Among all the training aids out there, plenty of them use a variety of bands to keep your arms together, plastic clamps that keep your wrists in the correct position, and sawhorse style setups with panels to keep you from swaying around. The Impact Press Training Aid is simplistic in its design, but the benefit to your game could be anything but simple.
The Fitness & Instruction section at this year’s PGA Show was a sea of vendors that made it easy for any single booth to get lost in the crowd. Impact Press drew the short straw and landed in a low visibility spot in the back. But their pre-show press release piqued our interest enough that we chose to track them down. We visited with owner and inventor, Bill Schmedes III, an award-winning PGA instructor.
Impact Press Training Aid
When I said simplistic, I wasn’t exaggerating. The Impact Press Training Aid is essentially an iron that features two lines — one on the hosel and one on the top of the clubhead.
Those two lines, combined with Schmedes’ training drills, are what makes this training club stand out. The whole idea is having visual cues at address and again at impact to confirm proper arm-club and clubface-target form. Muscle memory follows that visually confirmed stance to build a more idealized swing. Schmedes gave us a rundown of how it works and what the benefits are.
While we weren’t able to get his full body in the shot, this intro video from the company gives you a little better idea of what it can do.
Without going through the drills and training myself, I can’t speak to how effective a training tool this is, but it definitely stood out as something I wanted to try. This training aid seems like a great tool every instructor should have in their bag of tricks to teach students good form in addition owning one yourself for training at home and on the range.
Launch: February 1, 2020
MSRP: $99
To find out more about the Impact Press Training Aid, you can visit their site at impactpressgolf.com.
My full-time job has always been in the IT world, but I’ve also spent the better part of a decade writing product reviews and helping cover large industry-only trade shows. It was only in the latter part of 2019 that I put two and two together and realized I should be doing the same thing for something I’ve loved my whole life — golf. This is the culmination of a hobby that started as a child, a hobby that turned into a passion as an adult, and finally a passion that turned into The Golden Ferret.
