With this simple indoor exercise you can achieve better contact

Even when the weather is nice, you can get many benefits from practicing your game indoors, and GOLF Top 100 Teacher Trillium Rose shows you a simple drill you can do indoors to improve the quality of your contact.

In a video posted on Titleist’s YouTube channel, Rose explains that recreational players tend to focus on the backswing but ignore the follow-through.

“We’re going to focus on the follow-through,” she says. “So much emphasis is placed on the backswing. I think sometimes people just forget about the rest and think, well, the ball is long gone, it doesn’t matter.”

But of course the follow-through is also important and Rose has a few tips to help you improve the quality of your shot. First, though, she gives a quick overview of the swing motion.

“My theory on the backswing is this: The club has a small runway at impact,” Rose says. “The club moves at impact and hopefully hits the center of the face. If you tend to bend your arms very quickly and pull the club closer to you, you limit the time you have with the club to hit the center. In other words, you could pull the club completely off course. Instead of doing that, you should let the club linger at impact for much longer.”

To practice this idea, Rose demonstrates moving your arms through the impact zone in slow motion, avoiding any tendency to pull the club off course. It doesn’t have to be an exact straight line, but Rose says it can be helpful to imagine your arms and clubhead traveling through the impact zone on a runway. Memorizing this feeling will ultimately help you make more solid contact.

Next, remember to maintain posture. Avoid lifting or pulling up through the impact zone. Combine this posture – staying in your forward bend – with the “runway” movement in the impact zone to get a good feel.

Indoor exercise “Perfect contact”

Once you have this swing feeling in mind, you are ready to perform the exercise.

First, place your racket horizontally behind your head above your shoulder blades.

Then, holding both ends of your club, tilt your body to about 45 degrees and perform a backswing and follow-through motion. Using a mirror is helpful so you can make sure you stay in this stance throughout the entire motion.

Next, you can practice the impact zone movement by reaching your arms to the horizon line.

“Pay attention to the sideways bend and long arms, at least to the horizon line, and then bend them away,” says Rose.

There is one thing you should not forget during this exercise:

“Make sure you’re using your glutes, hamstrings, quads and abdominals strongly to support this position,” advises Rose. “Otherwise you’ll feel it in your lower back and that’s not what we want.”

Mastering this drill indoors will pay off when you hit the golf course.

“When you add a ball, the grass and the golf course,” Rose says, “you can make much better contact.”

Click here to watch a full video of Rose’s drilling demonstration.

Golf.com Publisher

A four-year member of Columbia’s first class of female collegiate golfers, Jessica can out-score anyone on the masthead. She can out-score anyone in the office, too, where she’s primarily responsible for producing print and online content, as well as overseeing major special projects like GOLF’s first Style Issue, which debuted in February 2018. Her original interview series, “A Round With,” premiered in November 2015 and appeared both in the magazine and as a video on GOLF.com.