There’s nothing worse than nailing a drive and looking up to see your ball stalling in the air. That’s why we asked PGA professional Ben Emersen to explain how to avoid creating too much spin with your driver. Check out the video and article below in which Ben discusses everything you need to know...
Once you've checked your driver address position, the first thing to do is work out why you’re spinning the ball too much, and that’s where modern technology can really help. In this day and age, it pays to spend some time on one of the best golf launch monitors - whether that’s a Trackman or one of the more portable options - to gather accurate and effective information you can use to improve the efficiency of your delivery and flight.
And there are two numbers we want you to focus on in particular: your attack angle and dynamic loft.
Attack angle relates to the angle at which the club is travelling at impact. If you’re hitting too far down or up on the ball, it can have a negative impact on your ability to maximise distance and accuracy. After all, for those who play in windy conditions, too much spin can impact direction as well as distance.
The dynamic loft is simply the loft on the club at impact. Again, too much or too little can have a profound impact on the shots you’re able to hit.
Hitting down on the ball, as illustrated above, is likely to increase the spin loft with with your driver
These numbers together can be used to calculate a golfer’s spin loft, which determines how much spin is imparted on the ball. The spin loft is the difference between the angle of attack and the dynamic loft, and the higher the difference, the more spin you’ll be creating. Hopefully that’s simple enough to understand.
In an ideal world, you want to have a positive angle of attack, with a dynamic loft not too dissimilar to the basic loft on the driver at address; this will keep the spin loft in an efficient window. This is how launch angle and power are linked.
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Hitting up on the ball, creating a positive angle of attack, should reduce the amount of spin you impart on the ball
If it transpires that you’re generating too much spin, the first thing to look at is your address position. Using alignment sticks or another club, make sure you’ve got the ball far enough forward in your stance. From there, set up as if the ball was in the middle of your stance, which will encourage you to hit up through impact.
To summarise, it’s really important to work out why you’re creating too much spin. Nowadays, there are countless facilities equipped with launch monitors available for hire at a pretty affordable rate. An hour would be enough time to get a handle on the numbers we’ve discussed and to start the journey to more penetrating tee shots.
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