My Christmas present to you:
Get the most out of your drives
By Frank Thomas
There are a couple of ways to make the ball fly farther.
The first is to increase your clubhead speed but assuming
that you are not going to do this, here are some alternatives.
Increase the ball speed by increasing the COR of the collision
(more efficient energy transfer from the club to the ball).
This can be done by making sure you have one of the latest
(the last 3 years) models of driver. This should be in the
neighborhood of 400 cc’s or larger in size with the
highest COR allowable.
Second, try and make contact in the center of the clubface,
generally considered the sweetspot. A shorter shaft will
provide you with more clubhead control. It is worthwhile
to be more consistently on the sweetspot rather than hitting
hard at the ball and missing it. You can lose 6 yards or
more in distance by just missing the sweetspot by half an
inch.
Third, try to launch the ball at approximately 15 degrees
if your swing speed is less than 75 mph with a spin rate
of not more than 3500 rpm. As your swing speed increases
to 120mph ( a little slower than Tiger’s) the launch
angle should be about 12 degrees with a spin rate of about
2200 rpm.
To achieve these launch conditions at the lower swing speeds
one needs a loft of 13-14 degrees on the driver. At higher
swing speeds of 85-90 mph a 10-11 degree loft may be required.
Unfortunately as the loft of the driver increases, so does
the spin rate.
To lower the spin rate, you can do two things:
First is to get a low spinning golf ball. These are generally
the soft core balls most effective for average to lower
swing speeds.
Secondly, make impact between a quarter and one half of
an inch above the sweet spot (this assumes you have the
skill to do this). Otherwise, just tee the ball up a little
higher so the average of the impact points is above center.
This will decrease the ball speed slightly, but the increased
launch angle and lower spin rate will make up for that slight
decrease in ball speed to get maximum distance for your
club head speed.
The overall message is to be as consistent as possible
as this will build confidence, improving your average, overall
distance.
Swing easy, tee it high, watch it fly.
|
Dear Friends
