Why You Need This: In this video, you’ll get a great golf distance lesson.

First, you’ll learn about launch angle and how much angle you should get with your driver.

Whenever you see long drivers such as Dustin Johnson blast their drives, you’ll see the ball launch really high with low spin.

So, how exactly do you launch the ball high?

Well, there’s a good way and a bad way.

The bad way is if you launch the ball high but with a lot of spin.

This spin is going to hurt your distance.

Then there are guys out there like Justin Thomas that launch high but carries super long because there’s relatively little spin on the ball.

There are several factors that’ll determine how far you hit...

One factor is where on the club face you hit the ball.

The driver’s club face bows out a bit so if you want a higher launch angle, hit the ball a bit above center where the degree may reach 12 degrees.

Not only will you get a higher launch, you’ll also put less spin on the ball.

The next distance factor is having a compression line leaning slightly away from the target.

In the video, you’ll see me hit a few drives demonstrating how these factors affect distance.

My FlightScope will show you the stats, and you’ll be surprised on how you can get low distance, even with a swing speed of 116.

Watch this video now for a crucial golf distance lesson and to discover the secrets to blasting your drives!

Golf Pros Featured:

Instructors Featured: Clay Ballard    

Video Duration: 8:04

Video Transcription:

Hi guys, in today’s video we’re going to talk about launch angle, and what is the right launch angle. Now I’m sure you’ve seen some of the top pros out there at the driving range, you’ve gone to the tournament, and they’re just launching the ball really high, they’re bombing it.

Dustin Johnson comes to mind, he really launches the ball high, gets low spin on it, and it goes forever. So how exactly do we launch the ball high? There is a good way and a bad way to do this.

Sometimes when you launch the ball high it gets a lot of spin on it, and the ball shoots up in the air like this. Other times when you launch it high it knuckles through the air and carries an absolute mile.

A good example of this is Justin Thomas, so I was looking up some of his stats the other day, he launches the ball at about 14° which is a very high launch angle, but gets very low spin. So only 2,100 RPM of spin.

That means that ball’s launching high and then carrying through the wind. That’s why he swings about 117 miles an hour which is a little above average, it’s a little bit faster, but he’s getting a lot more out of that. He’s hitting it farther than some of the guys that are swinging 120 or 122 miles an hour.

So let’s talk about a couple things that can determine this. Now number one, the biggest thing when we’re talking about driving and launching it high, low spin, is where we hit it on the driver face itself. If you look at your driver face, imagine it being in three quadrants.

You have the dead center which would be what most people think is the sweet spot. You have the bottom which is below the center, and then top which is above the center. The face itself isn’t actually dead flat, it’s got a bit of a roll to it.

If you have, for example, I have an 8° driver. The bottom of the face below center is going to have even less than 8° on it. The middle of the face on most modern drivers, even though it’s labeled 8°, probably has a little bit more, probably closer to 9° or even 10° in the center.

The top of the face has even more than that, it’s probably 12°, 13° of loft as I’m getting above the center. If I want to launch the ball high, I need to hit above center.

What that’s also going to do when I hit above center, that’s going to cause the ball to get less backspin, and it knuckles through the air a little bit more. So hitting it above center gives you that higher launch, and it gives you that lower spin like we want. Now I’ll get to a couple of example swings here in a minute.

The next thing that’s going to happen – so once we understand I need that ball a little above center on my hit, preferably right in line with the middle of the sweet spot or slightly to the toe.

It’s going to get that draw which will actually get it to have a little bit less spin also, but you don’t have to do it that way, but it just helps a little bit.

Now the second thing that we’re going to talk about is where I’m actually lined up as I’m coming into contact.

So if I’m coming in with a driver and let’s say that I’m taught to be stacked, or to my left side, and I’m hitting a driver like this, well now the angle between what we call the compression line, my left ankle, my left hip, my left shoulder, is almost leaning forward a little bit.

That’s lining me up to hit down into the ball and get a low launch, higher spinning shot. Obviously, I don’t want that to happen.

If you look at those guys that are launching it high and getting low spin, what they’re doing is they’re getting a compression line that’s slightly tilted away from the target. So here, my left ankle, my left hip, and my left shoulder are angled back slightly.

When we’re looking for that ideal compression line with the driver, I recommend somewhere between 6° and 8°. If you draw that line from your ankle, it should run right through the center of your hip, and then right through your shoulder.

Now what I don’t want to do is I don’t want to do this, that’s my ankle and my shoulder are back, but my hip is bumped out here in front. That’s going to get us to really drop down the right side of our body and start flipping at it and not making good swings.

So I want to get all three of those in a straight line angled back very, very slightly, which is going to help me to launch the ball a little bit higher.

When you’re looking at this -- depending on your swing speed, we’ve got the FlightScope out today -- ideally depending on your swing speed, the lower the swing speed you have the higher the launch.

So you’re looking for somewhere for a slower swing speed player, probably between 12 and 15° vertical launch would be good. You want a little bit more spin, so slower like let’s say someone that’s swinging 85 miles an hour, or 80 miles an hour, 12° to 15° launch would be good, so a little more vertical and around the high 2,000s for your RPMs of spin.

If you ever get on a TrackMan or FlightScope or any other radar device that shows you that. If you swing faster, you’re going to want to keep it down to the lower side.

PGA Tour average is about 10.5° vertical launch. I’d like to see it a little bit more than that, about 11° launch up to 14° or 15° is great if you can get there. Then the spin rate is going to be preferably a little bit lower if you can get it there, so 2,100 to 2,500 would be ideal. That would be for 120 miles an hour swing speed.

The Tour averages for your angle of attack is -1°, basically meaning we’re coming in real level. Spin, 2,500 or so. Launch angle about 11°, so it’s pretty good numbers.

Now let’s go ahead and go through a couple shots. I’m going to hit some thin, I’m going to hit some high off the face, I’m going to mess around with my compression line, and we’ll see exactly how this relates to hitting the ball, and what it does with my ball flight.

All right, so there’s a ball with a pretty good launch angle, pretty good spin rate. So on that one I tried to make sure that my compression line, the line between my ankle, hip, and shoulder was slightly back. I made sure that I hit it a little bit higher above the sweet spot, and slightly off on the toe.

You can see that the vertical launch was 12.5°, meaning it started out pretty high. Only had 2,286 on backspin, ta means it knuckled through the wind, and really got some good distance and some good carry.

Now let’s go ahead and try a few out, I’m going to get a little too far left. I’m going to hit some thin, and we’ll see how it affects it, it’s going to give way more spin and way lower launch angle.

All right, so now I made a couple swings. The second one that I did, I tried to get more in front, I tried to hit down on the ball a little bit more, and I tried to hit it a little bit thin on the face and it killed my distance.

Distance was way down, that one carried 238, so distance was really far down. The vertical launch, the launch angle, was only 3.6°, meaning 3° off the ground. I hit a little bit of a slice, I’m not used to making that type of swing, so it started to cut off to the right, and it had a little over 4,300 RPMs of backspin.

When that ball took off, it really went off low and it started to rise up and all that energy it spent rising was cutting down on its distance, where we want it to launch higher and penetrate through the air.

Even though I swung hard on that one, 116 miles an hour club head speed, didn’t go hardly anywhere, had big-time spin and low launch. That’s the exact opposite of what we want to be doing.

For you guys that want to work on this, go ahead and take out your video camera. Set it up and what I want you to do, is to get your hip, ankle, and shoulder all lined up slightly tilted away from the target like this. Check it on video, make sure it looks correctly. Do about 100 practice swings getting that back there.

For those of you that tend to bump your hip a little bit too far forward like this, that’s going to drop the right side down.

Feel like that hip works back this way and it’s almost going to feel like the angles between your leg and your upper leg, and your lower torso are going to get a little bit closer together, that way you can keep the hip moving back. That’s going to help you to launch it higher.

Get the contact on the top of the face, maybe a little bit toward the toe if you really want to get high launch, low spin, and you’re going to hit it a lot farther.

Good luck, go out there, make those swings. Play around and you’re going to see some big-time changes and a lot more distance with the driver. I’ll see you guys soon.