Pete Styles – PGA Teaching Pro

Pretty much every golf shot you ever hit will have spin on the ball, very rarely would the ball ever just fly straight and pure with no spin, in fact if it did the ball would fall out of the sky pretty quickly in its flight and you will be surprised that it doesn’t go it’s full distance. So every shot has spin really putts kind of have spin, when you hit them they have a little bit of back spin and then as soon as they hit the floor they have over spin, but certainly all your wedges, all your irons and all your drivers will have spin. Now very rarely is that ever top spin, again top spin would have to be a bad contact, a top of the ball, top spin rolls across the floor.

So every ball you hit has some degree of backspin, that’s where the ball is flying and its spinning backwards, it’s rotating like this and we often talk about side spinning golf and we see it both fly and it curves to on the side, we say the ball has got side spin. Now side spin would imply the ball is rotating this way, somewhat spinning like a globe but you can imagine well if the ball has always got backspin how is it back spinning and how is it side spinning at the same time, it simply can’t do that.

So when we say side spin we don’t really mean side spin, what we actually mean is the axis of the ball instead of rotating this way rotates slightly off axis and you imagine like an aeroplane, aeroplane is flying along with its wing’s level and then it tilts it’s wings, it tilts its axis, what happens to the aeroplane, it flies round the bend. And a golf ball will do exactly the same, a ball that’s purely back spinning is going to fly dead straight but a ball that has an element of that side spin mixed in with the backspin now starts to spin off axis like this, like the aeroplane wings it will curve. So ball from here that curve this way for the right handed golfer we’re going to call that a fade or a slice and if a ball axis tilts this way we’re going to call that a draw. So when you see or you hear or you talk about sidespin, just understand the concept that its backspin mixed in with a little bit of sidespin corrects it’s off axis spin.

And if you can control that spin, decrease it when you need to, increase it when you need to, you can control the shape and the curvature of your golf ball which of course will make you a much better golfer.