This Move Makes You Wild Off the Tee (And You Don’t Even Know It)

If your driver feels unpredictable — long one shot, wild the next — there’s a good chance you’re making this incredibly common downswing move… without even realizing it.

In this lesson, I break down the sneaky move that costs golfers accuracy, consistency, and distance off the tee. I’ll show you how to identify it in your own swing, explain why it feels correct but actually isn’t, and give you a few simple drills to fix it fast.

This isn’t about changing your whole swing — it’s about one smart shift that can instantly tighten your dispersion and boost your confidence with the driver.

✅ Learn what to look for
✅ Fix your downswing pattern
✅ Hit more fairways with power and control

Don’t let this hidden fault control your tee shots any longer.

📲 The Chris Ryan Golf Academy App
The all-in-one coaching platform designed to help you train smarter, practice better, and play your best golf! 🎯

✅ Structured training plans
✅ Fun & effective practice games
✅ Exclusive content not on YouTube

Start your 7-day free trial today! ⬇️
🔗 https://www.chrisryangolf.com/chris-ryan-golf-academy-app/

⛳ Want to Play Better Golf?
Join me on the journey to lower scores and more enjoyment on the course! Don’t forget to LIKE, COMMENT & SUBSCRIBE for weekly golf coaching videos.

💬 Got a question? Drop a comment below – I read them all!
📩 Want to work with me? Email: chris@chrisryangolf.com
🌍 Visit My Website: www.chrisryangolf.com

🎥 Want Personal Online Coaching?
If you’re serious about improving, I offer personalised online coaching to help you reach your goals faster.

🔗 https://www.chrisryangolf.com/online-coaching/

🤝 My Trusted Partners
🔥 TaylorMade Golf – https://www.taylormadegolf.eu
🏌️‍♂️ Clubhouse Golf – https://www.clubhousegolf.co.uk
🎯 Hack Motion – https://www.hackmotion.com/chrisryan
📡 FullSwing – https://www.fullswinggolf.com
🎯 PuttOut Golf – https://www.puttout.golf
👟 Adidas Golf
🔧 Mapei – https://www.mapei.com/GB-EN/
00:00 Introduction
00:28 Most Common Driver Fault
03:04 Perfect Arm Swing
07:09 Driver Delivery Drill

Almost all of my students who struggle with driver make this one dowsing mistake. And when we fix it, they pick up distance and they hit it straighter and those changes are almost immediate. In this video, I’m going to show you how to look for this in your golf swing, how to spot it so you know if this applies to you, and then more importantly, a couple of really simple drills that will fix it and enable you to take the ball straighter and further, like I said, almost immediately. So, what is this mistake and how do you kind of look for it in your golf swing? We need to be looking at the golf swing from a down the line view. So I want you to take your phone, pop it on a tripod, stick it in slow motion. That makes a big difference. And you’re looking at in the down swing when the club shaft is level with the ground. So you can see there level with the ground. That’s kind of what we call delivery position. And you’re looking at where is the club head relative to your hands at that point. Now, if you’re struggling with driver, hitting it not as far as you think, not as straight, not as consistent, there’s a very good chance that at that checkpoint, your driver will be above or sorry, outside of your hands. So, when we look at where the club head is traveling relative to the hands, it’s passing above and outside of them. Now, that’s not what we tend to see from the golfers who hit the driver high, right to left, and long. We see something very different. We’ll come to that in a little bit later, but I just want to show you why that’s an issue and why we need to address it and why it’s almost one of the most common faults that I see in the driver’s swing. So, I’m going to hit a shot. I got my full swing down here and I’m going to try and basically do that. I’m going to try and get that club head to pass above and outside my hands on the way down. and we’ll just see what happens as I do that. There’s going to be quite a few of you watching who are pretty familiar with that shot. Uh it went a long way off to the right. And when we look at the data, you can see there my attack angle with the driver was downwards and my club path was out to win. So my club was swinging left. Now if I swing the driver down into the ball and left, two things are going to happen. I’m going to get slices. I’m going to miss lots of fairways. And because I’m hitting down, I’m giving up yardage that I could get back if I was to hit up on the golf ball. So, I’m going to teach you how to fix that fault, how to change it, and how to ultimately hit up on the golf ball with a better path, which is instantly going to give you straighter drives with with more distance. Now, there’s a couple of little drills that we need to do, and I want you to run through these in this order because if you follow this sequence when you come to make full swings at the end, all these changes are going to be in place. We need to basically split this into two sections. We need to look at what your arms are doing in that down swing and then what your kind of lower arms are doing, specifically kind of your your wrists. And I said, we’re going to give you some really, really simple drills. So, let’s go ahead and let’s get you up to the top of the golf swing. Now, I’ve spoken about this a few times, but when we make a dow swing, there’s two things really happening when we look on a kind of macro level. Number one, my body is going from this position and it’s rotating back towards the target. That happens in every golf swing. It’s going to be happening in your golf swing. So, the body is rotating. What should also be happening is that relative to that body, the arms should be moving independently of that body. You can see here I move my arms, but I’m not moving my body. So, we’ve got, we’ll call it arm swing and body turn. Now, those things happen in almost every golf swing, but watch what happen if watch what happens if I play around with the order. So, we make a back swing and I go body turn, arm swing. Where is that club relative to my hands? It was over and outside. That was the position we’re trying to avoid. So, because I went body turn, arm swing, I got into that poor position. Now, watch what happens if I do the opposite. If I go up to the top and I go arm swing, body turn. Well, suddenly we get the opposite. Almost too extreme, the opposite way. But you can see how as we play around with that order, we change our delivery. And if we change our delivery here, we change what is happening at impact. And if we change what is happening at impact, we change what the ball is doing. And ultimately, that’s the goal. Anything you do in your swing here is to try and get the ball to do something better. This will get the ball to do something better. Trust me, I’ve had so much success with these drills, getting people to hit the driver longer and straighter. So, how do we change this? Well, the first little drill I want you to do is what I call the five:00 drill. You’re going to take something, place it on the ground. Obviously, I’ve used a golf ball. Take a setup. And I want you to imagine you’re stood on a clock face. 12:00 is right in front of me. That’s the golf ball. We’ve got one, we’ve got two, we’ve got three, we’ve got four, we’ve got five, we’ve got six. This golf ball is around about 5:00 somewhere in in that area there. And the first little exercise I want you to do is one where you make a back swing. You hold your body rotation and you allow your arms to work down towards 5:00 or in this case it’s the golf ball I place on the floor. Could be a tea, could be a glove, whatever it is for you. So my arms are working down. Notice how there’s very little if any body rotation. Now is that what actually happens in a golf swing? No. But this is a drill. We’re training different movements and very often the drills don’t need to look like a real swing because they’re there to serve a purpose. So what I’m going to do is I’m going to do a few of those. One, two, three. And then I’m going to on the fourth one try and still move the hands and arms down to that golf ball, but introduce the body turn. And look what happens. The club arrives at the golf ball. Now, when I first do this, I’m going to take my normal setup. The ball is teed up. I don’t want to be hitting these at full speed. If you have got the ability to track your data, which is so valuable if you have, you should start to see it change straight away. So, here we go. Let’s have a go. I’ve got my good alignment. So, I’m going to go back down to the ball. There’s one, two, three. Same movement and turn. and didn’t quite get that at the middle. But I think you’ll probably even see that golf ball had a little bit of right to left. It certainly didn’t have the sort of left to right. And yet we see the data there. Look straight away that data has changed because of what I did because I changed the order. Didn’t change what was happening. I just changed the order. That’s the first little drill. I don’t want you to go at full speed when you’re doing that. I just want you to hit shots. And you saw how far that ball went. It didn’t carry any more than about 20 yards. But we’ve got to get that order changing. And then you can move on to this second drill. I’ve just placed this alignment stick in the ground. You can see how I’ve done that. It’s basically on my target line, the length of an alignment stick behind the golf ball and obviously at a fairly shallow angle. I’ve also, you don’t necessarily need to do this, but it’s great for illustration purposes. I’ve just created a semicircle of golf balls from that ball that I had previously through to this golf ball. Now, why is this so important? Well, we’ve got basically arm rotation. So, you can see, and you can do this, just grab a club and you can do this. You’ll feel how you can rotate your forearms. My thumbs are going from straight up to my right and my left. This is called arm rotation. So, just look what happens if I get to the top of my back swing. I work my hands down to my five:00 position, which is what we’ve just said we want to do. I’m holding the body turns. My arms are working down. That’s what we wanted you to do in that first exercise. But if I start to rotate my arms to the left as I do that, where’s the club going? Well, again, it’s going outside and over my hands. So, if I start to turn now, I’m getting into all sorts of trouble. So, yes, we’ve got to get the arms swinging relative to the body, but remember at the start I said we needed then to look at more what’s happening in the forearms and the wrists because I can make my arms work exactly as I want to. But if the club starts to tip out because what my hands are doing, I’m in all sorts of trouble and I’m still going to have that club moving down and across. Take your golf club, flip it across, hold it right down by the head. You’re going to make your back swing this time. Hold your body. Get your arms working down. And I want you to trace the grip of the club into the golf ball over the semicircle of golf balls here. So you see as I do that, I’m going up. But this time I can’t make this movement because that wouldn’t allow me to trace that semicircle. What it’s going to cause me to do is it’s going to cause me to hold my forearm rotation. It’s going to cause me to release the angles a little bit. soon, which for drive is actually really good. So, you can see that as I’m holding my rotation, which is to my right, and I’m starting to use my thumbs to push the club head down, I start to get the grip pointing at this golf ball here, and then I can trace all the way through to impact. Now, in that really simple little drill, what we’re actually doing is changing the order of turn and arm swing and also controlling what your wrists and forearms are doing. If we want to change this fault, we have to do those two things. You have to change the order and we have to change what your forearms are doing. Now, as I make that little golf swing, there’s a very good chance you’re looking at this thinking, Chris, that does not look like a driver swing. But because I’m doing it in this strange order, it looks quite odd. If I start to blend that movement together, we actually get into a delivery position, which is exactly what you want. I know I’ve not got the club head there, but that club is passing underneath and behind my hands. Underneath and behind is going to give me a path, which is more likely to be to the right. That’s really beneficial to straighten out the drives. and it’s going to cause the club head to be lower pre- impact, which is going to help me hit up on the ball. And if I do that correctly, I will simply miss this alignment stick. So, as I flip the driver around the right way now, just watch as I rehearse these movements. Back swing, arms down, trace, and in. Arms down, trace, and in. And if I start to move those balls out the way, I’ll leave that one there because that’s my reference. I should be able to get that golf club to that ball without hitting the alignment stick. And I can see that very, very clearly. I can feel what movements are happening to create that. It’s going to instantly give me some feedback as to whether I’m making this poor move. Club over, club high, club outside. I can’t even get to the golf ball. So, if you felt comfortable and you could potentially put like a pool noodle over the top of that or something, there’s no reason why you can’t go ahead and hit some shots. I’m going to go at the same speed as I did that previous swing. I don’t want any speed here because that alignment stick is relatively close, but I can rehearse it. I can rehearse it. And I can go ahead and hit some shots. And again, that ball has gone I want to say 80 yards. But look at the shape on it. It went out to the right. It started to curve back. It’s finishing right in the center of the fairway. And once you can produce the delivery that I just did at whatever speed that was, let’s say it was 40% speed, then I just ramp it up. And as you start to ramp it up, you might want to remove this because it’s quite intrusive. But I guarantee you if you do those drills, pop your phone back, video your golf swing, you’re going to see something that looks a lot different.