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The Cheapest 40 Yards in Golf

Swing speed gets all the attention. But swing speed only sets your potential distance, the quality of the strike plays a big part in how much of that distance you actually keep.

I have a friend who runs a big golf academy. His students regularly go through driver "combines" on a launch monitor. He shared that data with me (over 100k swings!) and there are some fascinating insights in there.

This analysis is about drives that are extremely similar, except where they hit on the face. Same club speed (within 1 mph), same angle of attack, same face-to-path, and same face angle, all within half degree of each other. The biggest difference is where the ball hit on the face. In every pair, one drive was struck near the center of the face (just slightly high on the face), and the other was struck low on the heel.

Here are six pairs of “similar” drives, across a range of swing speeds. The distance each drive traveled is inside the little bubbles. The horizontal and vertical axis show distance (in mm) from the center of the face. A half inch is 12.7mm

Check out any pair of drives. Hitting it low on the heel gives up 34 to 60 yards of total distance. At 86 mph swing speed, the drive hit on the button went 227 yards and the low heel miss went 190. At 100 mph swing speed, it was 258 yards versus 215 yards. At 106 mph, it was 282 versus 221… Sixty yards of difference from swings that were very similar!

When you hit low heel, first, you lose ball speed. Second, gear effect kicks in. A heel strike adds slice-sidespin, and a low strike adds backspin. So, the ball is traveling slower and with more spin. Less ball speed and a ton of spin is how a drive comes up 40+ yards short.

The good news is this is the cheapest distance in golf. You don't have to add a single mile per hour of swing speed to win those yards back. You just have to move your contact toward the middle of the face. And that is something you can easily work on today.

Put a little foot spray or impact tape on the driver and hit some balls. Most golfers are not working on strike location. You start working on this and you will start hitting it longer (and probably a little straighter as a nice side benefit!).

This is not to say that getting stronger and more mobile so you can swing faster isn’t valuable. It is. It’s extremely valuable. But if you can also find the center of the face more often, you'll add distance that way too!

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