Golf Ball Striking Drills: 11 Proven Drills for Consistent and Clean Contact
When a beginner golfer heads to the driving range, the goal is to make contact with the ball. As our games improve and handicaps lower, the focus shifts to something more precise: clean and efficient ball striking.
Most amateur golfers are striving for better ball striking, and incorporating specific golf ball striking drills into your practice is a great way to get there.
We’ve put together these range drills to improve your ball striking and help you feel more in control of your iron shots.
Practice one or all of these during your next session. Not every drill will be a perfect fit for your game, so look at your strengths and weaknesses and choose accordingly.
The 11 Best Drills for Superior Ball Striking
Punch Shot Drill
Collin Morikawa is one of the best golf iron players in the world. He mentions that one of his best golf drills for ball striking is to hit punch shots.
With a punch shot, you will stop your swing short just after contact.
This process helps golfers focus on hitting the golf ball, creating solid contact, and not worrying about what happens after impact.
If you hit the ball thin a lot when you play, the punch shot is a good one to have in your arsenal.
Ideal Impact Position Drill
Many golfers are unsure of the proper impact position. Working on your ball striking is hard if you can’t get to impact correctly.
This drill helps you practice the impact position by setting your club face, body position, and stance and then practicing it with small swings.
When you start to get the feeling, while wearing your HackMotion, increase the length of the swing.
Miss The Stick Drill
Golfers who are approaching the ball from the correct position have a much easier time making solid contact.
However, many players are coming from over the top in their swing. This position makes it hard to achieve consistent and solid contact.
This video gives you a simple drill to take the club back under the alignment stick and ensure you don’t hit it on the downswing.
If you are afraid to hit shots with the alignment stick setup like this, you can always use it for practice swings and then copy that concept into the rest of your practice session.
Ball Than Turf Drill
Danny Maude simplifies clean ball striking with this ball, then turf drill.
Even great players are known to exaggerate their movements in golf and make things more complicated than they need to be. Luckily, the ball and turf drill can fix that.
You’ll place your trail foot well behind the lead foot and keep your balance as you try to throw the golf club at the ball.
Alignment Stick Lane Drill
To be a great golf ball striker, you will need some control over the clubface of your irons.
In this video from Cameron McCormick, you’ll learn a drill that helps you understand how path and face angle change your golf game.
Use this drill very slowly in the beginning to get used to the feel. Once you have that down and you become quite good at it, you can expand and hit shots like this.
Many professional golfers set up a similar setup when they head out for a round of golf. It makes a difference in the precision of the shots they are able to hit.
Match the Alignment Stick Drill
This video from Rob Cheney will help with your driver. If you struggle with inconsistency in the path of your driver swing, try the alignment stick drill.
You’ll want to wear your HackMotion for this one, as it will help you find the correlation between your wrist angles and the clubface and swing path of your golf driver.
Merry Go Round Drill
The Merry Go Round is a drill where you put a club across your chest and twist until you get your body to the proper impact position.
Once at this position, you can put the club down, and you’ll see your body has rotated to the point that all of your weight is on the lead foot.
The Merry Go Round Drill is perfect for practicing the feeling of great ball striking even when you aren’t at the golf course.
Pour the Water Behind You Drill
At HackMotion, we talk a lot about the position of the lead wrist in golf. After analyzing more than 1,000,000 golf swings, it’s easy to focus on this lead wrist because of the impact it has on the game of golf.
However, there are some other things to consider here with the trail hand.
For this drill you’ll hold a water bottle in your trail hand. As you swing to the top of the swing the focus is to pour the water behind you.
With this concept in mind, you can gain a lot of power, add extension to the trail wrist, and make more consistent contact with the ball.
Don’t Look at the Ball Drill
In this drill, Chris Ryan explains why he believes looking at the golf ball leads to issues with inconsistency in ball striking and poor body movement.
This very simple drill is a way to check if your lower body is moving as it should through the ball.
Choke up on the club all the way down to the clubhead and take little swings. Make sure that the golf club does not hit your side until your clubhead is past the golf ball.
Do this in slow motion at first so you can feel the process and understand what it takes to make clean contact.
Motorcycle Drill
Where Coach Lockey’s drill worked on the trail hand, the motorcycle drill from Tyler Ferrell will work on the lead wrist.
Golfers tend to have too much extension at the top of their backswing. This extension makes approaching the golf ball with a square clubface hard.
To eliminate some of that extension, you can add a motion to the top of the backswing that looks like the revving of a motorcycle. The motion adds flexion, not extension, to the lead wrist and helps to square the clubface.
This drill will improve ball striking by creating a consistently square clubface. When that face is square, you will accelerate through impact with much more confidence.
Wearing the HackMotion while doing this drill can help you get a feel for what it takes to become a better ball striker.
Miss the Towel Compress the Ball
With better ball striking, you should also have an easier time compressing the golf ball. This miss the towel compress-the-balll drill is a good option when you struggle with consistency.
All you will need is a towel placed directly behind the golf ball you are trying to hit. Swing back, miss the towel, and then swing down and miss the towel.
Your angle of attack should help you hit a cleaner shot that travels higher and even has better spin and control.
Final Thoughts
When working on your ball striking drills, try to use a club that you have some confidence in.
Most golfers like to use an 8 or 7 iron. There is just enough loft to help you succeed and focus on the drill simultaneously.
Practice these ball striking drills to become more precise in the golf shots you hit on the course. You will be glad you did!
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