Although Blake is strong, his movements were restricted and this is a speed killer. I had to find a way to unlock his fascial slings, namely the Spiral lines and also the Functional Lines. That’s where the Lag Popper and Tsunami Bar come in.

The Lag Popper has so many valuable functions, the first one being to load the backswing. The feedback combination of feel/sound let Blake know if he was just ‘taking’ it back or ‘swinging’ it back. You need to SWING it back. Check the before/after of his normal top of backswing and then using the Lag Popper. It’s not even the same guy.

To unlock the Spiral Lines, we then do the One Arm Golden Drill swings with the Lag Popper. I do these myself as a warm up before I hit balls. This drill frees up the chest/shoulder and the hips, which I’ve found are sections of the body that get tight as we sit/age.

Next Up: Tsunami Bar. We need to take Blake’s new found movements and add force to them. You can’t just pose a position in the golf swing, you have be able to create force from any section of the swing (in either direction). The Tsunami Bar allows you to generate speed with the arms and body by giving you an external goal of ‘torquing’ (bending) the bar. To do this, you must be able to accelerate and decelerate as quick as possible (something most golfers never work on).

Here is Blake’s first attempt at a ‘Downswing Pop’. You can see some serious speed leaks as he ‘throws’ with his right hand and then moves the upper body out towards the ball.

We worked on it and he improved. Plus add much more force by using his body better. He still has work to do, but huge improvement.

Once I have the golfer using the fascial slings/opened/generating force, it’s now time to put it all together in a golf swing. We need an intermediate step before we go straight to a golf ball, we need to hit the SpeedBall. The SpeedBall frees you up because you can’t miss it, but more importantly it gives you more resistance (safely) than a ball so your brain/body get the signal that you need to recruit more to overcome it.

When I have the golfer hit the SpeedBall, I’m looking to see if he is moving better as well as looking for the speed. The FlightScope has a cool feature called practice mode and it will accurately measure clubhead speed. Blake got his SpeedBall speed up to 105, so I knew he was then ready for a real ball.

We now go back to driver and ball and the results in this first session were fantastic.

He put up 104-105 chs and 149 ball speed! plus added 30 yards of carry!!

One of the secrets to helping golfers is to get them to make changes without them knowing it. This is called Implicit Learning and it’s one of my fundamentals to coaching. If the golfer walks away with a 20 pt. checklist, he’s got no chance of actually playing better golf. I use my tools and drills to create an external focus and these create the implicit learning.

Blake played golf the next day and commented that he was hitting the ball solid, nearly had a hole in one, and was definitely longer.

but wait there’s more……

Blake and I got together to keep training and see how far he could take it.

In our next session, we weren’t at the course. You don’t have to hit balls to get better. As a matter of fact, hitting balls probably makes you worse (there’s a lot to that statement, but we can address it in a separate blog).

So, we continued the theme of loading quicker/longer in the backswing. Plus I added the element of creating more lag (you can’t try to HOLD lag, you need to learn how the body creates it). The ‘Throwoff’ is the perfect drill: