Category Archives: distance

The Golf Ball Rollback

I’ve been waiting for the dust to settle somewhat on the golf ball rollback, but the news keeps changing every day as more and more opinion and speculation keeps coming out, so I if I don’t comment now, I never will.

What I can say is that the USGA is up to its usual stupidity, the kind it exercised for years in screwing up the U.S. Open with the way it prepared and conditioned the course.

Then there was the anchored putting fiasco.

Now this.

We really have to take a wait-and-see approach because the rollback doesn’t take effect for us until 2030. The deal might not yet be done.

(New golf ball testing rules come into effect in 2028, and the shorter ball comes into effect for everyone in 2030.)

The speculation is that the carry distance of the average male golfer will shorten by 5 yards, the average female golfer by 1 to 3 yards.



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The second shot would hardly be affected. They say.

What bothers me is that nothing I read about the comment period refers to comments they got from millions of recreational golfers, who are really what supports golf in this country.

Because they didn’t ask us.

Oh, they asked us about anchored putting, and they apparently didn’t like the comments they got, so we got left out of this discussion.

We like things the way they are. We are not the reason that courses are becoming obsolete because we hit the ball that far. We just don’t.

Back in the day when I was playing my best, my total driving distance was at 235 yards. Once a month I might pop one out there 250 and say to myself, “How did that happen?”

With that distance off the tee, a course of 5,900 yards fit perfectly.

So what am I going to do now that I’m much shorter than that?

When Bridgestone discontinued the ball I use, the e5, I bought as many as I could find. I have twenty boxes of them in my basement.

I would suggest that in 2029 you buy as many of the ball you use then and play them to your heart’s content from 2030 forward.

And then tell the USGA that even though they are in charge of “the game”, you are not a part of “the game” they are in charge of any more.

Because all you want to do is go out and have fun.

Which is what golf is for the millions of us.

P.S. You want my solution to the distance problem at the elite level (Because that’s the only level where distance is a problem)?

Make the pros play a balata ball.

Instead of their wild drives ending in the deep rough, they will end up two fairways over.

That will put more of a premium on straight rather than far, which should cut down distance from the insane to the mere ridiculous.

How to Hit a Golf Ball 3,255 Yards

Several weeks ago a golf magazines caught my eye. A banner on the cover said “217 ways to add 15 yards.” I’m good at doing math in my head, so I figured out that by following every one of those tips, I could hit the ball 3,255 yards and get around the front nine in 3.

We all want to hit the ball farther. Golf is easier to play, and more fun, when you can hit the ball a long way.

Golf magazines lead off every month with headlines like the one above. It’s all about sales, and distance sells.

You can find an article about hitting the ball straighter, but you have to look inside to find it.

The fact about distance, though, is that hitting the ball a long way is a talent. It’s not something you can learn how to do. You have it or you don’t.

When your technique is sound, meaning you hit the ball on the center of the clubface, you will hit the ball as far as your talent allows.

How do you get all the distance you’re due? Take a look at the golfers on the LPGA circuit. None of them are as big as you, or as strong as you, but they hit the ball a lot farther than you do. Why?

Because their mechanics are flawless. They deliver a centered, in-line hit every time. Their swings are efficient. Those are the models you should copy.

Here’s another truth about distance. Straight is better. Would you rather be known as someone who can hit a 7-iron 160 yards, or who can put a 7-iron in the green 80 percent of the time from whatever distance?

Both would be nice, but for recreational golfers it’s generally one or the other. Choose number two.

If you go for straight, you’ll get all the length you are capable of. And that will be enough to play good golf.

Ten More Yards with your driver

Everybody knows by now that the faster your clubhead is moving when it hits the ball, the farther the ball will go. F=ma, after all.

If you poke around the Internet you will find that in the range of swing speeds you now have, 1 more MPH will give you about 3 more yards of carry. So if you can get 3 more MPH, you’ll get almost 10 yards more carry.

So why don’t you just swing a little harder and get the extra speed? Well, it’s not that easy.

You’re probably already getting the highest swing speed you can get right now. Everyone has a limit, you know. And then trying harder means, for most people, putting out more effort, which usually ends up lowering your swing speed because of the extra tension you put into the harder swing.

And that, folks, is the key to getting those 3 MPH.

(Right now I feel like the coach in Chariots of Fire who told Harold Abrahams he needs three more yards and he can show Abrahams how to get them.)

If tension slows you down, the opposite of tension, relaxation speeds you up. What we’re going to relax are your arms, the parts of your body that do the actual swinging.

Stand up in your address position, but without a club in your hands. Let your arms hang down and swing them gently from side to side.

Notice how free and easy it is, and how all the movement is in the shoulder joint. The joint itself does not move.

Now stand up and swing both arms up and over your head, and let them fall straight down again so they swing behind you, just as if you were in a large stadium doing the Wave.

Just go back and forth, swinging freely, feeling as before all the movement in the joint but not of the joint.

Now ask yourself, do my arms feel like this when I swing a golf club? Especially in the forward swing?

I would bet they don’t. But if they did, those relaxed arms would swing faster perforce, and there you would have the extra speed you want.

How much more? I don’t know exactly, but there will be more. To put this technique into practice you have to trust that a relaxed swinging motion will send the ball farther away than a muscular hit will.

Which is true.

The State of My Game

The posts I write are meant to help you play better. Whatever I put up here is something I tried myself and find that it works. I’m not going to tell you something I heard somewhere that sounds like it makes sense. I test it first. But it’s all about you.

Today, though is different. Today is all about me, though maybe even then you might find something in it that helps you as well.

Because of some back surgeries I underwent several years ago, I had to change the way I swing the golf club. I swing it much easier now. I haven’t measured my clubhead speed, though I know it’s slower because I have lost about twenty yards off the tee and one club from the fairway.

Distance, though, is only one part of playing golf. I have become much more accurate, because I have to be accurate. I have designed a swing, therefore, that hits the ball very straight, time after time. That’s certainly not a bad thing.

Through impact, my club hits the ground at the same spot, at the same depth, with a square clubface, consistently. The way I accomplish this is to lose all thought of hitting the ball powerfully, and instead, think of swinging the club gracefully.

To strike the ball accurately, so many things have to be lined up just right, and when this has to be done at speed it’s all more difficult. I swing as fast as I can while still keeping everything in order. If I tried to swing faster, I would only disrupt the impact alignments and start hitting the ball anywhere but where I wanted it to go. In addition, I doubt I would hit the ball that much farther to make the effort worthwhile.

I find my longest shots happen when I take care of swinging the club and let the club take care of the hitting. After all, the hit is built into your clubs. That’s why you paid so much for them. You just swing it and let the manufacturer take care of the rest.

The recreational golfer, who doesn’t have world-class talent, doesn’t have access to world-class coaching, nor hours a day to spend practicing, needs to play golf differently than the players who do. We need a swing that keeps the ball in play, first and last.

In my personal experience, and in what I see in the people I play with, the pursuit of distance, trying to hit each ball as far as possible rather than as straight as possible, is the number one reason why so many golfers play worse than they are capable of. I know it’s fun to really tag one, but if your overall game is designed around doing that, you’re costing yourself handfuls of strokes for the occasional satisfaction.

On the other hand, if you can build a swing that accomplishes the three things I mentioned earlier, you will hit the ball straighter, and you won’t lose distance, because you will be making a more solid impact. I lost distance because of a physical condition, but that’s not you.

Recreational golf is wrapped up in hitting the ball straight. Spend some time at the driving range just watching people and ask yourself, about every one of them, if their problem is that they don’t hit the ball far enough, or that they don’t hit it straight enough.

If you can change your conception of golf from hard and far to graceful and straight, and they act on it, you will be on the way to becoming the best player you can be. Well, as long as you can putt, too.

How Far Do You Hit It, Really?

We all think we hit it farther than we do. You hear that a lot. Actually, I think each of us has a very good idea of how far we hit it. It’s just not as far as we would like.

This chart tells the approximate truth. If you have a swing speed with your driver of 95 mph, which is high for the majority of recreational golfers, you will carry the ball 210 yards. With adequate roll, you can get about 225 yards out of that shot.

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Now roll is highly variable. Have you ever seen an aerial shot of a Tour event and there’s a shot of a drive that falls straight out of the sky and maybe gets two yards of roll?

But, it was hit in the air a ton. Recreational golfers don’t hit those kinds of shots. Ours go lower and roll more.

So don’t kid yourself. If you are an average recreational golfer and you hit your driver 200 yards in the air, that’s a good shot. Add on maybe 15-20 yards of roll and you can play with that length.

Want to hit it farther? Assuming you hit the ball on the center of the clubface regularly (and that’s a big assumption) you’ll hit it farther by swinging faster AND maintaining good tempo.

A more lofted driver might help, too, but that’s another post.

Power Leaks in the Golf Swing

Every golfer has a maximum clubhead speed. You get it by eliminating power leaks. Here are a few things you can change that are robbing you of precious MPH at impact.

You swing too hard. Swinging hard actually slows you down. Muscular force doesn’t generate speed. A relaxed swing lets power accumulate and multiply on its own.

You grip too tight. This puts tension in your hands which radiates throughout your body. You end up holding back the club instead of letting it go.

You swing too fast. Remember, you want clubhead speed, not “youspeed.” You don’t have to turn your body at 90 MPH to make the clubhead go that fast.

The club fights against your grip. Especially a the top, you sense this and use up effort hanging on to the club. Grip down so the club feels balanced. Then it will never feel like it is trying to pull itself out of your hands.

You aim your swing. To get the most speed you can deliver to the ball, you have to let the swing happen. If you care too much about where the ball will go, you slow yourself down.

You start your downswing with just your hands. Start your downswing by turning your lower body. Let your arms just drop down and follow. It’s a gravity move with the arms, powered by turning your lower body.

Each one of these things can be changed in a few minutes. The major patch is to hit the ball on the center of the clubface while it is square to the swing path. If you want to get this one down, take lessons.

My new book, The Golfing Self, is now available at www.therecreationalgolfer.com. It will change everything about the way you play.

How to Think About Clubhead Speed

Though several factors are more important than clubhead speed in hitting the ball a long way, we must not neglect it. The problem is that most golfers think to get more speed they have to swing the club harder (harder=faster). Let’s look first at the speed that is built into the club and see if this is really necessary.

Watch a record turning on a record player. Or, if you don’t have a record player handy, remember what that one looked like. Or, if you’ve never seen a record player, just go with me on this.

A 12” long-playing record, turns at 33-1/3 revolutions per minute. Every part of the record, from the outside edge to the part right next to the spindle in the center, turns at that same rate.

The very edge of the record turns at approximately 21” per second. A spot one-half inch from the center only has to move at 1-3/4” per second. Because these two spots have to cover different distances in the same time, they move at different speeds, in order to travel at the same rate.

Over to golf. A 9-iron is generally 35-3/4” long. A driver is 43” long. If you swing these two clubs at the same rate, the clubheads will travel at different speeds.

Think of the driver’s clubhead as reaching to the edge of the record. A point representing the relative length of a 9-iron would travel at 17.3” per second, a bit over eighty percent as fast as a point on the edge.

Trackman data from the PGA Tour shows that the average swing speed for the driver is 112 MPH. For the 9-iron, it’s 85 MPH, seventy-five percent of the speed of the driver. Data from the LPGA Tour yield roughly the same ratio (94 MPH and 72 MPH).

Now the arc traced by a golf swing is not a circle, and there is acceleration in the swing, so the math is a lot more complicated than for a spinning turntable. The numbers work out differently, but the principle is the same:

If you like the way you hit your 9-iron, hit your driver the same way, and you’ll get the clubhead speed you crave.

If you don’t believe the math, believe your eyes. Watch LPGA Tour players especially. They don’t pound their driver. They swing it with the same ease as with any other club, yet they hit the ball farther than you do. Maybe that’s the reason why.

This post is about relative distance, the distance you hit your driver compared to your 9-iron. If you want to increase both of those distances and everything between, your absolute distance, see Two Simple Ways to Get More Distance

Visit www.therecreationalgolfer.com

The Golfer’s Goal: Accuracy or Distance?

They say that 230 in the fairway is better than 260 in the rough. But that assumes if you’re along hitter you always land in the rough. Usually long hitters have a better swing and are straighter.

Besides, I will take 260 and miss four fairways over being 230 in every fairway all the time.

That said, accuracy is the name of the game for recreational golfers. The pros can hit the ball into impossible places and still make par. We can’t.

If you can hit the ball a long way, good for you. But never sacrifice accuracy trying for more distance. Play with the distance you have and hit the ball straight. That’s the winning combination.

Two Simple Ways to Hit a Golf Ball Farther

Everyone wants more distance, and there’s no reason they shouldn’t get it. Here are two simple ways to add a few more yards to every full shot.

1. Get your rhythm right. Last week’s post on the subject tells you how to do that.

2. Lighten up your grip pressure. There’s no need to squeeze the club. How hard do you hold when you shake hands with a child? Or how tightly would you hold a pretty woman?*

That’s how hard you should hold the club, and try to keep it that light all the way through the swing. Holding too tightly makes your muscles work against you, slowing down the swing.

*My wife says I hold her like a golf club.