Why You Need This: Are you sick and tired of struggling with solid contact in golf?

You hit a shot off the toe...

Then one off the heel that dribbles into the water...

And all of a sudden you are so mad you could wrap your $400 driver around a tree!!

In this video, I'll be testing just how much driver face contact and the gear effect impacts the outcome of your ball flight.

If you ever wanted to know how much distance you lose off a low heel shot versus a shot off the sweet spot, this will be very eye opening.

I'll even go over a secret spot on the club that will get you a boost in yardage.

Once we talk about how different contact affects ball flight, you'll get a great drill to control your contact and give you extra distance.

(Not to mention the ability to hit the ball a lot more solidly.)

Let's watch the video now to pick up some easy distance without a huge change!

Golf Pros Featured:

Instructors Featured: Clay Ballard    

Video Duration: 10:09

Video Transcription:

Hitting the ball solidly is one of the best feelings that you can have in golf. We all know how important that is to getting the most distance.

Today we’re going to measure that, so how much difference is it between an unsolid shot and a solid shot, talking about where we hit it on the face, with the same swing and your overall distance. It could make up to as much as 49 yards’ difference in your driving distance, we’re going to go over that today.

All right, so a big part of how much distance you get is what’s called gear effect, and where we’re making contact with the golf ball. That determine show much energy also is going to be transferred into the golf ball is where we hit the face.

I have a big piece of wood here, let’s imagine this is the golf club, the face of the club, and this is your golf ball, this makes it a lot easier visualize. If you look at the lines on this giant ball, if I hit the ball dead solid, right in the center of the face, it’s going to transfer the most amount of energy into this ball, and it’s going to leave the face traveling very, very straight.

Now let’s imagine for a second that I hit this off the toe. What actually happens is the toe will twist back a lot. I don’t know if you’ve seen this in high speed, the toe really twists back a lot, and as it does that, because the ball is stuck to the face, the ball has what’s called a gear effect and actually moves the opposed way.

So as the toe goes back, the ball starts to curve right to left. If we’re looking at it from this direction, if you hit off the toe it moves back and the ball curves right to left just because you hit it off the toe, even if you’re swinging dead straight.

The opposite happens if you’re off the heel. The heel curves back and the ball rotates inward, resulting in a slice.

Now the final two pieces of this are low and high. If I’m hitting the ball low on the face, the club actually is going to twist down and I get an increase in spin. That can really destroy your driving distance because now the ball’s going to shoot up into the air, which you may have felt before.

So if your ball starts to get that really spinny shot that shoots up in the air, you’re losing some distance, and that’s because you’re hitting it low on the face.

When we hit it high on the face, the opposite thing happens. The club face turns back, and we get a little top spin on the ball or what feels like top spin, in reality it’s just less back spin.

Ideally, we want to get it as close to the sweet spot as we can, and actually just a little bit above that. That’s going to be the perfect shot that’s going to launch the all high, it’s going to have low spin, it’s going to give us the most distance.

Now let’s go ahead and test this out on the flight scope so we can see just how much this matters.

All right, so let’s start out by trying to hit some low and off the heel. This is going to be your worst shot, it’s going to take off the most distance because it’s going to add back spin, and it’s also going to give that left to right curve and to give you more of a lower launch which is going to be bad for distance too.

So I’m going to try to go for a low heel shot on this one. That was really low, actually just barely skipped off the ground, but you can see I went almost off the face there. So over did that one a little bit. Right off the bottom of the club, I’ll see if I can do a little better, at least get one on the face.

There we go, yeah. So pretty good swing, way low off the heel, it’s kind of blended in with the last one, but you can see really low off the heel there. That should really cut off my distance.

Now we’re going to try to hit one low and off the toe. Again, this is going to have more spin, not good for distance, it’s going to make the launch lower which is also not good for distance. It should have a little bit of a right to left curve on it.

Aw, too low again. Low off the toe, but I’m exaggerating these too much as we can see, and I’m off the bottom of the face. Let’s hit another one, I don’t think the flight scope is going to pick that one up.

All right, low off the toe, try number two. That’s a ball curve right to left, launched really low, caught that one a little more on the face. Again, these are extreme examples just so we can see these. We’re going to see too much spin, very short distances compared to where we want to be.

All right, next one we’re going to go high and off the heel. It’s going to launch a little bit higher. As you get higher on the face there’s actually more loft on the top of the face, which is going to get it to launch higher which is good for distance.

We’re going to have that gear effect actually getting less backspin on the ball, which is good for distance. But because it’s off the heel, it’s not going to transfer as much energy. So we’re going to still see kind of a loss of distance here, but it’s not going to be quite as bad as the other ones, if I can get this to contact correctly.

There we go, off the heel. That was higher than the other ones, but I still want to get it higher on the face. We can see that was almost in the center of the face off the heel. I’ll try one more, that ball definitely went farther.

There we go, we see that ball is cutting again, higher off the face. I got it above the center of gravity there, we can still see not as high as we could, but we see a huge difference in the launch angle.

That one is launching way, way higher which is good for distance. IT’ getting some overall better carry. Now let’s get one of the toe, and that’s going to be much, much faster, and then we’ll try to hit some really god ones.

All right, high and off the toe. Much more solid, so that was just a little high and off the toe, that ball started to curve right to left a little bit.

Not as extreme as what I was hoping there, but aging ball flight much better, higher launch, lower spin on that one and I probably picked up some decent distance when looking at that shot.

Let’s go ahead and take a look at these numbers, and then I’ll go ahead and talk about where we want to be if it’s perfect, and I’ve got a great drill to help you improve this.

Let’s take a look at these numbers for the four quadrants that we hit. The very first couple swings were low and off the heel. The first one didn’t read because it kind of skimmed across the ground.

The second was only 241 total distance, so not very good for 111 miles an hour club head speed, also notice 3,700 rpms of back spin. As I got lower on the face, that ball really started to spin up because of the gear effect, and we saw that that ball faded even though that wasn’t my swing that was making it fade, it was more of the contact point.

Now the second two we did low and off the toe. Again, had one skim across the ground, definitely not used to hitting that low on the face. We picked up a little bit of distance because the toe is going to go farther than the heel, we went 276 there. Again, 3,300 rpms of back spin, not exactly what we want to have, definitely not the best there.

As we went high and off the heel, we picked up a little bit more distance because it got a higher launch, lower spin in general. 282 yards total, but that’s the longest one yet, highest off the heel. We got around 3,100 rpms of back spin which is the lowest out of the ones that we’ve done so far.

Then finally, the longest one, even though we got too much spin because I probably got a little too much hook on there, but the 290 one was the high and off the toe. Smash factor was better, the spin was still a little bit high for what we want because it was kind of going right to left, but that was the best out of the four.

Now I’ve drawn an X right on the center of the sweet spot, so you’ll see on this picture that’s on the screen, a little tiny X below the circle is the dead center, that’s the center of gravity. Where you want to hit is that circular area there, so just a little bit higher than the center of gravity.

It’s going to get you a little more launch, it’s going to take off a little bit of spin, it’s going to get you maximum distance.

Go ahead and get your foot powder spray, put it on your club, make that little circle there, and I want to make sure that the dead center of my golf ball is right in that circle as I make some swings.

I’ll go ahead and try this out, it may take me a couple of them to get them exactly where I want them. I’ve kind of been all over the face doing these different drills, but we’ll see how I can do.

The first swing a little bit low, and a little bit off the heel. So we can see not perfect, not exactly where we want to be, but not too bad. We’ll try to adjust for another one.

All right, so there we go. On that swing, just barely above the center of gravity. It took me a few swings to get one where I wanted. You can see this top one, the center of that ball mark would be barely above the center of gravity.

That’s what we’re looking for. Go ahead and try that out. Try to find the center of gravity, and let’s go ahead and try a couple more drills that are going to get you better face awareness.

Now I’ve got some drills that I want you to do to really perfect this and to get used to hitting both low, high, toe, and heel, and that way you can fine tune to get right on the sweet spot.

What I want to do first here is go ahead, put the spray on your club and then draw a vertical line right down the center of the sweet spot. So we want a straight up and down line.

What I want to do is I want to hit 10 shots, and after every shot we’re going to check. The first shot I want to hit on the toe side of that line. Anything where the center of the ball mark is just on the toe side, that’s going to be counted as a win. That’s one point.

Then you’re going to move on to the second shot which is going to be on the heel side, it’ll be 2 points, back to the toe for 3, 4, 5, 6, alternating every shot until you get to 10 total successful shots that were on the right side of the club that you wanted.

That’s level number one. It might take you a while. For beginning players, it could take almost an entire range bucket to get some awareness there, but you’re going to start to be able to feel this better, and be able to adjust that.

It doesn’t have to be, we’re only talking about small amounts. You don’t have to change your swing, we’re just going to get better hand-eye coordination and better feel for the club head.

Then we’re going to do the same thing, we’re going to go low and high. We’re going to split the club into two different sections, top half and bottom half. We’re going to alternate for 10 points there too.

Then finally, I want to go ahead and draw that circle above the sweet spot right where we want to be, we’re going to try to get 10 right around that circle. So depending on your skill level, you can give yourself a little bit of wiggle room there. We’re going to try to get right where it is.

So you’re going to look after every shot. If I’m a little high, I’m going to try to lower the contact on the face.

If I’m a little low I’m going to do the opposite, and now you’re starting to develop a feel that’s exactly what the pros do when they get a little bit off, they work on their hand-eye coordination, get it right ack on the center.

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