Improve Your Angle Of Attack With Golf Drivers (Video) - by Pete Styles
Improve Your Angle Of Attack With Golf Drivers (Video) - by Pete Styles

So if we now understand that skying the ball up or popping the ball up off the top hedge and the leading hedge of a driver is a pretty depressing shot to hit on the golf course and it can affect our score as well. We need to understand, well why does it happen with the driver, why does it not happen with any other clubs, and how can we go about stopping it? Well, the first thing to note is generally when you hit your driver you’ve got it teed up, you’ve got it teed up nice and high. And therefore, we need to affect the swing angle, the attack angle as we term it, into the golf ball, we need to change that slightly compared to how we would do it with an iron. You see with an iron, the ball sitting on the ground most of the time. Its on the ground, and therefore to hit the ball effectively we need to hit down on it, so with an iron we would place the ball around about the center of our feet and during the impact phase the club would be descending down into the ball, hitting the ball then scarping the turf afterwards, and the ball runs up the phase and shoots off into the distance. But things happen slightly differently with the driver, and they happen differently primarily because the ball is teed up. So with the ball being teed up I can then go ahead and position that ball much nearer to my front foot. Therefore, my lowest part of my arc will be actually behind the ball and I will hit the ball on the rise, an attacking angle coming up or being level, but certainly trying to avoid coming down too steeply. Down a degree or two, not the end of the world, but down five, six, ten degrees like I might be with an iron would be a real problem.

See with an iron my lowest part of my swing is after the ball, and with the driver the lowest part of my swing should be behind the ball on this side. If I was hitting down on the ball, what would happen to that club head? It does this, so what leads into the top of the golf club there, the top of the ball is the top of the club, so I have my ball back, my hands too far forward, I get steep and I am just throwing the crown of the golf club, the leading edge under the golf ball and I am hitting downwards, so the club head buries itself behind the ball, the ball strikes the top edge and spins massively up into the air and goes nowhere. So its important we understand how the swing path angle, the attack angle should I say, coming into the golf ball should be more level and not so much downwards, a downwards angle is a sure fire sign that you might be hitting the top of the golf club and popping it up into the air. Improving your ball position, improving your body weight position by staying back a little bit more and sweeping up into the air is going to be a great way of changing your angle of attack and reducing the number of skied shots that go high with the driver. 2015-10-16

So if we now understand that skying the ball up or popping the ball up off the top hedge and the leading hedge of a driver is a pretty depressing shot to hit on the golf course and it can affect our score as well. We need to understand, well why does it happen with the driver, why does it not happen with any other clubs, and how can we go about stopping it? Well, the first thing to note is generally when you hit your driver you’ve got it teed up, you’ve got it teed up nice and high. And therefore, we need to affect the swing angle, the attack angle as we term it, into the golf ball, we need to change that slightly compared to how we would do it with an iron. You see with an iron, the ball sitting on the ground most of the time. Its on the ground, and therefore to hit the ball effectively we need to hit down on it, so with an iron we would place the ball around about the center of our feet and during the impact phase the club would be descending down into the ball, hitting the ball then scarping the turf afterwards, and the ball runs up the phase and shoots off into the distance. But things happen slightly differently with the driver, and they happen differently primarily because the ball is teed up. So with the ball being teed up I can then go ahead and position that ball much nearer to my front foot. Therefore, my lowest part of my arc will be actually behind the ball and I will hit the ball on the rise, an attacking angle coming up or being level, but certainly trying to avoid coming down too steeply. Down a degree or two, not the end of the world, but down five, six, ten degrees like I might be with an iron would be a real problem.

See with an iron my lowest part of my swing is after the ball, and with the driver the lowest part of my swing should be behind the ball on this side. If I was hitting down on the ball, what would happen to that club head? It does this, so what leads into the top of the golf club there, the top of the ball is the top of the club, so I have my ball back, my hands too far forward, I get steep and I am just throwing the crown of the golf club, the leading edge under the golf ball and I am hitting downwards, so the club head buries itself behind the ball, the ball strikes the top edge and spins massively up into the air and goes nowhere. So its important we understand how the swing path angle, the attack angle should I say, coming into the golf ball should be more level and not so much downwards, a downwards angle is a sure fire sign that you might be hitting the top of the golf club and popping it up into the air. Improving your ball position, improving your body weight position by staying back a little bit more and sweeping up into the air is going to be a great way of changing your angle of attack and reducing the number of skied shots that go high with the driver.