Reducing Ball Spin Driver

Reduce Spin, Add Distance | Golf. Tips. Mag. com By Art Sellinger, Illustration by Fhil Franke Tour players are hitting the ball dramatically farther these days. Improvements in clubs and balls are contributing factors, but so is the fact that professionals have learned to reduce the amount of spin on their drives. Today’s players put in long hours finding ways to reduce backspin and create the optimal launch angle. Work on the tips below to take spin off your tee shots and hit longer, more penetrating drives. Spin robs drives of their maximum distance.

Golfers who can master the art of reducing spin on their tee shots will add extra yards to their drives. Here’s how to go about it. First, tee the ball higher. Acquire some extra- long (2. This promotes swinging up on the ball—rather than flat or, even worse, downward—and helps create launch angles of 1. Second, never sole the driver at address. This will help promote an upward strike on the ball, too.

It also increases a golfer’s chances of making contact with the clubface in the center or slightly above. Drives struck one or two grooves below the center of the clubface will have too much spin and a trajectory that starts low and then climbs. Third, eliminate any downward action in the swing.

To reduce spin and maximize distance, golfers need to adopt the uppercut swing of a home- run hitter in baseball, not the flat swing of a contact hitter. Fourth, stay behind the ball. Any tendency to slide ahead of the ball at impact will lower the launch angle and create more spin. Stay down and through the shot at impact, swinging the club up, out and away from the body, not down and across it.

Two- time national long drive champion Art Sellinger is a member of the Pinnacle Distance Team. He uses the Cobra 4. Four Seasons Resort and Club, Las Colinas. Copies of Art’s Power Guarantee training system are available by calling (8.

Optimal Ball Spin with the Driver. It's finally time for us to discuss spin and how it relates to bombing your driver. Spin is one of the most important aspects of getting a properly fit driver and getting the maximum distance out of your swing. We'll also go into the nuts and bolts of some of the factors that affect spin.

In the last lesson we looked at launch angle, which has a dramatic impact not only on the overall distance of the ball flight, but also on the look of the shot when it's in the air. Spin also affects how the ball flies through the air, how it looks to your eye, and how far it goes.

It's an extremely important factor and the topic of this lesson. We use software to simulate the golf swing and analyze the effect of each factor. What Creates Spin?

Reduce Spin, Add Distance. By Art. Golfers who can master the art of reducing spin on their tee shots will add extra. This promotes swinging up on the ball. Higher than desired spin on the driver typically comes more from the golfer having a little more downward angle of attack into the ball or, from the golfer allowing.

Spin changes drastically depending on where the ball strikes the club face. For instance, if you hit the ball extremely low on the face the vertical gear effect creates more backspin and a much lower launch angle than if you hit it higher on the face. This is detrimental for several reasons. Think back to the Ball Speed lesson, when we marked the ball with a dry erase marker to find out where it was hitting the club face. We started with that lesson because where the ball strikes the club face affects distance more than anything else.

Optimal Ball Spin with the Driver RST Golf Instruction By: Chuck Quinton, Master Instructor • FULL BIO •. Reducing Driver Spin. Photo by North Charleston via Flickr. ball striking (12) Books (1) Club Fitting (6) Course Management (18) Driver (5) Driving Range (5). How to reduce backspin on driver - posted in CLUB BUILDING & BSG MEMBER PROJECTS. or at least adjust your ball position to wherever you spin it less. Golf Driver Spin Rates For More Distance. that helps you launch the golf ball higher with less spin. Your Driver Spin On Tee Shots.

In the next lesson we talked about the "roll" or curvature built into club face. Say you buy a 9. 5° driver off the shelf. Assuming it's in spec to begin with, which they're usually not, if you take a loft/lie gauge and measure the bottom of the face you may find that it only has 7° of loft at that point. If you're swinging that club head in the 9. Those two factors together are going to cost you a lot of distance.

Sample Swings - Red. Let's look at some specific scenarios. The graph below shows a simulation of three similar swings.

We'll start with the red one at the bottom. This line represents a swing with a dynamic loft of 1. That doesn't necessarily mean that the driver says 1. The club may say 9. The way the shaft flexes forward at impact can also affect the launch angle. For our example we'll assume that, whatever the factors, the net effect is 1.

We're swinging at 9. Simulation software shows us a graph of several sample shots. Why So Low? If we have 1. The bad news is, we came into impact with an angle of attack of - 2°. We're hitting down on the ball with this driver as if it were an iron shot.

A lot of golfers have been taught to do exactly this, but for the average golfer it's terrible advice. Hitting down on the ball will cost you massive, massive distance. Even with a negative angle of attack of just 2° - which isn't even all that sharp - the ball is only going to launch at 7°. When you're swinging at 9.

How To Reduce Your Driver Spin On Tee Shots. More golf Q&A via the AskGolfGuru swing app for iPhone, iPad and android devices. Learn how to improve your.

We can see on the graph that the red shot only carried about 2. Of course, we're all imperfect and we don't hit the ball flush every time so it's not even going to go that far. This angle of attack, this club head speed and this ball speed don't create enough spin to keep the ball in the air long enough to go anywhere. The driver is a distance club. It's designed to be hit as long as you can.

It's the only club in the bag without a distance or a speed limit on it. Review the launch angle lesson and work on getting a higher launch with the driver. The driver has become more and more of a specialty club and you need to learn how to maximize it. Sample Swings - Yellow. Let's see what happens when we change some of the factors on that swing.

On the yellow shot we've changed the angle of attack to positive 2. That's catching the ball slightly on the upswing. It gives a little more dynamic loft, which will increase the spin a little bit. With a little more forward kick in the shaft, we get a launch angle of 1. Our carry distance goes from 1. Ball speed and club head speed have remained the same. If we back the dynamic loft down as well we can get a direct comparison.

The yellow swing now carries 2. With just a little bit of swing instruction such as the Launch Angle lesson, we've picked up 2. We'll calculate the roll on these shots in a few minutes.)Red and yellow swings: The difference is the angle of attack. Just a couple of simple tweaks and we've got 2. If you've been hitting down on the ball, this is the change you can expect from moving the ball up in your stance, getting a little bit of axis tilt away from the target at impact, teeing it high, and catching it high on the face.

It's a huge difference and we haven't even changed the club itself. This is assuming that your club is already fit optimally for you, which it's probably not. Sample Swings - Blue. Now let's move on to the blue line.

Let's say we switch clubs. Instead of 9. 5° or 1. We're still going to catch it on the upswing at about 2. Changing blue's driver. What we'll start to see is that there is actually a point of diminishing returns at our club head speed of 9.

There comes a point where actually don't want so much loft. Now, if you swing slower than this you would never ever, ever want anything less than 1.

You want more loft, and you want to hit it higher on the face so you get more dynamic loft. At some point, though, if you're swinging at 9. Now we've actually got too much loft and too much spin. Too much loft. This is where the ball starts to balloon. It's climbing straight up in the air and we get a point where we there's too much loft, creating too much backspin, and the ball isn't going to go anywhere.

If we keep modifying these numbers we can find the optimal point - the point of maximum carry. In this example, that's at about 2. When we stop it there and check the loft we see it's about 1.

This shows us that if you're swinging 9. Blue's maximum carry. Let's Check the Numbers. Now we'll go in and have a look at some of the stats for these shots. The shot labeled A in the chart below is our blue shot, the optimal flight. We have a launch angle of 1. The ball is going to carry about 2.

Shot analysis. Shot B is the red one, where we hit down by a couple of degrees. That shot launched very low, got lower spin because there was less dynamic loft at impact, and now we're only getting 2. We do pick up a couple yards of roll, but two yards of roll obviously doesn't make up for losing 2. Shot C shows what happens if we catch the ball severely on the upswing. Now we've told the software that we're going to launch the ball extremely high. We've teed it super high, it's way up in our stance. We're going to catch it high on the face and 5- 6° on the upswing instead of 2°.

That's going to give us a low spin rate. Now we can start to get a lot of distance. This shot gets 2. PGA Tour- cut fairway. That's optimal. At this swing speed, the higher we can launch the ball the better because the ball will stay in the air longer. Launch it higher for more carry distance and more roll.

Additional Factors. We've made a number of assumptions for each of these swings. We've assumed that we hit the ball very solidly in the center of the club face for maximum ball speed. We've assumed that we have a decent driver head that has max COR and a good center of gravity, and that it's all built up perfectly and doesn't cost you ball speed. Missing the sweet spot. What happens if these things aren't true? What if we hit low on the face?

Let's take a look at shot D. When you hit the ball low on the face you lose a tremendous amount of ball speed. This software is showing a loss of about 1. Of course, lower ball speed is only part of it.

Now you're also launching it low because there's not enough loft on that part of the club face to get any distance. To make matters worse, hitting it low gives us a lot of backspin, which also costs us a lot of distance. Just missing the sweet spot - hitting low by 1/2" to 3/4" of an inch - you've gone from hitting a potential of 2. Now you can start to see all the things that go on when you don't catch one flush.

Graphing it Out. Why are you losing that distance? Why aren't you getting optimal distance for your club head speed? We can start to see in the graph.

The graph below shows those same shots. The top one is, obviously, the one we launched the highest.

You can see that it maxes out, carrying farther and getting more overall distance. The lowest one is where we missed the sweet spot and lost a lot of ball speed and distance. Graph. Total Distances. The bar chart below shows the total distance for each shot.

The blue portion of each line is the carry, and the green portion is roll. The one that launched the highest is C on this chart. That's the 1. 5. 6° launch angle, and it gets a total distance of 2. If we don't hit that shot solidly, it ends up looking more like the last line on the chart - shot D. That's where we hit too low on the face, causing too much spin and a low launch angle.

You're not going to get the ball over the 2. The good news is that with that exact same golf swing - the exact same speed, the exact same everything - you have the potential to hit it almost 6. Total distances chart. And 6. 0 yards is a dramatic difference. You're talking about going from playing the up tees and hitting a 3 wood or a 2 iron hybrid into a green, versus hitting an 8 or 9 iron into the green. It's a massive difference, and that's why it's so important that you start to gain an understanding of spin rates and launch angles, hitting the ball solidly and all these things we've been discussing in the Bomb Your Driver series. Check All the Factors.

Getting a club that feels comfortable in your hands - that you can swing properly and that doesn't require you to do a lot of work to get the proper launch numbers - will allow you to achieve more consistent drives. That's why driver fitting is so important. There's a lot to be gained or lost!

Even if you have a driver setting that's pretty solid and you consistently hit solid shots, if you hit down on the ball and launch it too low, that's ball flight B. That's 3. 0 yards short of your optimal shot. Catch that ball more on the upswing and you can pick up 3.

Again, we're talking three clubs into the green.