Driver Benchmarks

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Okay, golfers, in this benchmark program we're going to take a look at the

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driving benchmarks.

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So remember, driving accounts for about 28% of the overall scoring difference.

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And we're going to talk about why fairways is not the best indicator for this.

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So we're going to go through what are the benchmarks of the different skill

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levels and

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then talk a little bit about the technique that relates to it.

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Okay, so the first two goals for driver are we want to hit it far and we want

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to hit it straight.

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So, what we'll see from the iron benchmark is in order to give ourselves a

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legit chance at making birdie,

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we have to have a short enough distance into the green.

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It's hard to hit it really close from 200 yards.

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So we have to drive it well to give us enough opportunities from, let's say,

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inside 150 yards in order to hit enough chances at birdie.

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So now we're not going to use average for our driver.

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I like to use, kind of your, Mark Brody uses the best, your 75th percentile.

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So if you were to take four drives, what would be your third drive or your

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average of the best first and second drive?

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Rather than what's your total average?

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And this works better for amateur golfers because if you hit, let's say, a few

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drives that were 250 and one where you just topped it,

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that one really big outlier, excuse the average too much.

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So we're going to look more at like, what's a good drive for you?

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So a good drive, you'll see that there's a pretty big range on this compared to

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a lot of the stats.

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That's because there's lots of different golfers who shoot 100.

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Some aren't very consistent, some are wild and some are very consistent, they

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're just short.

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But to shoot 100, we want to hit the ball somewhere between 150 and 240, at

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least from the men's knees.

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And then when we get to pro level, we're at about 280 to 300.

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Now, that gets us far enough.

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We want to hit the fairway as much as we can.

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We will see from the iron stats that most pros are almost twice as accurate

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from the fairway as they are from the rough.

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So we get a window that we need to train.

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At a pro level, the average is about 3.4 degrees offline.

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I'll show that on the next slide, what that means.

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But roughly, let's say, 4 degrees, at 300 yards, that means you'd have about 21

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yards offline.

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You're 21 yards left or 21 yards right.

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At 200 yards, that would only be 14 yards.

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So, what we'll see is the better the golfer, the narrower the dispersion or the

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less distance you're hitting it,

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the closer you are to hitting it online.

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So, 3 degrees all the way up to 7 or 8 degrees at the higher level.

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So, the cool thing is, because you hit it shorter, even though you hit it

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offline,

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you'll end up seeing that, practically, we end up with a pretty consistent

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window of somewhere in the 25 to 30 yard range that we want to start training.

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So, when you're practicing on the range, you want to kind of pick targets that

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give you this 30 yard window so that you can assess,

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well, am I hitting that at least 50% of the time, ideally closer to 75% of the

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time?

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And how big are my misses? Are my misses just a little out of the grid or are

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they way out of the grid?

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So, a couple of benchmarks, 4 degrees at 300 yards is 21 yards offline and you

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double that at 8 degrees.

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So, I usually use that 30 yard window, which for most at 300 yards would be

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about full hands width or 4 fingers.

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So, it kind of looks like this, where we have these different degrees.

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Now, I like to put up here kind of what's possible.

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So, the best PGA Tour Pros is about 75%, so 3 out of 4.

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The best LPGA is about 87% and the best Champion Tour player is about 83%.

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So, you'll see the shorter that you hit it, the easier it is to hit it in the

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fairway,

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because you can be more degrees offline and still hit your target.

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But when we start to look at kind of the average pros, they level off a little

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bit, closer to 70% or 60%.

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So, usually, this is a good benchmark of being able to hit about half the fair

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ways

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while keeping track of your penalty strokes and making sure that we're not

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getting into too much trouble that way.

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Okay, now let's talk technique. If we were going to boil down driving into one

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simple goal or one simple key,

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I would consider it this driver flat spot, which is basically down at the

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bottom of the swing.

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If the golf ball is here, we're trying to have a very little change in the path

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and very little change in the face angle.

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So, I tend to find that poor drivers of the golf ball have more of kind of this

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V-shaped swing kind of like this.

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They can have the club face twisting a lot, kind of like this.

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And any of those tend to cause more variability.

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So, I've got kind of, in the driver video, we'll look at more of this, but we

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've got the height of the club

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staying pretty low compared to the golf ball, or about the same height of the

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golf ball from about right foot all the way through to left foot.

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And his Rory, he's a really solid driver of the golf ball, probably one of the

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best.

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And then up top there we've got Luke Donald, you can see a little bit higher

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club coming down, a little bit higher club.

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That'll be easier to see when we're actually looking at the video, but this

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just gives you a quick little snapshot to get your brain thinking.

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In order to create that flat spot, we basically need to power the swing more

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with the body.

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We need to get the club face closed a little bit earlier, so it's already lined

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up, and then if I use my body, that brings the club through flat, as long as I

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have good axis tilt, so that when my arms extend, the club is moving more

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parallel to the ground.

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Basically, if you look at his arms compared to his body, you can see that the

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arms didn't change as much here as, say, we saw the arms changing here for Luke

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Donald.

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So basically, more of a body hit, less of an arms hit.

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If you're looking at some of your stats, big path numbers, high downward angle

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of attack, those are two common ones that happen when we have too much of an

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armsy swing.

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But from a video perspective, we're trying to get this nice flat spot.

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If we do that, typically I've seen the misses get a whole lot tighter and your

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overall driving performance tends to increase.

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So keep that in mind, if you're working on your 30-yard window and you're

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having a hard time fitting it in, this is the first place to look when we're

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talking about the technical keys to improving your benchmarks.

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In the next video, we're going to talk about the most important skill, which is

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iron play.