Unlock Effortless Speed with This One Childhood Drill

Ever feel like you’re swinging hard but not hitting it far? You’re not alone — most amateur golfers put in too much effort for too little speed. But what if the secret to effortless power has been with you since childhood?

In this video, I’ll show you a simple, powerful drill inspired by the old fairground hammer game — the same one where you tried to ring the bell by striking a plate. This movement holds the key to how elite golfers generate incredible club head speed with ease.

✅ Discover how to move the grip to build and transfer energy
✅ Learn the two drills that can transform your swing and boost speed
✅ Understand why how you move your hands is the key to effortless power

Whether you’re struggling with distance, tempo, or just feel like you’re muscling the swing, this is the “ah-ha” moment your golf game has been waiting for.

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00:00 Introduction
00:29 Effortless Speed
03:40 Hand Speed in Downswing
05:26 The Split Grip Drill

Okay, I’ve been pretty happy with that. Into the middle of the green. And that was an Airon which has gone 174 yards. And to me, that felt effortless. Felt like easy power. And my hands at their fastest point are only traveling at around about 23 miles an hour, which is why it feels effortless. So, how am I able to generate that amount of distance, that amount of speed in the club with what feels like relatively slow hands? I’m going to teach you the secrets to that in this video. Let me take you right back to when you were a kid and you went to the fairgrounds and you probably saw that game where you picked up a big hammer and there was a big sort of silver disc that you had to hit as hard as you can and it shoots up and rings the bell at the top. What would you actually do in order to hit that as hard as you can? Well, let’s use the golf club instead of a hammer and the bag instead of that silver disc. Well, what you would probably do is you would move the grip in a certain way. So for me from here I would move this grip out away from me and then I would bend it down and back into my body. And when I do that that kicks the club head out. So if I show you that now I would go this way and I’d pull it down and into me. Notice how the grip is quite close to me at this point. And what that does is it gives me a lot of speed in the club head. But throughout that motion, I’m only focusing on what the grip is doing. I’m not concerned with what the club head is doing. So, I am thinking about moving the grip down and into me, which accelerates the club. Now, to me, that feels effortless. I’m doing that as I’m talking to you. It’s not strenuous. It’s not hard and to the point where I could even hold that golf club in literally just index finger and thumb. So, I don’t really feel like I’ve got a lot of control over the golf club, but I could still make that same movement and I could still hit that golf bag or this impact bag with a fair bit of speed because I’m using physics to my advantage. It’s not me from here thinking the club head and accelerating the club head to the bag because when I do that, that feels like it’s more effort for less speed. And you can try this. Try this little exercise. going to be maybe going to be an eye opening experience for you. The other thing as well is when I start to focus on the club head, it actually has the effect of moving the grip in the completely the opposite direction. So, what we’ve just said is that we’d like the grip to go away from you down and in on this curved path. But watch what happens when I from here try and accelerate the club head. The grip actually moves almost back and up in the opposite direction. So, the more I start to accelerate the club head, the more it makes it impossible for me to move the grip in the right way. The final point here before we actually get into a little drill to help you with this is look at the travel of the club head. If I do it this way, the club head is quite narrow to me. If I do it this way, the club head is wider to me and we get the hands in a very different position. Think about what we see in most good golf swings. the golf club gets narrower to the golfer before it kicks out to the ball. Most golfers who struggle have this wide movement where they’re focusing on the club head which slows the hands and gets them into these awkward positions. So, I’m going to teach you with two little exercises how to get that movement, how to get the grip moving in this way to give you that effortless speed. Start off with a couple of alignment sticks or something that’s quite similar. There’s two phases to this. Number one, we need to get the hands accelerating earlier. We then need to get the grip curving correctly through the golf ball. Remember that hand speed 23, that’s around about here. This is where it peaks in the down swing. Now, what happens in many golf swings, as we just said in that demonstration, is if we start to accelerate the club head, that actually has the effect of slowing the hands down. The more this accelerates early, the more the hands are forced more in and up and slowing them down. So, with these alignment sticks, the idea is to make a fairly normal back swing, bring the hands down until they’re over your trail thigh and slow them down as aggressively as you can, which would cause the end of these alignment sticks to bend downwards. I’m effectively trying to snap these alignment sticks. Now, with any luck, I will never snap them, but what it’s going to get me to do is accelerate my hands and then slow them down. And it’s going to almost force me to stop this because I really feel that if I do this, it forces my hands almost up away from the ground. What it should look like is something like this. If I can do that, the more I can get them to bend, we know that two things are happening. Number one, you’ve got good amount of speed in the hands at the right part of your golf swing. And number two is you’re slowing them down. So when we go back to our little demonstration, what we’re trying to do is accelerate before we then curve the hands back in to kick the club head out. So we can then move on to our next little exercise, which is trying to learn a little bit how we change what the grip is doing through the golf ball. So as I tee a ball up, and you can see that I’ve got these teed way too high for an eight iron, I’m going to go top hand as normal, trail hand right down onto the metal. I’ve actually got two fingers on the metal, two fingers on the grip. Now, when I take a setup, I’m going to make a little back swing and I’m going to work myself into the position that we just found with our first exercise where my kind of lead hand is over my thigh. You can see club shaft is around about level with the ground. Now, from here, I want to feel almost this kind of scissors action. Left hand is going to come up towards me. Right hand is going to go down towards the golf ball. I can just feel it a little bit more when I split my grip. So, watch what happens when I do that. Left hand up towards me, right hand down. What is the grip doing? The grip is moving up away from the ground. So, what we’re actually doing, if I do this in slow motion, is the grip is working down, down, down, down, down, and then it’s got this big curve in its path. We know from that first demonstration that’s key because that curve is what accelerates the club head out and it allows that club head to have incredible speed, that huge amount of effort. It feels effortless when you do it this way because you’re controlling the grip as opposed to focusing on the club head. And so many of you who feel like you use a lot of effort for not a lot of distance and you feel like the golf swing is strenuous and you feel like you’re wired on the way down, you’re scooping, it’s because you’re focusing on the club head, not the grip. Now, as I do that, you’ll notice that my lead arm starts to bend a little bit. Partly because my grip is split and partly because the grip is coming back up to me. So, watch what happens when I do the same movement. But as I do this, I just continue to pivot. When I pivot, my lead shoulder starts to move further from the ball. So, we start to get the same movement happening in the grip, but we start to have more structure in the lead arm because my lead shoulder is moving up away from the golf ball. It allowed me to move the grip in the correct way without bending the lead arm. So, what you can then do is you can start to try and clip a ball off the tea doing this. Not easy. And you’ll see why now I’ve teed it up much higher. So, I’m going to go set up. hover the club above the ball. I’m obviously not going to reach that green. Make a little back swing. Then I would work my hands down over my thigh. I would use my little scissor action, pivot out the way, and we go through. So you can see how I’m pivoting out the way. My lead arm stays straight and the grip is working upward. It’s curved. When we look at all the great players, what their grip does is it goes accelerating, acceleration, acceleration. That keeps the club head back. Then they start to curve it which accelerates the club head out. Think of it in this little example. Accelerate. Accelerate. Accelerate. What is the club doing? It’s not being kicked out yet, is it? As we start to bend the hands, that’s what kicks the club out. That’s what’s accelerating it through into impact. So, what I can then do is progress that to a little shot. Now, this isn’t going to go anywhere near full speed. I’m going to go left to the green so I don’t go in the water. So, I make a back swing. I accelerate my hands down without kicking the club out. And then I work the grip up as I pivot out the way. And we start to get the right movement happening. Now, that wasn’t at full speed. So, the club head isn’t going to have as much speed, but I’m developing the right movement. And when I’m doing that, I’m not focused on the club head. That’s the key message here. I’m focused on what the grip is doing because I know from that little demonstration, if you can do that, it’s really going to help you process this movement. It’s going to help you understand that if you move the grip correctly, the club head gets accelerated naturally.