What Makes The Golf Ball Curve (Video) - by Peter Finch
What Makes The Golf Ball Curve (Video) - by Peter Finch

What makes the golf ball curve? As the ball travels through the air, sometimes it would have draw spin or face spin, hook spin, or slice spin which causes the ball to move quite dramatically or quite subtly through the air. Either left to right or right to left, if you hear a dead straight shot, the balls going to travel dead straight without much deviation. The more it could actually causes that curve is a combination of your path and your club face at the point of impact. If you are kind of a slicer of the ball or a fader of the ball, what will generally be happening in your swing is the club path will be moving from out to in, across the target line and the club face will be slightly open to that pass that the point of impact. Maybe here in the slice it will open to that path and open to that target line.

Now what this will do is as you come into impact, it will produce back spin but that back spin, it will be tilted on an axis and as the axis is tilted, that’s what causes the spin and the curve in the air. Now it’s exactly the same as the opposite, so say in the opposite direction with the very much in to out swing path, again the spin axis will be tilted and that ball will move if the club face is close to that path from right to left in the air. You might kind of hear it referred to as side spin sometimes, the ball doesn’t actually spin on its side or it wouldn’t rise up into the air. But for arguments sake it is quite easy to imagine the ball spinning in that direction. But just know it’s actually a back spin axis which is just been titled. If you were to hit a pure straight shot, that is when the club approaches impact, can’t use the ball straight down the target line and just impasse that pure back spin. That’s probably the rarest shot in golf because it is so hard to achieve. But if you are hitting that pure straight shot with no curve, you just achieved the perfect back spin axis. But if you are curving it through the air, relate it back to your path, relate it back to your club face position impact. Figure out which one is actually causing the problem, work on it and then hopefully we can get you hitting the ball a little bit straighter. 2014-10-21

What makes the golf ball curve? As the ball travels through the air, sometimes it would have draw spin or face spin, hook spin, or slice spin which causes the ball to move quite dramatically or quite subtly through the air. Either left to right or right to left, if you hear a dead straight shot, the balls going to travel dead straight without much deviation. The more it could actually causes that curve is a combination of your path and your club face at the point of impact. If you are kind of a slicer of the ball or a fader of the ball, what will generally be happening in your swing is the club path will be moving from out to in, across the target line and the club face will be slightly open to that pass that the point of impact. Maybe here in the slice it will open to that path and open to that target line.

Now what this will do is as you come into impact, it will produce back spin but that back spin, it will be tilted on an axis and as the axis is tilted, that’s what causes the spin and the curve in the air. Now it’s exactly the same as the opposite, so say in the opposite direction with the very much in to out swing path, again the spin axis will be tilted and that ball will move if the club face is close to that path from right to left in the air. You might kind of hear it referred to as side spin sometimes, the ball doesn’t actually spin on its side or it wouldn’t rise up into the air. But for arguments sake it is quite easy to imagine the ball spinning in that direction. But just know it’s actually a back spin axis which is just been titled.

If you were to hit a pure straight shot, that is when the club approaches impact, can’t use the ball straight down the target line and just impasse that pure back spin. That’s probably the rarest shot in golf because it is so hard to achieve. But if you are hitting that pure straight shot with no curve, you just achieved the perfect back spin axis. But if you are curving it through the air, relate it back to your path, relate it back to your club face position impact. Figure out which one is actually causing the problem, work on it and then hopefully we can get you hitting the ball a little bit straighter.