Why You Need This: In this video, "Driver Ball Position For Distance | Add 38+ Yards," I'll explain how your ball position can make a huge difference.

You can even add 38 or more yards to your drives just by changing your ball position.

There are many advantages and disadvantages of ball position...

One placement could have you hooking or slicing the ball off the planet...

While another has you cranking a very low laser like shot with no carry to it...

This video is for everyone.

Even above average golfers tend to struggle with finding the perfect ball placement.

Watch this video now and I'll show you some crazy examples of what to do and what not to do all with my FlightScope...

Golf Pros Featured:

Instructors Featured: Clay Ballard    

Video Duration: 10:41

Video Transcription:

How would you like to pick up 38 yards just by changing your ball position? That’s what we’re going to talk about today, the advantages and disadvantages of ball position, how that’s going to affect your angle of attack, and how it results in 38 yards in average of distance.

I’m going to measure it on my flight scope. Let’s go ahead and get started.

All right guys, so let’s talk about how ball position is going to affect how far you hit the golf ball. Now if I’m hitting my driver, let’s imagine that the swing is happening on an arc. So as I’m coming down, it’s a circular motion.

If I make contact earlier in the swing, or my ball position is really far back, I’m going to tend to hit it on the downward angle of attack. That means my club face is moving down as I’m contacting the ball.

Let’s pretend that that’s a negative angle of attack. I’m hitting down on the ball, and usually when I do that, if I have the ball positioned too far back, I’m hitting down in to it, I’ll tend to flip to try to shallow that out. That’s something I see a lot of times. People will be coming down too steep and then flipping, which actually adds loft to the club.

So if this is my angle of attack, or the direction my club is moving, let’s imagine that’s a downward blow, and then this is my face angle. So as I have more and more loft, my face angle is higher.

The difference between these two angles is what’s called a spin wedge, and the bigger this difference in your spin wedge, the more spin that you’re going to have which is bad for a drive, we want to have low spin drives generally speaking. It’s also going to transfer less energy into the golf ball.

With this big spin wedge like this, now my club is coming down, this is the golf ball, and glancing across the ball. Not as much energy is delivered to the golf ball, it’s going to have less compression.

First as we go farther forward, now our angle of attack instead of being down is a little more level. We want it about level with the ground with the driver.

A positive angle of attack will go a little bit farther, but it’s kind of tough to switch back and forth from a positive angle of attack with a driver, and then go down to hitting slightly down with iron shots and everything else off the ground.

So we’re going to go about level, and instead of flipping now we can have forward shaft lean because we’re coming in at the right angle, and we can decrease the loft on the face.

As I get this angle closer together, now ‘m going to have a ball that has more energy, more speed, and it’s going to have less spin which overall means it’s going to go a lot farther.

We’re going to do a test now. I’ve got the flight scope out here. I’m going to hit about five balls with my ball position way back in the back of my stance, we’re really going to exaggerate, take it to the extreme.

Let’s see how much distance I lose where I put it up where it should be in the stance, I have that great angle of attack, and I rip some drives. Let’s test it out.

All right, so these first few I’m going to put the ball way back in my stance, so normally we would like to have a ball just kind of on the inside of the lead leg. I’ll go over that in a second video, and we’re going to be coming in with a nice angle, level angle of attack.

As I start to put the ball way back in my stance, I’m going to exaggerate and put it almost on my back foot here, and that’s going to get me chopping down into the ball as I swing a little bit. Let’s go ahead and try a few of these out. It might be kind of tough for me to do this, I’m not used to putting the ball way back here.

Oh, really low. There’s actually a range picker coming through the middle, and it was going so low it barely cleared the top of his roof there. That could have been dangerous, but let me go ahead and swing a few more.

One other thing you’ll notice is as this ball gets farther back in my stance, it also makes my path go way to the right. So let’s imagine I’m hitting this way for a second.

As I put this ball father back, my swing’s almost like a tilted hula hoop. If you can imagine a hula hoop circle and you tilt it back this way, that’s your swing plane.

If I’m coming down that swing plane, if I’m coming down with my club this way, notice how my club is traveling out away from my body, or the path is going to be more to the right that way.

If this I going to be my contact, you’ll see that I’m hitting down and swinging to the right, so very common thing for people that are coming in too steep, is they’ll tend to open their stance a lot.

If I’m going to straight ahead, I’m going to open my stance and now as I come down and hit, that’s going to allow me to go a little bit straighter. So naturally when the ball gets farther back, you’re going to start to hit to the right, and you’re going to combat that by opening your stance more and more.

As we get the ball farther forward, my club would be coming up the circle, and moving to the left, and I’ll do the opposite which I’ll get to a little bit later in this video.

I want to make sure that that’s something that’s very, very common. Throw the ball back in the stance, now this time I’m going to make the adjustment. My ball’s way back in my stance, but I have to open my feet a lot, and I’m going to hit another low chopped down into ball.

There we go, that one went a mile to the right, that’s a common miss that I see for a lot of people that are higher handicappers, that are beginning golfers. Big slice, way off to the right, lost a ton of yards.

All right, last few shots, losing tons of yardage on these. Again, I’m going to open my stance, come down into the ball, a lot of back spin. Actually that one is dead on the center of the face, that’s as far as I’m going to be able to hit one with it back in my stance. I can tell I had a little too much spin on it though.

Now we’re going to go ahead and put the ball a little bit farther up in our stance, and the idea here is that we’re going to be about level, or even a little bit positive with our angle of attack.

If I can get this level, and then take off the loft now that I’m coming in level with the ground, I can go ahead and get tons of forward shaft lean, as much as I want to, because I don’t have to worry about chopping down into the ground.

Before, when the ball was back in my stance, if I had forward shaft lean I would be smacking down in the ground, so I had to flip a little bit to level that out, which is a very common problem, and I hit a lot of those slices.

So now I’m going to go ahead and put the ball further up in my stance, just off the inside of my left ankle here. If you want to go even a little bit more extreme, maybe you want to hit the ball with actually as much distance as you can get, you can play it even farther up.

If you start to watch long drives, you’re going to see kind of up in front of the toe, almost level with the lead toe. That’s not what I would necessarily recommend for consistent golf, though, because now as I’m coming back up, I’m having a positive angle of attack just like we talked about last time.

If my club is working back up, it’s going to be working to the left. If I’m hitting down with an iron, it’s going to be working slightly to the right, so it’s a lot to change if we’re trying to go back and forth.

That means I’m going to have to line up a little bit farther to the right, so as my club moves back up to the left, it will actually be moving toward the target. Hopefully that makes sense, you’re going to close your stance a little bit if you’re going to do that.

With this one, I’m going to go with my normal stance, I’m going to play it just off the inside of my left foot. Let’s go ahead and try a few out.

There we go, pretty solid. Just barely left of the target, I can tell the angle of attack was way better on that one.

All right, so now let’s go over both of these sessions. You’re going to notice with the first one, I had a lot of the fade shots on there. I was usually losing some distance from that. If we go to the overview, we can see that I was averaging about 260 yards off the tee, which isn’t too bad, but I was swinging 110 miles an hour, so I should be getting way more out of that than just 260 off the tee.

We’ll notice that my smash factor 1.4, not terrible, but not what you’d want it to be. In the spin was 3,600 rpms.

That’s a lot of spin, again because I’m hitting down, flipping the club, getting more of that spin wedge, the biggest difference between those two angles, and that’s what’s really causing me to lose a lot of yardage there. So 260 on average, let’s go through some of these other parameters.

Here we’ll see that my angle of attack on those was -3°, so I was actually hitting down -3, I probably should have gone a little bit more exaggerated. I came in a little too level, I’m just not used to hitting down into the ball that much.

So -3, that’s definitely not where you’re going to want to be. I’ve seen players as much as -10°, so you can imagine how much yardage that would knock off. Then if we look at our loft, the dynamic loft was 9.4°.

Now let’s go ahead and we’ll take a look at these numbers compared to the more ideal numbers that I did second.

Now here on the second shots we saw, these are much, much straighter. I hit four out of five right down the pipe. I had one that faded off a little bit to the right.

If I go to the numbers, let’s take a look at the total distance was on average, 298. I had one 305, one 303, so those are a lot better numbers, obviously, hitting them on average roughly 40 yards, a little more than 40 yards farther.

The club head speed actually bumped up a little it, so again as I have this ball farther up in my stance, now I can get a little more forward shaft lean, a little more lag, and I don’t have to worry about chopping into the ground, and then release that out in front of the ball.

We saw my club head speed jump two to three miles an hour, even though I wasn’t trying to swing any harder, I just took my normal swing and it automatically increased a little bit.

My smash was a little bit higher on here. My spin on average was just about 3,000 rpms, which is actually higher than most of them. If we look at most of the shots they’re between 2,700 and 2,900, that’s still a little bit high.

I was tending to hit those a little bit lower on the face, which gave me a little extra spin. So it wasn’t ideal like I’d like to see, that would probably add another five or six miles an hour, if I cut them a little more solid.

If we look at the angle of attack, now we’re going to see a 1.4 positive angle of attack, so we’re 4.4° more up on the angle of attack, and we’re going to see that the dynamic loft was about the same on those shots.

All I did there was change the angle of attack, it allowed me to swing a little bit faster because the ball was up in the stance and I could release that lag, and I picked up from 240-250 all the way up to right around 300 yards of distance.

So it can be that easy. If we recap on this, get that ball just off the inside of your left leg. We want to be catching the ball on the rise, and taking a little bit of loft off with just a tiny bit of forward shaft lean as we’re hitting the driver. That’s going to get the ball to launch high, spin less, and go a lot farther.

Good luck to you guys, I’ll see you all soon.