What’s an Easy Golf Compression Drill? GOLFTEC Coaches Explain

🏌️‍♂️ Compression in golf means striking the ball before the ground with a descending angle of attack for a solid shot.

👐 Keeping your elbows close together and the shaft leaning toward the target helps achieve better ball compression.

🔄 Practicing with a 90° angle between your lead arm and the club shaft, then losing that angle through impact, trains proper wrist and arm movement.

⬇️ Expect low, punchy shots when practicing this drill slowly, which helps develop the right technique for compressing the golf ball.

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00:00:00 - Lexi, we are here talking compression. So, how to compress the ball more? I've got a really cool way to do that. So, this is something that you struggle with. Stay tuned. We're going to talk about how you can fix this. Let's do it. So, Josh, what is compression? So, compression, all that all that it really is is you're just hitting the golf ball and then the ground. So, the best golfers in the world hit the golf ball first with the golf club. They hit the golf ball off the ground with a

00:00:24 - descending angle of attack. So, that's really the compression. It's just the golf ball squeezing up against the the face of the club. That's essentially what it is. So, if that's something that you struggle with, generally you just need to understand like why this is important. So, the way that the club should move. Can I borrow your golf club really quick? Um, from address to impact. So, the golf club starts here at address. When you hit the golf ball, the best players in

00:00:47 - the world actually have the handle and the grip leaning more towards the target. And from the down the line camera, the shaft has actually stood up a little bit. Okay. So the butt of the club essentially moves towards the target and up when the best players in the world hit it. Okay. Bad golfers, the people who struggle with compressing the golf ball tend to do the opposite. They actually move the handle lower from the side view and the handle starts to move

00:01:10 - more away from the target. So what that does is it essentially changes the angle of attack or the way that the club's swinging into the ball. So you'll hit a lot of thin shots. You may even hit behind it and just your contact isn't going to be as good. Okay? So what we really need to do is just change that behavior. Okay? So, generally what causes that alignment with amateur golfers is a couple things. One is their hip sway is not towards the target enough. We're not going to talk about

00:01:32 - that one today. That's covered in another video. If you think that's your problem, check that one out. Um, but the other two things that that generally cause an issue with the compression is your golfers will have their elbows too far apart and like I said, the shaft will be leaning away from the target. So, those are the two things that we're really going to talk about today. So, if this is your problem, let's talk about a way to fix this. So, take your take your

00:01:52 - setup position. The easy way to do this is we're going to start with the shaft parallel to the ground. And what you want to do is you want to make sure when you do this that the club head is slightly behind your hands. Okay? Um so get yourself set up. It doesn't really necessarily matter right now how far inside it is for for most players. Just make sure the sweet spot is inside the handle. Okay. What you're looking to establish at this point is about a 90°

00:02:13 - angle between your lead arm and the club shaft. Okay. So what that's going to do is it's going to add in what's called radial deviation or the hinging of your wrist. So you want to get pretty close to 90. If you notice that you're somewhere really not close to 90, add in some of that hinging. This is where you want to start from. Okay. And then what you're going to do is you're going to work down from this position to impact. Basically trying to lose the angle that

00:02:34 - you have in your wrists as much as you can. So you're going to go into what's called er deviation where you point your thumbs towards the ground and you're going to keep your arms really straight as you do this. So adding in as much er deviation as you can hitting the ground that's going to help you swing more down and that's going to make it easier for you to compress the golf ball. Okay? And then when you finish your swing, you're going to stop somewhere out here at

00:02:53 - about hip to chest high. You want your arms really straight and you want the shaft in your arms to basically be in a straight line. This is going to ensure that you have the maximum amount of deviation. So when you do this, and you're going to do this really slow, what you should expect to see are a lot of shots that come out really low initially because you're not going super fast. So you'll hit a lot of low shots. You're just kind of punching them out there and then you're going to add speed

00:03:14 - as you go. So all good on uh how you're going to make that happen? Yep. Cool. So, let's start with the shaft. Yep. At 90°. That's perfect. There you go. And then from there, like I said, you're just going to chip one out there, trying to add as much of that er as you can. Good. So, you can see how you caught the ground a little bit before the ball there. So, this would be for all of you out there. If you see that happen, this would be where I'd almost preset your

00:03:41 - hips. So, like I said, we're going to talk about hip swing in another video, but push your hips towards the target. Move your wrist down. Point your thumbs to the ground as much as you can. That'll help move the low point more in front of the golf ball. Help you get that really solid strike. Good. So, a little bit more ground. You can see how those are coming out super super low. It's exactly what you're looking for. Okay. So, same thing. Start at 90. Really good. There you go. That one was

00:04:04 - super solid. So, this would be a really really good way to practice. And then at that point, all you do is you just start to make the swing longer, but you're still trying to incorporate those same fundamentals through impact. So again, bad golfers, too much distance between their elbows, too much of that radial deviation where you're basically like rehinging your wrists. Best players in the world when they hit, elbows are really straight, they have more of that erase

00:04:27 - the compressing of the golf ball if that's something that you struggle with. Awesome.

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