Why You Need This: How would you like to hear "4 driver secrets that golf stores don't want you do know?"

I bet you have bought a brand new driver that you were just killing on the indoor launch monitor.

Then you get out to the course and can't hit the thing worth a darn.

In the store you were driving 280, but out on the course, it's a different story.

You are back to hitting your drives 230.

I go over 4 ways that they can "tweak" the launch monitor, so you think you are driving farther with the new club.

Let's get started.....

Golf Pros Featured:

Instructors Featured: Clay Ballard    

Video Duration: 12:34

Video Transcription:

How many times have you gone into the local golf shop, the local golf store, or any golf store for that matter, you try out the brand-new driver that you’re excited to test out?

You get on the launch monitor and when you hit the balls into the screen, all of a sudden, you’re hitting it 20, 30, maybe even 40 yards farther than you were your old driver?

You get really excited about this, you buy this brand-new driver, you can’t wait to take it to the course. You start to make some swings on the course, and all of a sudden, you’re not really hitting it that great.

It’s going a little shorter, or the same distance as your driver was before, and now you’re kind of bummed out, and you think oh well, I’m just playing bad today, I’ll get it. I’ll get it in the future.

That happens all too often, and there’s a couple tricks that golf stores can do to make the launch monitors and the indoor simulators seem like you’re hitting it a little bit farther than what you really are.

I’m going to show you what those tricks are, and then show you one trick that you can do that will basically bust this every single time, so that you’ll know for sure whether the driver you’re buying is better than your current model driver. I’m going to do all that in this video.

Let’s go ahead and get started.

OK, so how do these launch monitors, how can you tweak these launch monitors to show that you’re hitting a little bit farther? It’s actually fairly easy to do.

Now one thing I want to get clear. Not all golf shops are doing this. If you go to a really good quality golf shop, they’re going to have the machine set up correctly for your swing, for the conditions that there are in your local area, and they’re not going to try to trick you into buying a driver.

So don’t think this is all golf shops are just trying to sell you drivers. Good golf shops are going to take the driver that you already have and if you can’t beat the numbers with their new driver, they’re not going to want to sell you that driver, because they want your repeat business.

They want you in there for the next year, for the better driver than that. We want to put it to the test, we want to see if the driver is actually better, and we want to make sure that they’re not cheating you with this.

The first one they can do is something called the altitude. Now for those of you who may not be familiar with this, if you’re hitting at sea level, the air is a little bit denser and the ball is not going to go quite as far as if you’re hitting at altitude.

So here on this first shot, I’ve got everything marked up to where you hit. I’ve got a 90 mile an hour club head speed player hitting a dead solid shot, great launch angle, great spin rate, everything’s just a perfect shot and they’re hitting it at sea level, and we’ll see the total distance is about 229 yards.

Now when I jack the altitude up, so I’ve got it set to like you’re at the top of the Himalayan Mountains, it’s 32,000 feet, that’s going to be a lot thinner air up there.

I can put this into this, it’s called a FlightScope Trajectory Optimizer, and it’s going to spit out the numbers of what it would be like if I was hitting at that altitude.

So if I messed with the machine, and I get it to set to 32,000 feet, it’s going to now tell me instead of 229, I’m hitting the ball 245 yards.

So it’s saying that I’m hitting it much farther, even though this was the exact same swing everything was exactly the same.

This makes a difference, and one thing, these machines aren’t designed to try to cheat or trick people, what they’re designed to do is to be able to set it up to your current conditions.

If I’m here in Florida, where altitude is basically zero, I’m at sea level, then I need to set this machine up to where it’s at sea level.

Now if I’m in Denver, Colorado playing golf, maybe the altitude is 9,000 feet, I need to set this machine up to 9,000 feet, because the ball is going to go a little bit farther there.

That’s something to keep in mind is that they can mess with the altitude a little bit to make the ball go a little bit farther, and make you feel like you’re hitting it farther than what you’re really doing.

Now the text piece is surface type, and what that means is I can either set this to soft, medium, or firm, or hard, and that’s talking about how hard the ground is.

If you watch, a lot of times at your local golf course you have a big rain, the ball is not going to roll at all. How many times have you gone to the fairway, you see where your ball landed in the fairway, and your golf ball is sitting right beside its divot or its pitch mark there.

That’s very, very common when it’s just now rained, and that’s going to be no rollout whatsoever.

If I set my machine to really soft conditions, it’s going to calculate the rollout just like after it rained. It’s going to land, it’s going to plug there, maybe a couple yards roll on a drive, but it’s really not going to roll out any.

Now medium condition would be just the normal amount of roll you get when you hit the fairway, and then firm or fast or hard condition would be like the middle of summer when the fairways are a little bit baked out, it’s rolling more.

On the PGA Tour they tend to play firmer, faster fairways, so a lot of times when you’re watching on TV that would be kind of the firm or the hard setting when you’re doing that on your machine.

What they can do also, if I just set it again to that normal one, that’s 229 yards, if I set it to the hard rollout, so it’s like a hard fairway, then it’s going to tell me that that ball is going to go 247.

So now all of a sudden I’m picking up some extra distance, almost 20 yards, just by setting how firm the fairway is, because that ball’s going to bounce and rollout.

Now again, this isn’t set up to trick you this way, and the store shouldn’t be set up to trick you this way, it should be set up to give accurate conditions for what it’s like in your area.

If you play in an area where it’s really hard, firm, fast fairways, and the balls are going to rollout, in the stores they should have it set up to a firm or hard condition, that way you can compare apples to apples.

If you play somewhere where it’s wet and the ball usually plugs, it should be set up on a softer condition, that way you can, again, compare apples to apples with what you’re doing.

It’s not the machine inherently itself that’s doing anything unscrupulous, or whatever, the stores don’t have to necessarily set the machine up one certain way, you just want to set it up to most realistic conditions, or you’re going to see that you’re hitting it up to 20 yards farther, just by the rollout.

Now this one is kind of interesting, and I think people way underplay this most of the time, so wind. If I have a 20 mile and hour wind behind my back, I’m going to get from 229 all the way up into, I think it’s about 30 yards on a 20 mile an hour wind.

If the wind is behind me, and I hit a 229-yard drive, in reality that wind is going to push it an extra 30 yards, so that’s going to end up 259 yards.

Now take it the other way. Let’s say that the wind is in my face 20 miles an hour, now I’m going to lose about 30 yards and I’m barely going to hit the ball right around 200 yards.

So a 20 mile an hour wind in your face, to a 20 mile an hour wind behind your back, can be up to 60 yards.

Now some of these machines let you factor that in, that way you can practice those conditions so that if you get on the course you can practice with different winds in your face and see how your clubs react.

Depending on how high or how low you hit the ball, some players will lose more or less yardage based on that amount of wind.

Again, they could set these machines up to trick you a little bit, feel like the wind is behind your back. Always pay attention when you’re looking on the screen there to see, is there a 10 mile an hour wind behind my back kind of helping this out. You’ll know that something’s a little fishy going on there.

One thing that’s interesting to note, it doesn’t really play a ton of affect on your distance is how much the ball spins. If you’re playing with a very low-spin golf ball, like a Pinnacle distance ball, that’s going to get you an extra few yards.

Now it’s not nearly as much as people would think. On a 229-yard drive, it’s only going to get you about 3 more yards.

The reason for this is not that the ball is any hotter, or leaves the face any faster, it’s that those balls spin less. When you get less backspin, almost all players have too much backspin, the ball kind of floats up on them and then comes down.

With those harder golf balls, the ball penetrates through the air a little bit more. Again, not very much, but two or three yards. When you start to add these things together, it really makes a big difference.

OK, so let’s talk about what we can do with this. How do we make sure that we don’t ever get fooled?

One thing to keep in mind is that all drivers are limited in the amount of ball speed that they can create. They do this by controlling what’s called the coefficient of restitution, which 0.83.

It basically just means that how hot this driver face can be. Now any club within the last say 10 years, they’re pretty much all hitting that coefficient of restitution.

If you hit one dead solid, there’s no driver that’s going to add 20 or 30 yards to your game. Now you can get fit, and I think it is important to get fit, to make sure that you get the right loft on the driver.

Certain drivers are going to get more backspin, or less backspin on the ball, which can help you to get better launch conditions.

So there may be one driver that you find for you that you do hit 10 or 15 yards farther, or that you just like the feel of and you can control the face a little bit better.

So there are drivers, and I have particular drivers that I hit way better than other drivers, it’s just saying as a whole, as an industry as a whole, you can’t say one driver’s going to be way better for everybody than all the other drivers.

It really just doesn’t work that way because of the rules that are placed on these clubs. That’s a thing to keep in mind. There is no magic driver out there, but there are some that you can hit better.

Here’s the surefire test to make sure you never get burned. Take your current driver into the store with you. Hit some shots with your current driver, hit some shots with that new driver.

Now even if the machine is saying that you’re hitting it way farther, it really doesn’t matter, because it’s an apples to apples test.

You hit four or five with your driver, four or five with the new driver, even if they’re both going 40 yards farther than they normally should be, if the new one is going farther, it’s going to outperform your old driver.

So there’s no way to cheat to make the new driver seem better on the machine, the machine just spits out the numbers and that makes it very accurate.

So if you take your club into the store with you and compare it to the new club, you’re always going to come out with the absolute best driver.

If you put all these things together, when we start out at 229 yards, when we add in the wind, the altitude, the firmness of the fairway.

When you put all that stuff together, we could go from that 229-yard drive all the way up over 300 yards.

I believe the numbers I put in here were 311 yards, so that we’re talking about adding 82 miles an hour, or 82 yards of total distance which is kind of crazy.

So most golf shops would never, ever cheat that much to jack up all these numbers like that. But some of them may tweak the numbers a little bit to make it seem a little bit better, so just stay conscious of that.

Now the number one thing, if we really want to hit it far, what are we going to do with our swing to create some more club head speed.

One thing that I’ve found that are some great drills to do this, are some one-arm swings. You’ll also notice that your body starts to open up a little bit more, and that your club releases out in front of your body, which would be past impact.

Now all we’ve got to do here from these baseball swings, is just tilt everything down where at the golf ball would be, and now we can get some good lag.

We can release that club out in front and increase our club head speed with just those right arm only drills. Do 5 or 10 of those, that really helps to sequence up your body.

Then let’s grab it with the left arm and do the exact same thing. So again, I’m going to feel like I open up my body, I lag this club, and then that’s releasing on out in front.

You’d be surprised if you do these every day, how much your club head speed will go up, because no longer are you trying to steer the club with your hands and arms, you’re using the momentum and the motion of your body to help accelerate that golf club.

So 5 to 10 with the right arm only, 5 or 10 with the left arm only, then put both hands together and you can really rip some shots.

All right, so we don’t want to stop here. This is a great video, I want to make sure that you guys don’t get burned on buying a driver that maybe isn’t better for you.

But now that we have the correct driver, or we at least know how to pick the correct driver, what is it that’s really going to affect how well you hit the driver more than anything? That’s your golf swing.

I can’t reiterate enough, whenever you’re working through and you’re practicing, stick with the Top Speed Golf System and start working through those drills.

One of the things that really helps with this is getting more lag. We talked about how in these one-arm swings, we can get the club to lag and release on out in front.

A great thing to pair that up with is the lag that we’re going to get in the takeaway, and making sure that you’re not picking the club up too early like we talk about in the Lag section of the Top Speed Golf System.

So I can’t reiterate this enough. Go to the Top Speed Golf System, start with level 1 on the Lag, work through those drills, get in the reps, that way whenever you go out to play, it’s just completely natural, it’s completely automatic.

You don’t even have to think about getting lag, and you can hit a driver that’s 30 years old, you can hit a wooden club really, really nicely, and better than what you’re playing partners are doing, if you have the right swing mechanics.

So go to the Lag section, check out those videos, and I’ll see you guys there.