What Does Smash Factor Mean? (Video) - by Pete Styles
What Does Smash Factor Mean? (Video) - by Pete Styles

What is smash factor when we relate it to golf? Now again this is a question that maybe five years ago we wouldn’t have even need to ask this question. We wouldn’t have even understood what smash factor is? Smash factor is a number that’s come around due to the proliferation of launch monitors lot of teaching professionals, lot of touring professionals are using launch monitors to understand what happens at the point of impact and what happens to produce the golf shot that we are hitting. Now smash factor is a co-relation between club head speed and ball speed. Now when the club moves in towards the ball it’s travelling at a speed and the ball will come off quicker than the club is travelling.

The elasticity of the ball and the club combined will mean that ball will come out faster than the club head is moving otherwise the club head will just push it along. Now the difference between the club head speed and the ball sped is the smash factor. Now it’s related to whether you hit the ball in the middle the toe or the heal, what sort of driver you’ve got, what sort of loft you have got, what sort of impact factors you’ve got, and what the ball is made out of as well. If we use simple numbers just to understand this if the club travelling at 100 miles an hour as it comes into the ball and the ball leaves at 150 miles an hour so 100 coming in and a 150 going out. That has a smash factor of 1.5 that’s the correlation between the swing speed and the ball speed. If the club is travelling at 100 miles an hour coming in and the ball leaves at 120 miles an hour that’s a 1.2 smash factor. Now 1.2 is not as good as 1.5 and I use 1.5 as an example because that’s about as good as you’ll get. I If you go and test golf clubs out and you are hitting decent balls with a decent club on a launch monitor and you are getting anywhere above 1.4 to 1.5 you are smashing the ball well and that’s using the most efficient use of your club head speed to produce some really good distance. If you are swinging the club really fast in to the ball but miss-hitting it all over the face and it’s not coming out with very good club head speed the smash factor is down and your efficiency and your power distribution is down. So we want to make sure that if I’m putting all this effort to get the club to 100 miles an hour that ball needs to be leaving at 150 miles an hour and I need to be hitting right in the centre of the club face so understanding your smash factor can help you understand your efficiency. Hopefully that helps you understand that a bit better. Next time you go and try clubs out you’ll understand how the ball is working, how the smash factor is working and that will help you make the right decisions. 2014-05-08

What is smash factor when we relate it to golf? Now again this is a question that maybe five years ago we wouldn’t have even need to ask this question. We wouldn’t have even understood what smash factor is? Smash factor is a number that’s come around due to the proliferation of launch monitors lot of teaching professionals, lot of touring professionals are using launch monitors to understand what happens at the point of impact and what happens to produce the golf shot that we are hitting. Now smash factor is a co-relation between club head speed and ball speed. Now when the club moves in towards the ball it’s travelling at a speed and the ball will come off quicker than the club is travelling.

The elasticity of the ball and the club combined will mean that ball will come out faster than the club head is moving otherwise the club head will just push it along. Now the difference between the club head speed and the ball sped is the smash factor. Now it’s related to whether you hit the ball in the middle the toe or the heal, what sort of driver you’ve got, what sort of loft you have got, what sort of impact factors you’ve got, and what the ball is made out of as well. If we use simple numbers just to understand this if the club travelling at 100 miles an hour as it comes into the ball and the ball leaves at 150 miles an hour so 100 coming in and a 150 going out.

That has a smash factor of 1.5 that’s the correlation between the swing speed and the ball speed. If the club is travelling at 100 miles an hour coming in and the ball leaves at 120 miles an hour that’s a 1.2 smash factor. Now 1.2 is not as good as 1.5 and I use 1.5 as an example because that’s about as good as you’ll get. I If you go and test golf clubs out and you are hitting decent balls with a decent club on a launch monitor and you are getting anywhere above 1.4 to 1.5 you are smashing the ball well and that’s using the most efficient use of your club head speed to produce some really good distance.

If you are swinging the club really fast in to the ball but miss-hitting it all over the face and it’s not coming out with very good club head speed the smash factor is down and your efficiency and your power distribution is down. So we want to make sure that if I’m putting all this effort to get the club to 100 miles an hour that ball needs to be leaving at 150 miles an hour and I need to be hitting right in the centre of the club face so understanding your smash factor can help you understand your efficiency. Hopefully that helps you understand that a bit better. Next time you go and try clubs out you’ll understand how the ball is working, how the smash factor is working and that will help you make the right decisions.