7 Best Ball Striking Tips Ever!

In this video, PGA pro Alex Elliott offers his 7 best ball striking tips

(Image credit: GM Youtube)

Making better contact more consistently is a sure-fire route to better scores. In the video and article below, Alex Elliott's advice should help you create more compression with your irons and the right angle of attack with your driver for more power and accuracy.

7. Understanding the descending blow

A couple of things to note here. With irons, generally the more loft you have the more you want to hit down on the golf ball, and you want to try and hit ball first and then turf.

Additionally too often players think the thing to do is brush the ground with the club or help the ball into the air which in turn exposes the leading edge and is to be avoided.

A drill to help ball striking here is to focus on a mark in front of the golf ball, and try and hit through that mark.

6. Find the centre of the club-face

The drill here is to make a gate just wide enough for your club-head. Place a ball slightly behind the gate and what we are looking for here is to a) take a divot along the line after the gate, and b) swing the club through the gate.

This will truly focus your mind on making a good strike rather than have your mind worrying about everything else to do with the swing.

5. Pressure drill

If you look at most of the top players their hands are ahead of the ball through impact and one drill to help create that feeling is Alex's pressure drill.

Here take an alignment stick and place it into the ground and address the stick with the club aligned with the middle of it. Then do your backswing and then slowing it down at impact feel as if your hands are ahead of the stick when you would normally impact the ball.

That way you can really get that feeling of pressure and that could significantly help with strike.

4. Driver strikes

Getting good strikes with the driver is still hugely important despite the forgiveness of modern clubs. A quick way of finding out where you are striking the driver is by getting an aerosol can and spraying the face of the driver. Then hit a shot and location will be clear to see.

Additionally using another gate drill will help provide the strike location as well.

3. Swing sequencing

A common area many golfers come unstuck is the sequencing of the swing. A couple of key points here are; can you feel the hips are always ahead of the shoulders, or the upper half of your body is always chasing the lower.

A simple way of putting that is, can you get your belt buckle to target before your chest.

2. Pre-setting the impact position

One of the best examples out on Tour right now for this is Matthew Wolff. If we look at what he does in his routine, he simulates the impact position with his knee bend to get that feeling dialled in.

Every golfer can do the same by feeling the pressure into the left side of their body and create that feeling which will result in a descending blow.

1. Arc of the swing

This is for those struggling particularly with the driver. With the irons we are looking for a descending blow but with the driver we want an ascending blow and part of that is understanding that the swing is an arc around us.

With the driver it is all about trusting the natural arc of the club in that you take it back on one line, bring it through on the same line but hit up on the ball with an ascending blow.

What can help here is setup. Having the ball in the right place is important as is spine angle but also feel as if you are swinging with the rhythm of a seven-iron too.

Alex Elliott
Top 50 Coach

Location: Mottram Hall 


Alex spent a great deal of time learning the game from fellow northwest golfer, Andrew Murray, who was a European Tour regular from 1979 to 1995. He spent three years on the European Tour caddying for Andrew’s son, Tom, before taking his PGA qualifications. His passion for the game and personality in front of the camera has helped him to create a thriving social media platform on Instagram and YouTube, where he offers a whole host of tips and advice to help viewers shoot lower scores.


Most significant influences on your teaching:

Mike Bender's book, 'Build The Swing Of A Lifetime', which I read during my PGA qualifications. He uses so many different tools to help students deliver the club better when hitting the golf ball. Andrew Murray, too. He helped form the way I interact with golfers and simplified what can be a complex game for a club golfer.


Advice for practice: 

I like to get students to work in sets of five golf balls – three drills shots to two course shots. The drill shots have no consequence, but with the two course shots, I ask the student to create a green or fairway and go through a full routine.


Greatest success story:

One of my students hadn’t played golf for ten years - he'd lost his love for the game. After watching my online Instagram and YouTube content, he came for several golf lessons and has now joined a local golf club. Knowing I've helped get someone back into golf... you can't beat that.