Hitting a solid golf shot is one of the purest feelings in sport. As soon as the club makes contact with the ball, that sweet and magical feeling courses up through the club and into your body, creating a physical wave of euphoria that can be very addictive.
However, this joy can be short-lived if your ball striking is inconsistent. One excellent shot followed by a string of errant monstrosities can be incredibly frustrating.
Thankfully, you can become a consistently good ball striker if you have enough time to practice your swing. With that being said, amateur golfers will never have endless hours to dedicate to practice. Instead, you need to ensure that every minute spent on the range is actually accelerating your journey toward becoming a better ball striker.
To help you take a few leaps forward, we have put together a selection of the best golf training aids for ball striking specifically. Each of these training aids has the potential to quality of the contact that you make with the ball, leading to better accuracy and lower scores. Let’s take a look at what’s available right now.
Best Golf Training Aids For Ball Striking
DST Compressor 8 Iron
The first thing to note about the DST Compressor is that it is used by a number of notable PGA professionals, including Jon Rahm, Henrik Stenson and Matt Wallace. The fundamental goal of the DST Compressor is to teach you how to compress the clubface into the golf ball, which is literally a pre-requisite for solid ball striking.
The ‘professional’ level compression is achieved by a curved shaft, which effectively places your hands ahead of the clubhead at impact. Importantly, in order to make a solid strike with the DST Compressor, you have to make use of forward shaft lean. This is what allows you to drive the clubhead into the ball before you hit the turf.
A lot of amateurs have a tendency to strike the ground before the ball, leading to fat shots which travel far shorter than they should.
The DST Compressor is the ultimate antidote for players that struggle with poor contact and fat shots. It forces you how to implement forward shaft lean correctly, leading to crisp iron shots, clean divots, and that sweet, Henrik Stenson inspired sound.
It should be pretty clear based on the image above that the very best ball strikers naturally achieve a healthy amount of forward shaft lean at impact. The image clearly shows each player’s head behind the ball, while their hands are well ahead of the ball. This is a recipe for solid ball striking, and it is exactly what the DST compressor is designed to help you achieve on the practice range.
DST Compressor Benefits:
- Hand Position Alignment Marker helps you practice returning the club to the same position at impact
- Teaches you how to make contact with your hands ahead of the ball
- Curved shaft teaches you what ‘forward shaft lean’ really is
- Used by US Open Champion Jon Rahm as a training aid
- Encourages crisp contact and a piercing powerful ball flight
- The ultimate antidote for players who duff their irons
Golf Swing Shirt
The Golf Swing shirt is designed to teach you how to stay connected throughout the entirety of your golf swing. Endorsed by legendary teacher, Jimmy Ballard, the Golf Swing offers a practical way to keep your arms, upper body and lower body connected during the backswing and the follow-through.
You may be familiar with the Ben Hogan towel drill, where you effectively pin a towel to your chest using your shoulders and armpits. While this drill can be very effective if you do it correctly, it can also be awkward and cumbersome to make a full swing with a towel pinned to your chest.
Thankfully, the Golf swing shirt can unlock all the benefits of the Hogan towel drill, while making it very easy to hit short shots and full shots with the golf swing shirt on your body.
Ultimately, the Golf Swing shirt can help you ‘feel’ what it’s like to stay connected, without any complex swing thoughts or golf techniques. You simply slip it on and start swinging. It only takes about 10 minutes to gain a solid understanding of the connected swing that the golf swing shirt promotes.
Golf Swing Shirt Benefits:
- Teaches you the ‘feel’ of a fully connected golf swing
- Promotes a swing method that is aligned with the swing philosophy of Ben Hogan
- Very simple to put on and use
- Can improve ball striking, swing plane, and tempo
- Helps you synchronize the upper body and the lower body
- Can help prevent flipping the club before impact
- Teaches you how to rotate your torso during the swing
Orange Whip Golf Training Aid
The Orange Whip is arguably the most popular golf training aid that has ever been made. Built with an incredibly flexible shaft, a large orange ball (instead of a clubhead), and a patented counterweight at the top of the grip, the Orange Whip essentially teaches you how to swing a weighted object in a natural and athletic manner.
One of the worst aspects of golf is that it is very easy to practice the wrong movement patterns, which tends to make you worse rather than better over time.
This is why training aids like the Orange whip can be so useful. Instead of being overly technical, by simply swinging the orange whip, you will automatically train your body to load energy during the backswing and unload that energy during the follow-through.
Orange Whip Benefits:
- Helps improve tempo, balance and swing plane
- An excellent tool for warming up before a round
- Can increase the strength and flexibility of golf-specific muscles
- Promotes a fluid, natural highly athletic golf swing
- Teaches you how to load and unload the club correctly
Matzie Swing Assist
The Matzie Swing Assist is an older training aid that still gets the job done if you want to improve your ball striking. Using a patented bent shaft, the Matzie Amazing Assist Swing trainer generates a release force that is 16 times greater than the release force of a standard 6 iron.
In addition to a design that promotes a powerful release pattern, the Amazing Assist also has a moulded grip, which can quickly improve how you hold all of your golf clubs.
Matzie Amazing Assist Benefts:
- Uses a moulded grip to quickly improve your grip technique
- Pulls your arms back to a fully extended position during the takeaway
- Improves wrist action through impact, promoting a powerful release
- Can help reduce your tendency to slice the ball
- Improves golf-specific muscular strength
- Can increase your swing speed if used consistently over time
Rypstick Swing Speed Stick
The fundamental goal of the Rypstick is to help you increase your swing speed. This can improve your ball striking, by making your golf swing more dynamic and more athletic.
In addition, the further you hit the ball, the easier the game of golf becomes. This is one of the key separators between amateurs and professionals, and there is a direct correlation between driving distance and handicap (ie people who drive the ball further tend to have lower handicaps and vice versa).
The Rypstick employs all the same principles as the SuperSpeed golf system, but the product has the added convenience of being a single stick, rather than the triple stick setup employed by SuperSpeed golf.
The Rypstick also includes a counterweight mechanism which can be added to the grip of the club, which can help you develop your hand speed.
All in all, the Rypstick offers a scientifically valid method for improving your swing speed. In a few weeks, it is realistic to add 10 yards to your drives, which should translate to one less club into the green.
Rypstick Benefits
- Used by over 60 PGA Tour professionals
- More convenient than the SuperSpeed golf training system
- Offers a scientifically valid method for increasing your swing speed
- Can help you increase driver distance by more than 10 yards
Golf Swing Pro created by Dan Martin
The Pro (Precise Rotational Orbit) Golf Swing Trainer was created by Dan Martin. It takes the concept of a flexible shaft to a whole new level, using a rope rather than a shaft to help players develop the sensation of swinging rather than hitting a golf ball.
The goal when using the Pro Trainer is to keep the rope in a straight line during the follow-through. The only way to do this is by leveraging centripetal force, which is a prerequisite for an efficient golf swing.
In addition, the Pro includes an impact pad, which encourages an efficient release pattern at exactly the right moment. Instead of casting the club too early, the impact pad can help teach you how to release the stored energy of your swing at exactly the right time. In other words, it can help with timing, rhythm, and the overarching sensation of a well-executed release.
The Pro Swing Trainer Benefits
- Teaches you how to feel the correct physics of a ‘golf swing’ rather than a ‘golf hit’
- Helps to eliminate the tendency to ‘muscle the club’ into the ball
- Teaches you how to harness the laws of physics to improve your golf swing
- Can help you increase lag naturally
- Reinforces proper body rotation
- Improves tempo, timing, and rhythm
Lag Shot Golf 7 Iron
The Lag Shot Golf 7 iron is built with a super flexible shaft and a weighted clubhead, which promotes your ability to generate lag, naturally. It only takes about 20 shots with the Lag Shot to realize what you need to do in order to load and unload the shaft of a golf club successfully.
Importantly, the Lag Shot 7 iron is one of the few golf training aids for ball striking that you can actually hit golf balls with. Instead of relying exclusively on practice swings and trying to transfer those feelings to your normal swing, you can literally step up to a ball and smash it with the Lag Shot.
Lag Shot Golf 7 Iron Benefits:
- Add lag naturally and effortlessly. No forced, manufactured, or “mechanical” feels that make your swing worse!
- Promotes a relaxed grip and smooth “one-piece” takeaway (no jerky moves that throw off your swing plane, tempo, or positions).
- Grooves a fluid, “stress-free” transition that automatically stores massive amounts of power without over swinging.
- More distance means hitting 2 clubs LESS into each green, resulting in shorter birdie putts, easier pars, and lower scores.
- Greater accuracy on your approach shots, so you can hit a record number of greens in regulation and “play stress-free golf.”
Golf Smash Bag (Impact Bag)
The longest recorded drive in PGA tour history was struck by a legendary golfer by the name of Mike Austin. As one of the longest hitters to ever live, Austin often talks about ‘the mud wall’ drill.
Basically, his teacher wanted him to be able to hit a wall of mud, without getting his hands and arms dirty. The only way to achieve this task is by releasing the clubhead into the wall of mud, rather than moving the body into the wall.
Importantly, an impact bag can help you get this very same feeling, whereby the clubhead is released into a large solid object, using the body to leverage that release rather than impede it.
Even though it might seem like an overly simple training aid, you should not underestimate the importance of improving your release pattern. An impact bag can help you do exactly that. You will instinctively sense how to hit an impact bag hard, and you can carry these instinctive feelings into your actual golf swing.
Final Thoughts
In the end, it should be pretty clear that there are a number of high-quality training aids that can help improve your ball striking abilities. The next step is simply to select the training aid that is most likely to compliment the attributes of your swing and your swing philosophy.