Wyndham Clark taught me six driving range secrets in 30 minutes (2024)

Want to warm up like Wyndham Clark? We can’t blame you. After all, he is the reigning US Open champion. He owns the course record at Pebble Beach; he is also the defending champion there. He’s the fourth-ranked player in the world, so he must be doing something right.

Good news for us – and for you – is that he’s also the newest guest on Warming Up, where he joined us for a bluebird day at Troon North, near his home in Scottsdale, Arizona, and taught us a thing or two . So if you want to warm up like Wyndham Clark, read on and play big.

1. Activate those glutes. (Yes, serious…)

Clark gives himself about 70 minutes when he actually enters the practice area to hit balls, chip and putt. But before that he will spend 30 minutes in the gym. What is he doing there?

“It’s muscle activation. I’m actually working out a little bit, trying to sweat and get the heart rate going,” he says. The idea is to get his body ready so that if he had to go straight to the first tee, he could. When he says “workout,” however, he doesn’t mean curls and bench presses. Instead of:

“Activate the glutes,” he says somewhat reluctantly, echoing a long-standing tigerism. “It ensures that all the muscles you use in the body when playing golf are all firing. So I do a lot of core, I do a lot of stuff for the back so that my posture is really good, a lot of rotational stuff, a lot of stuff for the glutes and the hamstrings.

‘And then a lot of explosive things. Because, contrary to what some people think, golf is an explosive sport; you’re pretty quiet and then you put it on and swing it at 120 miles per hour. And so I try to work that out in the gym so that my body is ready to swing fast and do whatever I need it to do.

You may not be able to turn it 125. But you can let your engine warm up anyway.

2. Put on your wedges.

Clark always starts his range session with a gap wedge. And he picks them up. Yes, serious. A top-five golfer in the world hits gap wedges off a tee. Why? Two reasons.

The first is to enter the ball position and formation. He uses two alignment sticks – one to point at his target, another perpendicular to the tee – and essentially builds a foolproof way of placing the ball in the right spot.

The second is to set his swing path. Clark doesn’t want his swing to get too steep.

“I tend to be steep,” he says. “So under pressure…I really start swinging to the left, big divots, sweeping cuts. And what I’m trying to do here is neutralize that and do the opposite, so that when I compete (my ball flight), that’s where I want it to be.

Clark tries to get high draws with these wedges and get them clean with limited divots. He gets in touch with how his body feels. And if something is wrong – if he cuts, pulls or pushes – he checks his ball position and setup to see what could be wrong.

He sometimes gets strange looks at the shooting range.

“So, you hit a wedge off a tee?”

But when Clark decided to go swing-coach free about 18 months ago, he wanted a push in the right direction. After contacting a few coaches he respects, he followed two pieces of advice: his ball position is too far up and he needs to chase the feeling of making tight draws. Enter the tee drill. During that period, Clark went from outside the top 150 in Strokes Gained: Approach to the top 40.

“This is my swing coach,” he says.

3. Start with your basic principles. Then start visualizing

Clark uses the tee and alignment stick grid to dial in his fundamentals and essentially find zero. He compares the exercise to players using a putting mirror on the practice putting green.

But once he gets comfortable?

“Now I start shooting,” he says. “I’m going to go for a flag and start making little cuts, little draws. And I’m going to prepare for the day.”

His caddy John Ellis will guide him through it, he says, giving him shots as if they were interview questions.

“He will be fine, he has a tight draw, we need five extra meters here,” he says. They use the daily plan. Assuming Clark hits a perfect tee shot, here is the next chance he gets.

“If it’s a left back pin on any hole, (Ellis) says I’m going to have 148 and I hit my pitching wedge 144 that week, he’ll tell me to hit it four or five extra yards,” says Clark. “I’ll make a tight draw to try to gain that extra distance and so I’ll set up and visualize the shot.”

4. Do you want to shape shots? Start with your basic principles

Clark likes to cut corners. “That’s 70, 75 percent of the time,” he says. But he also likes to work the ball with his mid and short irons, depending on the situation. Once he reaches 5 iron or lower, he is more likely to have consistent form. But from 6 iron down?

“To add distance, subtract distance, reach certain pins, I cut it, straighten it, draw it, whatever it is,” he says.

So how would he hit a cut or a draw? He would start with his basic principles. Remember that cross-shaped alignment stick setup he started with? He would shift that a little bit. Adjust the train tracks so that the feet point further to the left and the ball is slightly higher in its stance. But he will keep the club face open compared to his stance – still facing the target – and then he will swing through it, keeping the face open as he does.

“I think it also makes it a little more fun to shape photos,” he says. “It helps your misses.”

I asked Clark if he prefers to ride with the wind—say, hitting a cut with a side-to-side wind—or if he prefers to have something blocking it.

“I bet I ride the wind more than I hold it,” he says. “I feel like when I try to fight the wind I make bigger mistakes. When I ride the wind, it always works in the direction of where the wind is going.”

He has an example.

“If the wind is from the left and it’s a left pin, a lot of people say, ‘Let’s make a draw.’ Well, my miss with a draw is getting out. So I come out, block it, the wind takes it away. Now I’m so far right that I’m in a bad place. Instead of me saying, you know what, maybe I should aim a little to the left and hit a tight straight ball or a cut, now he starts to the left of the flag and works towards the flag, maybe he’s a little away, but never far beyond here (gesture to the right). That’s how I’ve always done it.”

5. Practice tough tee shots.

As he works his way up from the short irons to the long irons and to his woods and driver, Clark likes to visualize the tricky tee shots of the course he’s about to play. We’ll be visiting shortly after he wraps up the Players Championship, so he still has #5 at TPC Sawgrass in mind.

“We’re going to tee ball on the 5th hole,” he says. “It’s quite a difficult shot and (Ellis) is like, it’s going to come in from the left. So I imagine that shot: “Okay, I want to do a low cut.” And so I’ll set it up and have my parameters and try to basically replicate that recording. So when I get there, I’ve already done it.

Clark goes through a few more difficult tee shots. It is difficult for him to get the required draw on the par-5 second hole. And No. 18 is also a notoriously tough tee shot. We’re going there.

Clark says he heard some criticism after hitting the 2-iron off the tee in the final round of the Players, one shot behind Scottie Scheffler. But he thinks he made the right decision.

“I’ve learned throughout my golf career that everything my eye sees and what I feel is the right play, rather than what everyone else is doing or what the statistics say,” he says. “Because when I sometimes push the boundaries and that’s what you’re ‘supposed’ to do, I sometimes tend to get bad results.”

That includes No. 18. So he places the ball in the back center of his stance, sets up and rips a trap-draw shot down the fairway.

6. Play the first hole.

Clark finishes his warm-up by doing what he’s going to do next: he plays the first hole.

“We start with the tee ball and hit the second shot,” he says. “And once we do that, it’s like, sweet, let’s go. I walk there about ten minutes before my tee time and hit three, four minute putts, just to get that feeling back and make sure the speed is right.

I watch him play No. 1 at Augusta here on the range at Troon North, sending an 8-iron into the center of a mock green. He is satisfied.

“When you hit that shot, you say, ‘Okay, perfect,’” he says. “You walk up to the tee, you’ve already hit the shot, you feel good and hopefully you just replicate what you did on the range.”

You can watch the entire Warm Up with Wyndham Clark below or here on YouTube. To enjoy!