 Welcome back to the Average Golfers channel and what is the start of a brand new series that we're calling Test in the Tips. So like you, I'm an Average Golfer and my good golf lasts maybe two or three rounds and all things go downhill and we return to our fault, our bad game and what do I do? Well maybe like you I look to YouTube channels to try and help me find a quick fix, solve my problems and that's exactly what we're going to do in Test in the Tips. I'm going to try some of the tips from the major YouTube channels that are out there, test their theories, see if they work and whether or not you should also be giving them a try. I'm going to kick things off with a video that's really relevant to my current struggles and that was of recent weeks I've been playing pretty poorly and in particular my irons which is generally the better part of my game have been a little bit erratic to say the least. Strike was poor and even with the good shots I was getting them just a little bit thinner times off the bottom grooves and I was questioning what was going wrong. And I watched a video from Ali Taylor. Now first of all Ali's got a fantastic channel going right now, there's some amazing tips on there and plenty of them so don't forget to give him a subscribe and flick over to his channel for plenty and more of these kind of golfing tips. But this resonated with me, it was a recent upload of theirs and it was about how to strike your irons better and I thought right I'll have a quick watch and straight away. I seen things in there which were relevant to my game and now this sort of two pence piece can make such a massive difference to my strike quality. Right so first of all let me try and explain the basic principle of this tip and it's the idea is to find out where you're striking the ball or where the lowest point is in your swing. So let's take it for a sort of elite players you will always see they'll hit ball first then turf and often a fairly hefty divot. For me I very much take the ball off the top of the turf and what I found this morning is that sometimes that can be that if you've ever fatted a ball or you catch it just a little bit behind then the lowest point in my swing is certainly at the back of the ball. And that's something that's not ideal in terms of perfect iron striking. You want to be striking the ball or the lowest point in your swing needs to be after impact. Now the good thing that we've got is we've got Trackman to tell us is this instructional video that we're going to use, this tip, has it really worked. So can we move the lowest points in my swing from being behind the golf ball potentially to being after impact. And that's what we're going to test and we're going to do it with this two pence piece which I've now lost. And the basic way in which this works is you place the two pence piece behind the golf ball. And it's about, I don't know, three four inches behind the golf ball in its first instance. And the idea is is that on your downswing all you have to do is miss that two pence piece. Now that may sound very easy and straightforward but trust me it feels very very different when you're over the ball and you realise quite where you actually deliver that club at its lowest point. And that was the real surprise to me in this data that I collected earlier. So the shots that you see me hit with dry ball data collected is Trackman very cleverly records the lowest point in your swing. And it measures it in inches. And if you go through the data that you're looking at now you'll see that on every occasion I'm significantly behind the ball in terms of my lowest point of my swing. And what that's done it's impacted on basically at what part of the swing I've made contact and it's made a massive difference the way I launch the ball. I've always been a person that hits the ball incredibly high. That is that 20 degree of launch angle you can see that on average 3.3 inches behind the ball is my lowest point of impact. And basically what that does like I said it's throwing that ball up there it's a big high ball flight can be good at times but it very much seems hitting it on almost the upswing and at no point am I making the lowest point of my swing after impact. So we made the drill and I tried like I said the two pence goes directly behind the ball. The first instance there's quite a lot of room and all you have to do is what it makes you do first and foremost is you start to feel that your weight slightly shifts over to that left hand side unknowingly and I notice it straight away. My immediate address was almost or natural address rather was almost my weight on my right heel so almost again where I'm on the upswing coming through. So the first thing I did was my weight automatically shifted a little bit forward and then I attempted to try and not hit the two pence piece. You'll see there I just caught it and that happens on a number of occasions when you and don't forget this is like four inches behind the ball at this point. But I did that on a number of occasions even though I was trying my best to avoid it it just showed again that my lowest point if you like of impact or the lowest point of my swing is quite a bit behind the ball. I'll give it one more go while the camera's on and see if we can avoid it this time. Now the big thing that changes is you hear the Christmas of the strike that's the first thing that changes. Now the idea of the video is quite simple. Find out whether or not this instructional video that comes from Ali Taylor is, no whether it's good or bad but did I find it beneficial for me and what I've got to say is that it made an immediate difference to the way I was striking the golf ball. Can you hear how crisp that is? It's an incredible change very very quickly and I'll show you in terms of dry ball data what impact it had. Is that crisp in it? I believe how crisp they are. So the idea of the drill was to continually move in the two pence just a little bit closer each time to the ball and believe me it was for me personally it was a real struggle to get it any closer because as you see I struck out a few occasions when it was four inches behind the ball. But the idea like I said is to improve that strike and I found that towards the latter part it changed significantly once I got used to it. Like I said you heard the sound and the crispness of the strike changed significantly. But what I like more than anything and I know not everybody can do this and that's why hence the reason testing the tips video series has come about is we've got trackman to back it up, did it actually work and it worked incredibly well. So the shots I hit this morning was just a general to find out you know where do I strike the ball, where is the lowest point in my swing. And the data you'll see there is 3.3 inches before the ball on average was the lowest point of my swing. There was as far back as 5.81 swing there behind the ball but don't forget that's not hitting the ground that's the lowest point of my swing and therefore just hitting it a little bit on the upswing. You'll see that I just want to reference when we go to the other end when I change it up. Look at things like the spin number, the carry distance and the launch angle because everything changes with this drill. So we moved the drill, we put the two pence piece behind the ball four inches away and I started striking the ball and with absolutely immediate effect we started to see my lowest point of swing moving. It moved on average so the average was 1.2 inches after impact. That was the lowest point of my swing which was an incredible change. I just want to go to, if I get to the top of the screen, yeah I thought so. The last three shots I hit this morning were 2.83.3 and 2.9 inches after impact. So that was again, that was taking divots. That's moving significantly and some instances almost 5, 6 inches movements into the lowest point of my swing and it just made such a difference to the Christmas of strike. But most of all what it changed was ball flight. I've been guilty of having sometimes a little bit of a floaty weaker ball flight, very high launching which in certain circumstances can be a real help but it also can be detrimental in any lessons I've been to. Everybody's always talked about me getting my hands over the ball trying to get that club head covered and impacted again having this kind of knock on effect and launch angle dropped to an average of 15.7 Which is incredible. It's almost 5 degrees lower in ball flight. Spin drop just a little bit but not significantly. You'll see the peak height drops 20 feet on average. It impacts on land angle and there's some potential negatives that you'd see in there in terms of a 7.9 coming into the green. Maybe I don't know. But the whole purpose of testing the tips is to find out whether or not that tip from Ali Taylor that putting that coin behind the ball had any sort of positive impact and did it do what it intended to do. And 100% yes it did. Not only from an opinion based but from a factual based in terms of what we got from Trackman. So fantastic tip from Ali. Don't forget if you want more tips on a regular basis then go and check out Ali Taylor's channel. Fantastic content what he's putting out right now and I can 100% guarantee that that tip he's just put out works fantastically well. It did for me it made a massive difference and just the crispness of strike alone was worth doing. It's something that I will continue to do. The challenge is going out on the golf course without that two pence and visualizing that it's there and trying to do exactly the same thing. Right that's me. Thank you for watching. Subscribe if you don't already hit that like button but comments down below. Give the tip a go and give me your feedback or is this something you've seen already and maybe perhaps tried yourself. But more importantly this is the first episode of this testing the tips series and what I want to know is what are your thoughts on it and whether we should continue to do more. Right thank you for watching. See you soon.