How A Pro Hits The Ball Farther

Brad Ott: Hi, this is Brad Ott, Director of Instruction at TPC Craig Ranch, McKinney, Texas.

This is a question I want to talk to you about, it has to do with distance.

I get this a lot from my amateur students.

After playing on tour for a number of years, probably one of the most often asked questions is "How do you hit the ball further?" Well, we all know there's five power sources in the golf swing.

You have your hips, your torso, your left arm, your right arm, and your wrists.

One of the things that I'll see a lot of my students ...

This is probably the most common error that I'll see out of my students that lose power is they don't use, for a right-handed golfer, I don't see them use their right arm properly.

What I mean by that, a lot of people, A, don't bend their right arm enough or B, they bend it at a bad angle.

What do I mean by that? Well, your right arm, the extension of it is really a power source.

If you can extend your right arm as you're making impact, the club moves faster.

The more it's bent, the more you extend.

Now there's a trade-off to this.

If you bend it too much, if you'll notice I've over-bent it, now we lose our radius.

You want to bend it, but you want to bend it right at about 90 degrees.

Any less than that, you lose your power, you're not able to snap that right arm.

Any more than that, you have a lot of power, but unfortunately you don't have much width, so you don't have a big circle.

The right arm is probably one of the most mistakenly used body parts when I see my students struggling with distance.

The other thing I pointed out was they don't use it properly when they do bend it.

Whenever your arm is ...

This is called internally rotated of that shoulder ...

Once your arm is internally rotated you do have the nice arm bend that you want.

Unfortunately as you're going down to hit the golf ball your power is directed behind you.

You have to have your arm externally rotated so that it will extend into the golf ball.

If you're struggling with distance, if you're not hitting it real far, and you see something in your right arm, if your coach or anybody sees something in your right arm that doesn't look efficient, try and master that right arm.

Think about some of the components that I just talked about.

Make sure A, that it's bending 90 degrees, and make sure B, that as it's coming down the right arm extends to the golf ball, not away from the golf ball, but to the golf ball.

I think if you can work on that right arm, you might be able to find there's a power source missing in your golf swing, could help you knock those yards up a little bit higher.