Tip Tuesday: Ways to Generate More Club Head Speed

We all want more length off the tee, and who better to get advice from than a three-time World Long Drive Championships winner? Sean “The Beast” Fister of the Dustin Johnson Golf School at TPC Myrtle Beach is here to show us a few simple keys to unlocking your distance potential!

Sean Fister:

Hi, I’m Sean “The Beast” Fister at Dustin Johnson Golf School, and I’ve been competing in long driving for a very long time, probably close to 30 years. I’ve been on a quest to find out how you can swing the club as fast as humanly possible to hit the golf ball as far as humanly possible, and I came pretty darn close. I learned some things along the way that can help you. Number one, about club head speed. If you don’t have club head speed, you can’t really be expecting a lot of distance. We all want more speed. How do you get that speed? Well, there are several ways.

One way is grip pressure. If your grip pressure is higher than a four or five on a scale from one to 10, that’s too hard. You can’t, you can’t… the hands won’t work when they’re gripping a club too tight. Tension has no place in a person that wants to hit the ball far. Tension robs you of distance. You want to be nice and loose. You never saw a pitcher like Nolan Ryan on the mound holding the baseball and gripping it tight. No, he was loose, loosey goosey, and that’s the way you want to grip the club. You want to be loosey goosey with it. Believe me. You want to be a two or three on the scale, barely holding it. You won’t throw it. Your subconscious won’t let you do that. You want to have light grip pressure.

The next thing you want to do, and I see a lot of seniors or people that are getting older, that are losing yardage, and they’re thinking about turning the left shoulder and they get the left shoulder back and it gets real tight … And then I’ll just tell them to just turn the right shoulder around, and immediately, they turn the right shoulder and look how much more turn they’ve … they’ve turned 20 more degrees. That’s 10, 20, 30 yards in some cases. Just relax. You turn the right shoulder back. Now you’re in a good position to fire through it.

The other thing is, for club head speed, is a lot of people think that when you have to swing hard, you have to throw your hands really hard, and that actually works against you. You cannot throw your hands faster than your shoulders can turn. Because if you get from here and go boom, your hands won’t travel that distance. There is no way. The way to pick up some more speed is get up the top and snap those shoulders through. Drive those shoulders through faster and your club head speed will immediately go up.