Golf Sweet Spot, How Can I Ensure I Am Hitting It With My Driver (Video) - by Pete Styles
Golf Sweet Spot, How Can I Ensure I Am Hitting It With My Driver (Video) - by Pete Styles

Actually striking the right part of your driver is the most essential part of hitting the straight shots, it’s all well and good having a really nice swing, but if you are not hitting the right part of the golf club you will actually see a big drop off in terms of the distance of your shots, but also the accuracy of your shots. And the middle of the center of the golf club is an area that we would term the sweet spot, when you hit the sweet spot you don’t really feel like you’ve struck the ball and it just zings off into the distance. That’s one of those pure drives that you want to get out there and measure to see how far it went.

So the sweet spot of most drivers is an area around about the size of a dime and its going to be just slightly above the middle of the golf club, in terms of the height, but probably in the center of the golf club in terms of the left and right face, so it’s just slightly above the center, but around about the middle. And a lot of drivers you have to have a marking on the top that sort of says hit it from under here, there would be a dome or a crest or even a logo of the manufacture, hit under there that’s going to be where the sweet spot is. So how can we tell whether you are hitting the sweet spot? Well as a more professional player you’ll actually be able to feel it, when you strike it out in the middle it feels good and it sounds good. But until you’ve built, take that feel and that feedback it’s quite important you can actually have a visual clue for where you’ve hit. So if you have got a relatively new driver and you keep the face nice and clean quite often you will see the dimples, you will see the imprints of the last ball you hit or even a collection of golf balls that you’ve hit on the face and every now and then you can just wipe the face clean and have another go and see where you are hitting them, that works particularly well with the modern sort of black face drivers you can really see the impact points very clearly there. Now I’m about to use something different that I am cheating and this is something I would encourage you to do as well. This is impact tape, so it’s a piece of white sticky tape I’ll just take it out off my little roll here, this is from a company called Strike Right, I roll it – I’ll take out of the roll stick it on the clubface and when I hit the ball there’s a very small amount of friction there for a very small amount of heat created and that blackens the paper in the right area and if I could walk it up to the camera so you can see, I’m hitting in that area there. Now if I was to hit more shots you start to see the pattern emerging, the toe or the heel, let’s go ahead and deliberately hit one from the toe side, I’m going to try and hit this from the toe edge – and as I look down a little bit more towards the toe, but another imprint starts to come up with the bottom here. Now if you hit a lot of shots you’d start to get a bit of a feel for where your average shots are hitting and maybe you might see that if you hit one from the toe, it does one particular shape the heel, there’s another particular shape, because like I said at the start hitting off center does create different flights through the shots. So when you are hitting shots with your driver its essential to hit the sweet spot, the sound and the feel are good give a ways for better players. For less experienced golfers, look for the visual clues, look for the marking on the clubface or get some tape, some strike tape to put over the face or even just some sort of brown pastel tape, rip it off stick it on the face half a dozen shots you’ll see the imprints. If it’s moving too much towards the toe, too much towards the heel maybe you could do something within your swing to start balancing that ball flight to get it right in center so we start to see the ball pitching down the fairway a little bit straighter. 2014-11-04

Actually striking the right part of your driver is the most essential part of hitting the straight shots, it’s all well and good having a really nice swing, but if you are not hitting the right part of the golf club you will actually see a big drop off in terms of the distance of your shots, but also the accuracy of your shots. And the middle of the center of the golf club is an area that we would term the sweet spot, when you hit the sweet spot you don’t really feel like you’ve struck the ball and it just zings off into the distance. That’s one of those pure drives that you want to get out there and measure to see how far it went.

So the sweet spot of most drivers is an area around about the size of a dime and its going to be just slightly above the middle of the golf club, in terms of the height, but probably in the center of the golf club in terms of the left and right face, so it’s just slightly above the center, but around about the middle.

And a lot of drivers you have to have a marking on the top that sort of says hit it from under here, there would be a dome or a crest or even a logo of the manufacture, hit under there that’s going to be where the sweet spot is. So how can we tell whether you are hitting the sweet spot? Well as a more professional player you’ll actually be able to feel it, when you strike it out in the middle it feels good and it sounds good.

But until you’ve built, take that feel and that feedback it’s quite important you can actually have a visual clue for where you’ve hit. So if you have got a relatively new driver and you keep the face nice and clean quite often you will see the dimples, you will see the imprints of the last ball you hit or even a collection of golf balls that you’ve hit on the face and every now and then you can just wipe the face clean and have another go and see where you are hitting them, that works particularly well with the modern sort of black face drivers you can really see the impact points very clearly there.

Now I’m about to use something different that I am cheating and this is something I would encourage you to do as well. This is impact tape, so it’s a piece of white sticky tape I’ll just take it out off my little roll here, this is from a company called Strike Right, I roll it – I’ll take out of the roll stick it on the clubface and when I hit the ball there’s a very small amount of friction there for a very small amount of heat created and that blackens the paper in the right area and if I could walk it up to the camera so you can see, I’m hitting in that area there. Now if I was to hit more shots you start to see the pattern emerging, the toe or the heel, let’s go ahead and deliberately hit one from the toe side, I’m going to try and hit this from the toe edge – and as I look down a little bit more towards the toe, but another imprint starts to come up with the bottom here.

Now if you hit a lot of shots you’d start to get a bit of a feel for where your average shots are hitting and maybe you might see that if you hit one from the toe, it does one particular shape the heel, there’s another particular shape, because like I said at the start hitting off center does create different flights through the shots. So when you are hitting shots with your driver its essential to hit the sweet spot, the sound and the feel are good give a ways for better players. For less experienced golfers, look for the visual clues, look for the marking on the clubface or get some tape, some strike tape to put over the face or even just some sort of brown pastel tape, rip it off stick it on the face half a dozen shots you’ll see the imprints. If it’s moving too much towards the toe, too much towards the heel maybe you could do something within your swing to start balancing that ball flight to get it right in center so we start to see the ball pitching down the fairway a little bit straighter.