Why You Need This: In this video, I show you 10 golf ball secrets the manufacturers don't want you to know.

Have you ever wondered what the real differences are between all the various types of golf balls out there?

This ball is super soft, but this ball is made for distance, this ball has two layers, three layers, four layers, five layers......

It can be very confusing.

What if I told you that a large majority of the hype around golf balls is just marketing?

In this video, I'm going to dive into what makes a good golf ball and what you should really be looking at when deciding which golf ball is best for YOUR game.

And there's one ball out there that may just be giving you the best of both worlds...

Let's get started...

Golf Pros Featured:

Instructors Featured: Clay Ballard    

Video Duration: 14:01

Video Transcription:

It’s awesome to have you here today, in this video I’m going to talk about a lot of the details on golf balls, picking the right golf ball, and talk about a lot of the things that you’re not going to hear about in marketing, that the big companies don’t necessarily want you to know about golf balls.

Let’s just right on in there, and let’s start talking about this.

First off, a dozen golf balls to manufacture those cost about $12.00. If you’re going for a Titleist golf ball, a TaylorMade golf ball, a Callaway, whatever your favorite golf ball brand is.

It’s going to be roughly the same because they’re really using the same materials, or pretty much the same materials if you’re buying those high-end golf ball brands.

They all have good quality control, and to be honest, there’s really just not a lot of difference between them. The golf balls are very similar to each other.

If you take a look at these charts, I’m show you a couple piece of research here, and the first one I’ll go over here is a driver chart and you’re going to see that it has all the different golf balls from different manufacturers.

You’re going to see that the spin rates are pretty similar. If you look from left to right, I believe it is, on the bottom, you’ll see the spin rates not a ton of difference on there when we’re talking about driver.

If you look at the launch angle, it’s less than a degree difference between all the different brands.

So this is not my opinion, this is not asking one person and the next person, this is saying let’s take a robot, let’s have him hit these golf shots, and let’s measure and see what happens to see the real performance of the golf ball.

With the driver, all the golf balls are very, very similar. Now when you go into short game shots, that’s what we’ll talk about more, that’s when you’re going to see a lot of the differences.

We’ll show you a chart here later how the spin differences can really vary between the types of golf ball, especially going between cheaper Sterling golf balls and more expensive golf balls.

The first thing to know is the manufacturing process, there’s not one golf ball that a company spends two, three times more money on that’s an ultra-ultra-premium golf ball.

They’re all making really good golf balls, the quality control is good, so really it just comes down picking the one that you like the best, and more specifically, you like best around the greens.

One of the golf balls I think is really cool is the Snell golf ball. This is a guy named Dean Snell, he worked with Titleist, came up with the original Pro V.

Worked with TaylorMade, came up with the Penta, a lot of good TaylorMade golf balls, so he’s really been developing golf balls for high-end golf ball companies for a long time.

The last couple years he started his own company called Snell. I play the MTB Black, is the ones that I really like.

I am a little bit biased, I’ll tell you, he sends us free golf balls, but the reason that I reached to him is because I’d tried some of these, and these things are dead on your Titleist Pro Vs, they’re dead on your TaylorMade TP5X, I mean they’re very, very similar to that.

If you’re looking at what are the differences in golf balls, the main thing is when we’re talking about a Surlyn golf ball, which is the outer coating of the golf ball, versus a urethane golf ball.

This outer coating on the golf ball, what they do with this is they break it down into multiple layers.

If you take a slice of this golf ball, and I’ll show you a close-up of this, you’re going to notice the outer coating that’s in white, that’s your cover, that’s where it’s going to be different materials.

A urethane golf ball, what outer cover is, they can make that soft and then they can put various different layers inside this golf ball to change the performance on that.

Now with the urethane golf ball, this outer coating they make soft, the inner coating, or let’s talk about the core, the big piece in the middle. They make that pretty soft also.

What happens is when you hit this golf ball, it compresses the golf ball about a third of the thickness of this golf ball with your driver. You make a swing, it smashes that driver in, or smashes this golf ball in.

If you look at your face after you hit a golf ball, you’ll notice sometimes it has a pretty big mark on there. That’s because it’s smooshing into this golf ball.

It’s taking the soft outer core, it’s smooshing against the soft inner core, and that actually helps to decrease the spin. With the driver, you really want low spin shots.

Just like that chart we saw earlier, all the drivers have about the same spin rate on them, roughly the same spin rate. So with a urethane golf ball, they make a soft outer core, a soft inner core, low-spin shot.

With a Surlyn golf ball, the cheaper golf balls, the ones that you by for $10, $15, $20, they still have this soft outer core and soft inner core, but they don’t have these other layers in there.

So they spin low on he driver, but when you get to the wedges they’re also not spinning very much on the wedges.

Now with your higher-end golf balls, your Pro Vs, your TP5X, your Snell golf balls, what’s happening here is they’re putting these other layers between the core and the outer layer and these are actually harder.

The second layer between the outside, the next layer in, is actually a harder layer and what happens is, when you’re hitting a wedge shot and you’re not compressing the full golf ball.

You’re just barely compressing this golf ball, and compressing the outer layer against the core to get low spin, you compress the outer layer against the next layer. Now that next layer is hard.

Imagine your wedge hitting something really soft and that being smushed up against something really hard. That’s going to really bite extra, and it’s going to create more backspin on the shot.

When you’re buying a premium golf ball, that’s what you’re paying for. We saw on the driver, they’re all the same.

If you take a look at this wedge chart, what you’re actually going to see is on one half of the chart, you have all these groupings of premium golf balls. Those are your golf balls that are higher-priced golf balls.

If you look in the middle of the chart, you’re going to see kind of a mid-range golf ball. You’ll see that you lose some spin, and the launch goes up a little higher when we’re talking about these short wedge shots.

This is just for wedge shots when we’re doing this. Then you’ll notice on the far left of the chart, you’re going to see that’s the least amount of spin, those are the cheapest golf balls. This is where you really see the difference in golf balls.

Now Snell, you’ll notice it’s sitting right in the middle of those high-performance golf balls, but the price of a Snell is $32 a dozen versus paying $47, $48, whatever a normal price golf balls are from Titleist and TaylorMade.

Now what I’m not saying is these Snell golf balls really aren’t going to be much different than your other premium golf balls. I’m not saying these are some magic golf ball that’s going to be fantastic.

What I’m saying is they’re dag-gone exactly the same as all the premium golf balls, they’re right there in the middle, but they’re just cheaper.

So it’s a little bit better of a deal for the player, and that’s why I always recommend them. I think hey, if you can get a really good performing product and save 30 percent or whatever on the price, that’s pretty good.

So what I used to play before this was the TaylorMade golf balls. Some of these spin really good. The two that I personally like are the TaylorMade, the TP5X, I like the Snell MTB Black, and I like the Titleist Pro V1x.

Now for me, I think those are all really good golf balls, because low spin on the driver, but they’re all on the higher spin with your wedges.

So you can hit that driver that launches up in the air, knuckles through the wind, get you some great distance with the drives, then you can grab a wedge and have one of the most highest-spinning golf balls that’s out there. Those are both really good.

That brings me to another point here, there’s no ultra-long golf ball. So a lot of times the companies will market their golf balls as being 10 yards farther than other companies.

Or maybe you’ll buy a Pinnacle Extreme Distance, or a Pinnacle Whatever it is, or a TopFlight, or somebody will bring out one of those golf balls saying, “Oh, I’ve got a long hole here, I’m going to bring out this rock hard ball to get some extra distance.”

When we looked at that driver spin rate chart, we’re seeing that those really hard golf balls don’t actually go any farther than our premium golf balls.

So if you buy the premium golf balls, that’s the maximum distance you’re going to get. If you buy really any dag-gone golf ball from any company, you’re really getting the maximum distance.

If you ever hear a golf ball company talking about how you’re going to pick up tons of distance with their golf ball, they’re talking about one yard on a 200-and-something yard drive. It’s almost nothing.

Any golf ball you play, going to be about the same off the driver. One of the other things is they’ll oftentimes name these to try to trick you.

So we talked about how premium golf balls get the spin with the wedges, and they decrease the spin with the driver. Cheaper golf balls same with the driver, but on the wedges they don’t have any spin.

Now they’ll try to trick you with this by saying, naming these soft, and super soft, and ultra-soft, and high-spin, when they’re talking about the cheaper golf balls.

Those $15 a dozen, $20 a dozen golf balls, those are not going to spin. They’re not going to spin anywhere near what the premium golf balls are going to spin.

So it doesn’t matter if the name is soft, super-soft, spin, whatever it is, that’s all jus marketing to try to get you to try that golf ball at a cheaper price. It’s not really going to work that well for you.

Lower compression, whenever you drop the compression, this is kind of a myth I’ve heard out there, and one thing they’ll use to try to market this to you.

They’ll say that if you’re a slower swing-speed player, I’m going to lower the compression of the golf ball, and that’s going to help you to get all of this crazy distance.

Well in reality, not really going to get much distance. If we’re talking about a 200, 250-yard drive, or let’s say it’s a 200-yard drive, you’re maybe going to get one more yard of distance, two more yards of distance.

It’s not really enough to notice. Again, when you’re talking driver, any golf ball is going to do. When you drop that compression down, though, what that does is that makes it tricky to get the ball to perform correctly around the greens.

So we have these different layers specifically designed to perform in different ways. If we drop the compression really low, to market this as a longer golf ball for slower swing-speed players, it’s not going to perform around the greens.

It’s not saying that low compression is good or bad, I just don’t think it makes much difference and the robot testing shows it doesn’t make much difference either. It’s just pure, pure marketing stuff.

One of the other things is people will ask me about, what about other cheaper golf balls? What about your Vice golf ball?

I’ve hit those, I don’t the quality control on the Vice golf balls is up to the standards of what you would see with a Titleist Pro VX, a TaylorMade golf ball, a Snell MTB golf ball.

I really think that those, when I hit those, the performance is much more consistent than what I see with some of these other brands.

You maybe even heard the Kirkland golf ball from Costco, that was a really good golf ball. What that actually is, that’s a design from an old TaylorMade golf ball.

They just took the exact formula from an older TaylorMade golf ball and copied it, and that’s why you don’t see them anymore, because they’re not able to produce those, they got in a big lawsuit with it, and that kind of stuff.

Those are completely fine, but you just can’t really find them, and if you do, you have to pay normal prices for the golf ball.

They’re not any better than any of these normal golf balls that you can buy that I’m talking about here today.

One interesting fact here is, when we’re playing in the cold, I thought this was a great point to bring up.

A lot of times players will go out and they’ll buy these premium golf balls, and they’ll be playing in the middle of winter, and spending a lot of money on these golf balls, when they’re really not going to perform that great in the winter anyways.

Now we talked about how when you hit a golf ball, it’s going to compress this golf ball. Well, when the golf ball gets really cold, let’s say it’s 40° outside, this ball hardens up a little bit.

It’s not going to compress, it’s not as elastic, it’s not going to really jump off the face as much, and you’re going to lose some distance, probably 15 or 20 yards shorter than when you’re playing and it’s 70° or 80° outside, which is how the golf ball is designed to do it.

So make sure if you are playing in the winter, keep the golf balls in your house, keep them warm. If you keep them outside in your garage, they’re going to start out cold.

If you keep them warm, you’re going to get that performance, at least for nine holes. If you really want to get crazy with it, put a couple golf balls in the pro shop, pick those up at the turn, you’ll be playing with fresh golf balls the entire time.

So those are some of the myths that I see out there, those are some of the things, some of the tricks that I think golf ball manufacturers are doing to try to get you to purchase a particular golf ball over another one.

When we look at these charts, we’re seeing they’re much more consistent as long as we’re buying the correct type of golf ball for our game.

I don’t believe that it’s important to buy a high-end urethane $40 to $50 a dozen golf ball if we’re a beginning golfer. The performance is so small, when we look at these charts, there’s not very much difference.

If you really care about getting the best performance, though, I’d absolutely go with one of those high-performing golf balls.

Remember with the driver, if we’re going to simplify this down to just a couple key bullet points, with the driver there’s no difference.

Play any golf ball, they’re all relatively the same. Maybe you could make a hundred rpms difference, but it’s not going to really matter much in your game.

So the driver, forget about it. Any golf ball that’s manufactured by a reputable brand, it’s going to be good.

Wedges, that’s where you really notice the difference. If you want that elite wedge performance, you’re going to want to go with a higher-end golf ball that’s a urethane cover.

That’s what’s going to allow it to bite against that second layer, these multi-layers in here and get a lot of spin.

Then lastly, I prefer the Snell golf ball, not because it’s better than everything else out there and it’s some magic golf ball. It’s the same as everything out there, just $18-$20 cheaper.

If you’re a member, here’s what I want you to do next. Go to the Top Speed Golf website and log in, and let’s talk about what to work on from here.

We talked about in this video how the golf balls really they’re very similar. If you’re buying a premium golf ball they all perform roughly the same.

There’s no golf ball that’s going to spectacularly get you another 20 yards of distance, it’s not going to make the ball spin back on the green. They’re very, very similar.

If you want to get the best performance, I recommend you work on the number one fundamental, or what I call the number one real fundamental of the Top Speed Golf System.

Now that’s the Stable Fluid Spine, and here’s what that’s going to allow you to do. If I can keep my spine angle slightly tilted away at address, I can go to the top of the swing and be slightly tilted away.

I can come to contact and be slightly tilted away. That stabilizes my head, that keeps my body from moving all around, and I’ going to be able to make more clean contact.

Doesn’t matter which golf ball we’re playing with, if we hit it thin, it’s going to go thin, it’s not going to be very good. If we chunk behind it, it’s going to be a bad shot.

So the real key to getting the best performance out of the golf ball, is hitting it nice and clean, having that club come down, hit ball-first contact, and then take a divot in front.

The number one thing that’s going to help you with that, is the Stable Fluid Spine. Go to the Stable Fluid Spine section, start on level number one.

Start working through those drills, that’s going to help you get a lot more consistent in your contact. I’ll see you there.