Why You’re Losing Distance With Your Driver

🏌️‍♂️ Spin loft is the key factor that determines how much a golf ball spins and how far it travels when hit with a driver.

🔧 Reducing spin loft by flattening your swing and closing the club face helps maximize driving distance.

🎯 Placing a tee or head cover in front of the ball during practice encourages a more level angle of attack and less spin.

🙌 Rotating your hands away from the target to close the club face can significantly improve your driver performance.

00:00:00 - I've got a driver. This is probably a shot that a lot of people see when they play golf uh recreationally. So, let's talk about some of the common things that lead to just losing a ton of distance with a driver and how you can go about fixing it.

00:00:17 - All right, we're going to get a little nerdy here. We're going to talk about something called spin loft. I promise it's not going to be that weird. We're going to get through it together. So, uh I've got a club shaft obviously and then an alignment stick. These both are going to represent two different things. So, when I'm talking about spin loft, what that essentially is, the club shaft, that is the angle of attack or the angle that the club is swinging into the golf

00:00:35 - ball when it is struck. And then this orange alignment stick would represent the dynamic loft of the club. The bigger that this gap gets or the wider that the spin loft becomes, the more the golf ball spins, thus the golf ball will go shorter. That's why with a wedge, you have a spin loft that's really wide and open like this versus with a driver, you want that spin loft to be much narrower and closer together. It's why the best players in the world hit the ball really

00:00:58 - far. So, uh, what a lot of amateur golfers do is they hit their driver like they're hitting a greenside bunker shot. And that's where you end up with a shot here where it spins at 4500 RPMs, probably launches a little higher than you want, and just doesn't go very far. So, a lot of that has to deal with the direction that the club is being swung and then how open the club face is. So, you can see on this shot that I just hit, I had a path that was well out to

00:01:23 - in. It was 15° to the left. I had the face 11° open relative to that path. That's why the ball started left, curved back to the right. Didn't go very far and spun a ton. So, if this is part of your problem, understanding spin loft is the first step. From there, then you need to start identifying how do you reduce your spin loft? Well, obviously, if I've got that spin loft wedge that I just showed you, if I'm swinging down too many degrees and I've got the face

00:01:49 - too many degrees open, you can see how that's going to widen that window between those two vectors. that's a problem. So, what you need to do is you need to level off the angle of attack or swing a little bit flatter relative to the ground and then also reduce the loft of the club when you hit the shot. So, in order to do that, we're going to do two things. So, first and foremost, uh in order to reduce the loft of the club, if you're not already holding the club

00:02:13 - with the face more closed, like you should rotate your hands more away from the target, that will help close the face. You should make sure that as you're swinging, your swing direction is more out to the right. Both of those things will go a long way to helping close your face to path relationship, which will help reduce your dynamic loft. When we're talking about swinging a little bit more level and not swinging so many degrees down, an easy way to do that is if you have a head cover or

00:02:35 - something soft, put it in front of the golf ball by about a grip's length. I don't have a head cover handy, so I'm just going to use another tee. What I would do is basically put that tee in front of the golf ball that I'm going to hit. And then my objective when I swing is to not hit this front tee with my club. If I was swinging down too many degrees, I would hit both T's. That would cause me to have too much spin loft. That ball would spin too much. So, stick a tee in the ground about a club

00:02:59 - head in front of where your golf ball is. If you have a head cover, I'd stick it about a grip's length in front of where your golf ball is. And then the object is to make some swings or you avoid that. That'll help you swing a little bit more up or even a little bit flatter. And then by closing the face, that'll help reduce the spin as well. So, let's see if I can kind of show you what that might look like. So, take your normal setup. got my grip in a little

00:03:20 - bit more of that rotated away from the from the target position. And then I'm going to try to miss that first T when I swing.

00:03:35 - So there you go. You can see I got that one a little bit more in the center of the face. My back spin's going to be much closer to that optimal range, closer to that 2,00 marker. Um, so all I really did again, just reduce the spin loft, make sure I missed that front tee. You can still see it sticking in the ground right there. Objective accomplished. That will go a long way to helping you hit the ball further, have more fun, play better golf. So, keep that in mind the next time you go

00:03:57 - practice. This will help you hit the ball further off the tea and will be the next thing you need to work on.

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