15 Golf Driving Tips to Improve your Drive

The majority of golf tips shared today concern the improvement of a golfers’ drive. The golf driving tips that are often shared are more aimed towards hitting the ball a longer distance.

The first and foremost step when setting up for a long drive is your positioning. You should start off as you would do for any golf swing shot. Driving is a very important shot as it can determine the rest of the hole.

Some simple yet effective free golf driving tips for accuracy and length have been included below:

1. Make The Club Do The Work

So often, beginners are seen attempting to smash the ball to pieces in the hope of increasing the distance of their drive and impressing their mates. The clubs are designed for different distances, so let your driver do its thing. A useful golf driving tip here is to concentrate on your swing and the center of the ball, not the power of your swing.

Trying to hit the ball too hard will result in a slice, an air shot, or even a pulled muscle on your part. Just take your time, get the motion of your swing correct and let the club do what it was made for. Only when you have mastered your swing should you try to hit it harder.

2. Keep Your Eyes On The Game

The professional golfer’s eye line is parallel to the target line. This is a critical alignment to facilitate the club’s correct path approaching impact. If the eyes point to the right of the target, the club will likely come excessively from the inside. If the eyes point to the left, the club will be excessively steep. Matching the eye line to the target line is a great way to get the club on the correct path.

3. Keep Your Elbow Attached to Your Hip

The correct sequence of motion beginning the downswing creates the proper tilt of the right side. This allows the right arm to bend, creating a powerful position while ensuring an on-plane attack. Keeping the right arm close to the hip encourages the body to drive the arms and club through impact, minimizing the role of the hands during contact.

4. Keep Your Muscles Supple and Your Grip Soft

Try keeping your hands soft throughout the swing and leaving the club at the top of your backswing for as long as possible. By soft hands, I mean keeping your muscles supple from your elbows through your fingers. Doing this helps promote a quicker, snappier release through impact.

By leaving the club at the top, here’s what I mean:

Once you get your body set at the top of your backswing, keeping your club at the top allows you to begin the downswing not with your hands, but with your larger, more powerful trunk and leg muscles. By driving the downswing with the body and then with the hands, you can achieve some serious lag that’s going to release when your clubhead meets the ball. Stick with these two swing thoughts, and you’ll find that effortless swings are the secret to more distance.

5. Short Backswing = Longer Drive

By swinging the club too far back, all you’re doing is losing width and control.You can get all the power you need from little more than a three-quarter-length backswing, as long as you have a correct wrist hinge and full body turn. With this simple golf driving tip, you will get much more width into your golf swing resulting in more consistent longer drives.

6. Clear Vision

One golf driving tip is to visualize the shot you want to hit. Feel a smooth swing as you take a couple practice swings and visualize the ball flying to your target. This helps instill confidence and focuses you on execution instead of “what if I top my first tee ball?” Whatever you do don’t think about topping off the tee, imagine yourself hitting the ball straight down the fairway and never think to yourself what if. Just feel confident about your shot and it will more than likely come off for you, but you must concentrate!

7. Aggressive Hip Rotation

Tigers hip rotation on the downswing is unmatched on tour. He can do this because of his extreme core rotational strength and flexibility. Even though you may not be as fit as Tiger, you can still try to rotate your hips aggressive on the downswing while trying to create lag behind you with your club. What this does is created a high level of torque in your core, which translates into a MUCH higher clubhead speed and distance.

8. Tilt Your Spine Away

Tilt Your Spine Away: Another great addition to our golf driving tips is to tilt or angle your spine away from the target. This enables you to sweep up on the ball giving it more loft and distance. The most common position for amateurs is a straight or reverse tilted spine causing you to hit down on it and losing valuable height and distance.

9. Always Keep Your Foot Anchored

One of the essential golf driving tips to hit longer is to keep your foot anchored and your body behind the ball. The anchored foot is the foot which you swing away from and towards the ball. If you’re right handed it will be your right foot and the left foot for the left-hander. Lifting your foot too early on a golf swing decreases the power and the length of the shot. Keeping your foot anchored on any lofted shot also stops you from going into your downswing too early and interrupting the fluid motion of a full swing, which also results in a loss of distance on the shot.

10. Level Rotation of Hips and Shoulders

One of the keys to a solid drive is to make sure that on your backswing you keep your backswing side as motionless as possible, so you can and let your front side do all the work. This keeps the shoulders and the hips at a level alignment and it allows you to make a good solid rotation for a great backswing and a powerful, solid shot.

A good way to practice the level turns of the shoulders and the hips are to take a couple of help speed practice swings with the arm you use at the front of the swing, and just that arm only. Make sure you concentrate on keeping the shoulders and the hips on a level rotation while doing so.

11. Hang a Shirt on Your Club

As whacky as this may sound it is really effective practice purposes nonetheless. It is preached (along with many other golf driving tips) by a lot of professional golf instructors and is proven to work. It not only helps to slow down your swing and prevent slice or hook, it also encourages you to finish your swing off completely. Don’t make the mistake however of pausing at the top of your backswing as you still want that natural fluent motion of a normal golf swing.

12. Imagine You’re Playing Baseball

Yep, another one of those great golf driving tips you know us so well for. This is not your average tip for driving but it works just as well, if not better.

Make some waist-high practice swings as if you were hitting a pitch. Increase your speed after each swing, really trying to feel and hear the clubhead whip through impact as if you were “swinging for the fences.” Gradually lower the height of the swing as if a pitcher were throwing you lower pitches. Continue until the clubhead contacts the ground.

You’re now well on your way to adding an extra 20 yards to your drives!!

13. It’s All About The Arms

Every golfer goes through fazes of inconsistency in their ball striking no matter how experienced they are. A good golf driving tip to get rid of this inconsistency is to get used to swinging the arms. The arms are often forgotten about in golf driving tips, and more emphasis is placed on the trunk. Your arms are just as important in any golf swing.

To start getting your confidence and reassurances back all you have to do is swing your club as you would but as you follow through to bring back to a backswing again, and keep it going like this for a few repetitions, or until you feel comfortable again with the club and the line of your swing. Make sure you keep this action going in a consistent motion with no pauses in between.

You will be hitting consistently again in no time at all.

14. Minimizing Spin To Get More Length

Having a spin on the ball off a drive can seriously shorten the distance of which you hit. Some golf driving tips for getting rid of spin are outlined below:

Use a higher tee than normal. The best tees for this are the 23/4 inch tees that peg the ball as high as possible. Having a higher tee like this promotes the golfer to swing up on the ball rather than flat on it or even down on it in some bad cases…

Get rid of any downward action. Swinging up instead of down on contact with the ball will minimize spin and improve your overall driving distance.

Remain behind the ball. Any tendency to slide ahead of the ball at impact will lower the launch angle and create more spin. Stay down and through the shot at impact, swinging the club up, out and away from the body, not down and across it.

15. Get Fit For Longer Drives

No matter what you have done in the past to increase your drive, none of them can be as effective as actually getting fit to perform your swing and drives better. If you still can’t get up there in the 300-yard marker I think it’s time to hit the gym. No matter how good and fluid your swing is, if you’re not strong and flexible in the correct places then you’re not going to get maximum distance. My advice to you is, sign up for one of the many golf fitness programs available on the internet and get hitting longer drives.

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