How do you make a golf shot spin backward? (Video) - by Pete Styles
How do you make a golf shot spin backward? (Video) - by Pete Styles

As a golf teaching professional this is a question that I get asked quite often, is how do I get a ball to spin back? How do I see the guys in the TV spinning the ball back 20 feet across the green? How can I do that? Well there's couple of parameters that you really need to make sure you’ve got right first, one of them is the quality of the golf ball. If you are using a hard distance orientated golf ball, it simply won’t happen very often. The guys out on tour that you see on the tele are using much softer golf balls.

They are also using premium golf clubs with good clean grooves and relatively new grooves. If your grooves are worn out and have been played for some five, six seasons chances are the grooves aren’t going to generate enough spin on the ball, so its good clean dry grooves, good quality clean dry golf ball. The nest thing then is just to make sure you got a good ball strike. Now good ball striking is where the club hits the ball first before it hits anything else. So if the club hits the ground, hits the wet grass or hits the mud, before the ball you simply are not going to be spinning the ball very well. So we are going to play the ball into the middle or just slightly into the back third of the stance, we then have the handle of the club slightly left of center so it’s pointing towards the left thigh. It de-lofts the club a little bit and during the swing stay left for the right handed golfer, this is stay on the left side and hit down on the ball, any time you are leaning back and your body weight gets onto your right leg that implies scooping and lifting and here’s the thing hitting the ball higher doesn’t necessarily create more spin. In fact it can sometimes go against you, you create less spin. So we want to be leaning on the left side as we strike down and if you are a good ball striker and you get ball turf. You’ll hear that nice solid thump and thwack into the ground and that would create a lot of backspin. One last thing you’ve got to consider is what the greens are like, if the greens are dry and hard and bouncy that ball is not spinning, and it doesn’t matter who hits it. If the greens are well watered and quite quick and ideally sloping slightly towards you, that’s the best set of conditions to get spin. So a good ball, good grooves, the correct green and a nice hit down into the back of the ball then you might start seeing that ball backing up across the surface.
2015-03-26

As a golf teaching professional this is a question that I get asked quite often, is how do I get a ball to spin back? How do I see the guys in the TV spinning the ball back 20 feet across the green? How can I do that? Well there's couple of parameters that you really need to make sure you’ve got right first, one of them is the quality of the golf ball. If you are using a hard distance orientated golf ball, it simply won’t happen very often. The guys out on tour that you see on the tele are using much softer golf balls.

They are also using premium golf clubs with good clean grooves and relatively new grooves. If your grooves are worn out and have been played for some five, six seasons chances are the grooves aren’t going to generate enough spin on the ball, so its good clean dry grooves, good quality clean dry golf ball. The nest thing then is just to make sure you got a good ball strike. Now good ball striking is where the club hits the ball first before it hits anything else.

So if the club hits the ground, hits the wet grass or hits the mud, before the ball you simply are not going to be spinning the ball very well. So we are going to play the ball into the middle or just slightly into the back third of the stance, we then have the handle of the club slightly left of center so it’s pointing towards the left thigh. It de-lofts the club a little bit and during the swing stay left for the right handed golfer, this is stay on the left side and hit down on the ball, any time you are leaning back and your body weight gets onto your right leg that implies scooping and lifting and here’s the thing hitting the ball higher doesn’t necessarily create more spin.

In fact it can sometimes go against you, you create less spin. So we want to be leaning on the left side as we strike down and if you are a good ball striker and you get ball turf. You’ll hear that nice solid thump and thwack into the ground and that would create a lot of backspin. One last thing you’ve got to consider is what the greens are like, if the greens are dry and hard and bouncy that ball is not spinning, and it doesn’t matter who hits it. If the greens are well watered and quite quick and ideally sloping slightly towards you, that’s the best set of conditions to get spin. So a good ball, good grooves, the correct green and a nice hit down into the back of the ball then you might start seeing that ball backing up across the surface.