How To Understand And Improve Your Golf Ball Flight Trajectory (Video) - by Pete Styles
How To Understand And Improve Your Golf Ball Flight Trajectory (Video) - by Pete Styles

Everything we do in our golf swing, all the information that you’ve learnt about how to swing the club and even all the money that you’ve spent on getting the right clubs and the right golf ball in your bag, it’s all designed to help and improve what happens up here in the sky, the ball flight. Now, the ball flight is purely determined by everything that you did before you hit the golf ball. Once you’ve hit the golf ball clearly you can’t do anything else to affect the ball flight. I mean you can shout at it, and you can try and talk to it, but the golf ball doesn’t listen and I can assure you. Now, the golf ball also it doesn’t know who you are, how big you are, what your handicap is, it doesn’t really care about what clubs you’ve got in your bag. It can only do something with the information you give it at the point of impact; how fast the club is travelling, the angle of the clubface, the angle of the swing path, the centeredness of strike and the angle of attack as you hit down onto it, those are the five things that will create a ball flight that goes up into the sky. And once its gone, its gone, you cant do anything about it. So during our setup and our swing and our hitting, we’ve got to make sure we input the right information into this ball.

And if the ball flight then takes off with the wrong flight, the wrong direction or the wrong curve, the wrong distance we need to change something prior to impact that will hopefully affect that ball and put it in a better position. Now, in terms of the ball flight we have lots of different characteristics and words and names for different ball flights. And that’s helpful in terms of diagnosing a ball flight, you know a golfer can say to me, ‘Oh I sliced the ball.” Now my understanding of a slice and his understanding of the slice better be the same otherwise we could go ahead and fix the wrong problem. So it’s important that I actually watch the ball flight and I can then confirm, “Yes you are right, that is a slice as I would term it.” Lots of different terms; push slice, slice, pull slice, high slice, low slice, all the same for draws, hooks, fades, shanks, tops. So loads and loads of different categories. Now generally it breaks down into nine basic ball flights, now rather than me regurgitating you trying to remember them all, there is a picture to the side of this video I am sure either on the first page or the second page that will actually help you understand what your ball flight is in terms of a diagram. Once you’ve understood your ball flight, you can start going around trying to correct it or trying to change it. And understand that you have the ability to change that ball flight, this isn’t something that only the pros can do or only the manufacturer of a golf club can do, you can do something in your swing to improve that ball flight. Now just because you haven’t been able to do that in the past and you’ve slice it in the ten years you’ve playing golf doesn’t mean this change is beyond you, its physics at the end of the day, the amount of information you give to that golf ball before you hit it is physics and the ball then just takes this information from that and flies off. And if you can improve and change the information you give that golf ball you can improve the ball flight. So in this next series of videos we are going to set about trying to understand ball flight and how you can change it.
2015-10-16

Everything we do in our golf swing, all the information that you’ve learnt about how to swing the club and even all the money that you’ve spent on getting the right clubs and the right golf ball in your bag, it’s all designed to help and improve what happens up here in the sky, the ball flight. Now, the ball flight is purely determined by everything that you did before you hit the golf ball. Once you’ve hit the golf ball clearly you can’t do anything else to affect the ball flight. I mean you can shout at it, and you can try and talk to it, but the golf ball doesn’t listen and I can assure you. Now, the golf ball also it doesn’t know who you are, how big you are, what your handicap is, it doesn’t really care about what clubs you’ve got in your bag. It can only do something with the information you give it at the point of impact; how fast the club is travelling, the angle of the clubface, the angle of the swing path, the centeredness of strike and the angle of attack as you hit down onto it, those are the five things that will create a ball flight that goes up into the sky. And once its gone, its gone, you cant do anything about it. So during our setup and our swing and our hitting, we’ve got to make sure we input the right information into this ball.

And if the ball flight then takes off with the wrong flight, the wrong direction or the wrong curve, the wrong distance we need to change something prior to impact that will hopefully affect that ball and put it in a better position. Now, in terms of the ball flight we have lots of different characteristics and words and names for different ball flights. And that’s helpful in terms of diagnosing a ball flight, you know a golfer can say to me, ‘Oh I sliced the ball.” Now my understanding of a slice and his understanding of the slice better be the same otherwise we could go ahead and fix the wrong problem. So it’s important that I actually watch the ball flight and I can then confirm, “Yes you are right, that is a slice as I would term it.” Lots of different terms; push slice, slice, pull slice, high slice, low slice, all the same for draws, hooks, fades, shanks, tops. So loads and loads of different categories. Now generally it breaks down into nine basic ball flights, now rather than me regurgitating you trying to remember them all, there is a picture to the side of this video I am sure either on the first page or the second page that will actually help you understand what your ball flight is in terms of a diagram.

Once you’ve understood your ball flight, you can start going around trying to correct it or trying to change it. And understand that you have the ability to change that ball flight, this isn’t something that only the pros can do or only the manufacturer of a golf club can do, you can do something in your swing to improve that ball flight. Now just because you haven’t been able to do that in the past and you’ve slice it in the ten years you’ve playing golf doesn’t mean this change is beyond you, its physics at the end of the day, the amount of information you give to that golf ball before you hit it is physics and the ball then just takes this information from that and flies off. And if you can improve and change the information you give that golf ball you can improve the ball flight. So in this next series of videos we are going to set about trying to understand ball flight and how you can change it.