A Full Range Session With Robert Rock

Robert Rock meets up again with Golf Monthly’s Joe Ferguson to go through a typical practice session on the driving range at Little Aston Golf Club to explain how he got his golf swing into such an enviable place.

► Chapters:
Introduction 0:00-0:46
Starting a session 0:46
Building a hitting station 3:19
Video analysis 8:46
Hitting driver 14:00
TRS Slider training aid 19:28
Slow mo swing montage 26:03

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Watch more on Golf Monthly…
📹 How To Build The Perfect Golf Swing With Robert Rock 👉 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKMbP7HF9Po
📹 Bryan Bros: What’s In The Bag! 👉 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26GGVTjA_Gw
📹 These Are The 5 Most Underrated Clubs Of 2025 👉 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kho–yiVIEg

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[Music] Right behind me over there is a man in possession of what many people think is the most aesthetically pleasing and technically good golf swing in the game. Now, the last time we did a video with Rob, you guys loved it. The comments were popping off. So, I’ve come to Rob’s home course. So, we’re going to do a little practice session. Let’s get stuck in. Oh, that was a good one, wasn’t it, Rob? Good to see you, mate. Morning, mate. We are here at your home course, right? Little Aston. Yeah, Little Aston. Yeah. So, this is where you do most of your practice. It’s where I do my practice and my coaching now. Yeah. It’s a lovely spot. So, what we wanted to do, we had a great video out in Abu Dhabi last time I saw you. Slightly different weather, wasn’t it? But this is equally as beautiful here. So, what I want to do today is I want to go through what you would do in a typical practice session because you still look after your game, right? You still you still play some stuff and you’re still working on you’ve just been telling me beforehand, working on some other things in in your game. So, you’re still practicing. So, I want to see what a typical Robert Rock practice session would look like now and almost. Talk me through what you were doing when you were playing full-time on the European tour. That would be great. Sound all right? Yeah, it’s good. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Could be loads of bucket balls, but it could be a lot of the time it was a lot of filming, a lot of thinking about what I was doing, a lot of rewinding, watching swings again, trying to trying to always move forwards with the swing to to get it where I wanted wanted to. And um that just took a lot of lot of stopping and starting. Um and now now I know a bit more about my own swing and I understand it better. Now it’s more putting it back into where I want it using the notes and knowledge that I’ve sort of gained on my own game is what do I need to put in today to make it work if I’m playing a tournament this week and it doesn’t take me as long thankfully. So talking of clipping balls away let’s go let’s get going. So when you just turn up here, are you pre-stretched? Are you stretch here? Do you just not stretch? Are you someone who just gets into hitting shots and uses that as a stretch? I didn’t used to stretch before. I would just build the swing up slowly with a six or seven. Clip some away when we’re talking. People want to see you hit balls. Yeah. So nowadays I’m putting the Well, and before I would be just my stretching would basically be re rehearsing the swing in slow motion, just feeling where I’m trying to get to. in the whole whole action. This bit at the end hurts a bit more than it used to. So, that’s what I’m wary of when I’m building it up. I’ve got to loosen up so that that that happens. Okay. Um, and I have to do more shots in sort of a slow slow motion version like that to build up. I’ve already hit like 20 shots. Probably takes me more like 40 to get up to full speed. I’m going to caddy for you as well, Rob. Give me that club. Are you not happy with that? No. Oh, filthy. Let’s get Let’s get some proper shots. Thank you. So, that would be a drill that you do. So, obviously you set up a little station here for your swing plane and your alignment. Yeah, it’s a seven iron. Trying to keep myself as close to the edge of this stick as possible so that this one’s relevant. I’m trying to skim my way up that one and come down pretty close to it. Okay, cool. Hopefully over the top of it. And is this something you would do at the start of a session? And so you’re kind of calibrating plane at this point and then you get on to some other stuff. Yeah. Well, I did I kind of when I was using irons, I had this here all the time. So it was it was a good reference when when I was playing tournaments, my takeaway was pretty much everything to me. And if that sort of flowed up that line, I played really nice. I remember from Abu Dhabi, there’s a couple of times when you were hitting shots where you’d get to that and you just wouldn’t you just stop and go again. cuz I with this as a reference I can sometimes feel that I’m going out away from it and trying to find it. Very rarely I go to inside and clatter it. So when I snatch the club away a little bit quicker, I can feel that it goes too far out and then I’m trying to pull it back and that’s what messes me up. Okay. So I want to feel a really smooth incline to that which I’ve done in various ways to be fair. It’s about finding what what do I need to do to get this club head to because the grip really isn’t doing much or the butt end of the club. I’m trying to get the club from pointing straight down at the ball to be pointing away from the target. And you can control that with all sorts really. So that varies. The position I’m after will always be the same, but how I actually get there is determined by what what do I feel I need to move more on a particular day. Want to see it again then? So, I try and do it as slow as I can. Caught that a bit fat. Um, and I don’t really pay too much attention to how I’m hitting it. You just finding positions. I’m just trying to get comfy with building the back swing up. Then when that flows a bit easier, then I start trying to put the other bits into play. So, you’re not sort of counting balls in. You’re not going I I hit 10 20 using this, then I move on to this. This is a feel thing for you. When you start to feel, okay, that’s good. Then you might remove that. move on when it feels good and looks good. Okay, cool. So, it’s got to it’s got to feel good from here while I’m taking the club away. It’s got to feel like it’s going back smoothly. It’s got to look good from there and from there. So, you’d be in a session now that you just turned up. You’d be recording this. You’d be constantly referring back to what you’re seeing and cross referencing. That would I mean, you got two cameras here. I’d generally do it with one. I’d have one camera there and when it starts to feel nice from this view, I check it. If it feels nice from there, then I go this side. Okay. Does it marry up with what I think? Loads of early days. This side would look great. That side look terrible. Got to start again. This is the stuff that’s fascinating because keep clipping away. But people when they watch your golf swing, it’s so fluid. It’s so natural. It looks like you were just born swinging it like that. What people Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I saw it. We picked that up on the camera. So people don’t understand what sound that was, by the way. That was pretty. People don’t understand the the level of work and maintenance that’s going into make something look as easy as you’re making it look. It is not my natural swing because going back to your early career, I remember you saying something like you you sort of figured out early on that you what your current technique wasn’t going to cut it. It wasn’t going to take you to where you wanted to be. So that that was kind of when you started those seven, eight all day practice sessions, right? To to to get you to where you want to be. And you was that independent research? Yeah. And it was just watching other players. I thought I just can’t do that. Watched some other great players play different shots that I couldn’t play. This is good, isn’t it? This and I thought, well, if I’m going to be a proper pro and understand my my job and my craft prop, I got to be able to do 90. What was it specifically that you can do? You say shots you couldn’t hit. Was it strikes? Was it It was strike. It was strike of irons. It was consistency of a starting line. was a shape, something that’s basically attacking flags. Yeah. Okay. Right. You got to be able to home your iron shots in to some degree and your medium to short irons. They got to start going close. Yeah. Not not long irons. Right. I don’t think I’ve played with anyone that’s great with long irons. Um no one hits long irons tappins really often. Um I could probably count some of my memorable long irons, but I didn’t do it very often. I hit lots of six, sevens, eight, nines close. Yeah. but not really threes and fours. Okay, cool. See another one of these. But it was Yeah, it was it was about me also being aware that my putting probably wasn’t going to be my strongest part. That never bothers me, by the way. I know you brought that up off camera. So, that’s kind of cuz you’re where you’re setting this up. I see a lot of people setting this kind of drill up and then moving the ball kind of like three or four inches this way. You got loads of leway. It’s got to be tight to match that because it makes that irrelevant, right? Yeah. Exactly. Otherwise, you got to keep moving that. So, I’ I’d keep hitting out of a hole, okay? Cuz I knew this was set up right. So, on tour practice areas where I was just I didn’t really didn’t have enough room to move back a lot. Couldn’t move side to side cuz somebody front and back. So, I would just I’d end up just hitting out of holes like that because I knew that it was all right. And as I wasn’t really paying attention too much to shot, it didn’t really matter. Another bit of tor source here while Rob’s clipping this away. I see many men with a graphite design to ad alignment stick. That’s a big flex everyone. Just for you, Joe. Big flex. Very flashy this guy. Flush. I also knew that this bit being so close and I was trying to fade it, I was going to skim it, so I didn’t mind that. Cool. So, let’s assume now we’re in the position, we’ve checked the camera, you’re in a position where you’re feeling things are good. Now, you are you moving that out the way? moving everything out the way. Would you get into a point now where you’re just kind of like, I’m going to hit some shots. I’m going to shape some. Is that what you do next or where do you go after? Very, very rarely did that. Okay. I trusted that what I’d set up and measured if you like or saw on the video that it would make me hit a little fade. Okay. than it generally did. If I got it all right, like all the the viewpoints of it and I was taking a nice divot, cutting across it tiny little bit, they should fade while I’m doing this. So, I paid attention to some of the shots at the end and I may have taken that out when I wanted to be a little bit more um rhythmical and yes, that’s what I’m getting at. So, I guess this is would be classed as kind of like I never get the terminology right, but like block practice technique work, right? This is this was swing building for me that I felt like I had to redo every Monday. Okay. But then so say Monday, halfway through that session, you that’s it. That’s what you do. You’re just rebuilding, recalibrating this technique. You’re not then going, I’m going to discard those. I’m going to hit some shots. I’m going to shape some. I’m going to do this. You’re still just staying in, yeah, I’m staying in this this zone. Cuz I knew if I did this on a Monday and however long it some some nice days, it only took the morning’s work. Yeah. And I went home thinking, well, that last tournament I played okay, checked it on the Monday morning and it wasn’t far off. Few little tweaks in the setup and the takeaway, maybe a little bit later on and I’d work through it nicely and there wasn’t a lot to do. Then I’d give give myself a bit of a break um and not hit so many balls on the Monday knowing that I’m then going to go out on Tuesday or I’m flying Monday night or I’m flying Tuesday morning. Then I’ve got to see whether the swings made it on the fly over with me, which is a funny Yeah. funny thing, but often it didn’t. Okay. Often it felt amazing at home on Monday and then just the environment of being at a tournament and trying to redo this setup at a tournament didn’t feel the same. Let’s clip a couple more. Yeah. So in terms of I don’t see I mean obviously you’ve got a guide here for club path and swing point. Are you someone who obviously your fundamentals when we look at everything from a face on point of view which we’ll show you now your grip which I you use the golf pride line grip stuff which I think help get you in a nice neutral position you all we’ve spoken about here is is what’s in your brain of this position and this takeaway fundamentals of alignment of grip of posture is that something you’re always looking at on camera as well or is that just now ingrained with you it’s because of all all because of this um I would have my caddies check my alignment once I got uh on the course stuff. Yeah, I mean I mean there’s there’s nothing to alignment here is it’s already done for me. So it was it was one variable that needed checking once I got out on the course where there’s nothing no reference points to me a lot while I’m doing this in practice sessions at home. So, I would be coming back here just trying to picture the alignment stick and this as a a plane so that I could walk into it and kind of build it into my pre-shot routine, which which sometimes I I managed to do on the course. But it [Music] when the takeaway and alignment felt nice, the game was easy. Yeah. But as soon as I had a well, hitting the ball was easy. Soon as I had a doubt about my alignment, that changes this. So if I if I’m thinking I’m there, but I’m here or the other way around, this has got to move and that put me off. So I I did easily put myself off. Interesting. Well, I’m still trying to get to the bottom of this session. So we’ve done our maintenance work. We’re happy with takeaway. We’re happy with what’s going on here. Is that literally like you just said the Jack Nicholas? Right. Cool. I’m good. I’m moving on. Are you not going? Are you not even clipping any drivers? I’ll hit some drivers. Yeah, I’ll I’ll change this. I’ll shift the angle of this. Can we do that? Hit some drivers. Yeah, we might break stuff, but we’ll try it today. That’s fine. Yeah. So, I’ve got a club repair shop. We can sort that out. Can we Can we sort that right? Yeah, we can sort that right out. Like my last head cover. I do. That’s beautiful. I’m actually going to pick one of these up. Got a little Jones bag yesterday and that’s going to look great on it. A little vintage look. I’ll treat you to one of them, mate. Oh, what a man. What a man. You got that on camera, right? I’ll treat you to one of them. Um, there’s also, we’ll show a little B-roll of it now. A lovely little sounder Sunday bag. Clutch tort should we use? We got a lot going on. You pick your pick. You take your I bet you got some lovely tees, aren’t you? Lovely. I got a nice little tea bag as well, I think, is gorgeous. Yeah. Palm when I got them. Hima clutch. Come on then. Let’s have a little look at how you would re-calibrate this. So, this I need to do this on video, but I’m going to trust you to help me do this. Okay. Well, that’s not a wise move. No, probably not. But let’s give it a whirl. So again, I I might cut myself a little more slack with the driver because it’s Yeah, it’s not easy, is it? And this is the first one. And this is the first one. And in truth, coming slightly underneath this with the driver is no big deal. You big wuss. He’s got that basically horizontal just light on the ground. I wouldn’t do many of these, right? I want to make sure that the swing moves feel the same. gives me a slightly different position at the top cuz it’s the driver, but I want the takeaway to feel nice. And I would assume the work you’re doing with seven on is going to bleed into this. It should be the same. I might only do a handful of these. Cool. Okay. Once everything’s organized and pretty good, there’d be previous days like in the early 2000s, I’d get the six iron looking good driver. Oh my god, it looks horrendous. So now I’m starting again and it looks horrendous from the front. More importantly, I used to bend my left arm lots and I used to hate it. So you can’t see that so clearly from down the line. So that’s why constantly doing both views cuz the bending was the fault that I hated. The the line wasn’t always terrible. I dropped it back and shallowed it too much. I didn’t like that. It’s been a big fad, but I hated it. Okay. Nothing good in that, I don’t think. Um, so and it’s something I I do and I don’t really want too much of it. Lay it down too flat, it’s no good. Um, so I’d constantly be thinking about what’s it going to look like from there and what’s it going to look like from there. Is this feeling better? Um, so I had to try and marry two images up in in my head at the same time, which is quite quite difficult. Just as you’re clipping these away, I want you to think about because what you’ve said there about bent left arm, a lot of people at home will have that problem. I’ve got that problem. So, I’d love to know what you did to rectify that. It’s not such a big problem. I made it a bigger problem than it was in your head. Yeah. I hated it. I could feel it cuz some people think an extra lever isn’t necessarily. Yeah. I used to drive it brilliant with a bent left arm. Right. Okay. Okay. I felt like that was the reason why I couldn’t strike my irions really really well. Got you. Probably wasn’t. Okay. So, but I didn’t like the look of it and the fact I couldn’t fix it irritated me. So, it became a a thing to do. unnecessary thing to do. Maybe I should have spent more time on putting than the bent left arm. Aim pointing. Aim pointing. Exactly. Well, I think we only need one of those, Rob. That’s That was pretty good. Yes. If I’d done that procession and it looked right, I’d be like, I’m done. Brilliant. But those days were few and far between. Come on, do it again. Show me it wasn’t a fluke. But I think there’s some great lessons in here. This is two in a row. You must be able to. You’re Robert Rock. You got to quit. Robert Rock. You must be able to. So, there’s some good lessons in here for me. Like, but that could have been great, right? But if it weren’t right at the top and it didn’t look right from there, I’m still going. We’re not stopping. I’m not showing you that. That just assume it was good, right? But this this I’ll be wasting my time now, couldn’t I? So, that’s a very good point. But I guess the lesson here for a lot of people at home is that rather than that Yeah, that’s really good. By the way, there’s a bit I can’t do now, which I hate, is the fact that my right leg skips forward because my back hurts. Rob, calm down. It looks great. There’s like you got to got to got to bank it in a bit better than that. The lesson in here is that search for me there’s so many people trying a different swing thought every week going for a lesson with their club bro then a lesson with someone else and getting all these different things ahead once you get like you’ve said you’ve found your key to what what your checkpoints and what make your makes your swing work. Do it to death and never deviate away from it and in no time your swing will look like that and start to actually enjoy what you’ve got. And I wish I’ I wish I’d enjoyed my swing a bit more. And actually, in the end, I was really happy with what it turned out. But I think it was good from probably 2008 onwards. But I guess that self-critical part of you, you would have got to where you got it, right? Yeah. I wouldn’t have got there. That’s true. I could have had somebody blowing smoke. I could do that for you right now. I should have employed you to do that and then that would have made me feel better. Not bad. Just slightly faster would be good, wouldn’t it? Yeah. If we could speed it up a bit. I mean, let’s just go steady. You’re getting Can you like speed it up? We can do that in the post for me, can’t you? Brilliant. Right. Give us one more, Rob, and then we’re going to wrap this up. That is absolutely something I didn’t didn’t mention. This I used to do this off astroturf with no tea. Okay. Just so that because you can’t te up and on a mat with a at home I was in a it was on a artificial putting green where I didn’t have a a tea and I couldn’t I couldn’t be bothered to keep bending over teeing it up. Start doing drive off. So I just kept doing it off the deck cuz I could hit it off the same place and I wasn’t bothered where it went cuz it went into a net. Well, I guess the side benefit of that is the precision of strike you need to do that. You’re training something else. strike was good and it helped me keep myself from tilting too far back which I thought was one of the reasons why bottom out too early. Yeah, could bottom out too early. Yeah. So, I would do them all like this. But I’m not going to do one of these cuz I’ll probably top it. No, you’re going to do it now. You think you are? You But but it’s easier like that. I would do that and I would just I mean I probably topped hundreds of them. But I was just building a swing with a ball to hit at, not trying to hit a shot. Because you can make a practice swing and make that look nice, but as soon as there’s something to hit, it changes, doesn’t it? So, I didn’t I didn’t care really what driver shot was hitting at the time. I just wanted a a ball to swing at at some sort of pace to make sure that things are lined up and I actually struck it all right. So, I do I did hundreds, thousands like that. So, we’ve got our alignment sticks down. We’ve got your plane set up. Are you other than this, are you uh a training aid sort of a guy? Do you use anything else to kind of get the Got Liam TRS here just training we got TRS everything we’re going to just I didn’t use a load of training aids to be honest but I mean these were well you call these training aids or not they’re just sticks aren’t they right but um part of the process for me later on was trying to maximize my practice time and make it more efficient because I couldn’t hit the thousands of balls I wanted to hit. So when we talked about my takeaway and the takeaway really was the key part for me, but building it up to the top and the transition. Obviously transition is like major, isn’t it? In the in in the swing to make sure everything’s working properly and I was one day I was trying to think a bit further ahead and I wanted to be sure my right arm was doing a certain job at the top so that I could think further into the down swing to see if my idea was going to work. So, I bought a load of seat belt off eBay and a couple of clips and made this. Right. And the idea was I wanted my arm to be So, just back. You literally just bought a seat belt off eBay. I bought seat belt off eBay and some plastic clips. We’re pretty much close to what we got other than the nice fancy bit that Liam did to it in the end. So, one seat belt strap around the chest cuz I I tried putting a glove under my arm, right? Didn’t like how that felt and it didn’t do the job that I wanted it to do. tried the towel under the arm drill, which is basically the same thing. And that doesn’t work either because it just keeps your arms fixed in one point, which I don’t think they should be doing. So, I made this bit to give you a little bit of room and a tiny gap. Yeah. So, it’s not it’s not wedged to me like it would have to be if I’ve tucked this under there. Right. So, this has got like a what we got there? Like 3 or 4 millm gap and the ability for it to to move. So, it’s on a level with my chest, and I wanted my right arm to be able to do that to its basically maximum range of motion going backwards whilst it was flexing. Okay. Right. So, I wanted to be able to get my right arm folded and I wanted to get the the arm around my body as far as I could without it drifting up off my side. Sure. Because I wanted to get the order of the down swing better. So, I wanted my right arm to be the furthest point behind me at the top. not pinned in front of me. Yeah. So, it became the last thing to come down in the order of the the the down swing, but not floating like but not floating. So, if I let let it go way behind me with my right arm sticking miles out behind, I knew that was no good cuz the elbow would get stuck coming down. Yeah. So, I wanted it to be in order but also relatively close and have some um relationship to my body turn. And you hit shots with this, right? This isn’t just a Yeah, it was it was me trying to go go ahead like a month’s worth of work. So, if I strap this close to me, I can keep going in the back swing know that it’s knowing that it’s within certain boundaries, but I can stretch my back swing out more cuz I was getting getting a bit older and less flexible. So, I didn’t want to just let my right arm go loose and go anywhere, but I wanted to stretch it further back. So, I wanted that to go deep as far as I could so that then when I unwind my body, I could give myself more time for my shoulders to unwind. Cuz one of the faults I had was that the shoulders didn’t unwind quick enough. Okay? And if the arms come down too soon, you haven’t got time for your shoulders to open up. So, that was the idea. Sync that up. So, this was to get the arm behind, feeling a bit more behind my shoulder, and then use my shoulder turn to then create space for my right arm to fit into on the way down. And as a little bit of a byproduct, it kept it quite nice and organized on the way through, but that wasn’t the original intention. Yeah, that looked pretty good, didn’t it? And it does feel pretty much like what mos swing normally feels like. Whereas if you were using a towel or tying a rope around yourself or the glide restricted, right? Yeah. It’s not realistic. Got to be tight around your chest so it doesn’t give you too much room. And it’s got to sit level. Yeah. And I did notice that I actually started to hit some really good shots with this on and I found a a pretty good rhythm with it. And it did do what I wanted it to do was the bottom line. So, we ended up making it. Do we need to next time you’re playing a tournament, do we need to take your sweater off and check you haven’t got it on underneath there? I’ll keep I can keep this one underneath. Can I? Hey, just hold the belly in a little bit. For most people, the follow- through part will be the more restrictive feeling. The back swing should be okay. And if it doesn’t feel okay, chances are you’re doing something wrong, right? Yeah. Yeah. And then, I mean, it’s only to give you a feeling of how close the arms can be to the body while still getting a full full swing in. It shouldn’t make the swing too short. And it’s a bit like Ben Hogan’s Ben Hogan’s drill of having his he had his he had his arm strapped together sometimes and he had his arm strapped to his his chest with a belt I believe to try and get that and that relationship which you see in his swing where his elbows the the right elbow folds in nicely in into his side coming down, but then he he refolds his left arm really well. That’s something I haven’t been able to do, but I wanted to be able to do that to fold quickly like that without the wrist having to do that. The elbow folds better on the way through. You get a better release up the plane, I think. But I haven’t managed to quite train myself to do that. Cool. Rob, that is absolutely fascinating stuff. There’s some really good lessons there. Everyone can take something different from that. Really appreciate that. People really want to see. Hope we’ve not spoken too much over that because I wanted to just get loads of Rob rock swings because that’s what people want to see. And if I have spoken too much over that, I apologize. Cue a really nice cinematic slow-mo montage of Rob. [Music] Heat. [Music] [Music] Heat. [Music]