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Losing Distance - What Questions To Ask Yourself
Losing distance is very frustrating, but it's worse when you can't figure out why. Here's a quick checklist to help you avoid the confusion.
- Change in contact? - use some form of feedback like spray or tape to check contact
- Change in club head speed? - least common
- Changes in ball flight? - height of the shot as well as the curve
- Change in weather/conditions/equipment?
Tags: Driver, Member Question
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In this concept video, we're going to discuss losing distance.
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So it's very frequent in this adventure of learning golf that you're going to have great
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weeks and then bad weeks.
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Or great rounds followed by bad rounds.
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Well one of the more frustrating things for a lot of my students is when you have a great
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day and you're driving them all 293 hundred yards and then you go out there the next day
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and you're topping out at 260.
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Now I get a fair amount of emails as far as what do you think I'm doing?
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And I always respond with let's start with the objective data and you tell me what you think
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might be happening so we can come over the plan.
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So there's a few little objective things that you want to try to zero in on.
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One is going to be contact.
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So the first time you start to have issues as far as losing distance that you've already
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gained, the first thing I want you to do is either spray the face or take impact
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tape or you can even just take a strip of electrical tape and place it across the face
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and monitor where you're making contact with it.
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If you're making contact with it in a place that's a little bit further away from the
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sweet spot than what you're used to, you can lose significant amount of distance with
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the driver hitting as much as a half inch off sweet spot which really half inch, you know,
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kind of the size of the width of your thumb isn't going to be a whole lot.
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So if you're hitting a half inch off of the sweet spot that could cost you 20 yards or so.
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So that could potentially or sorry, 20 percent of your distance.
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So if you're used to hitting them all about 300 yards and we take away 20 percent,
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that would be about 240.
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So perhaps you're doing in your swing that is affecting your contact.
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But the next piece I would look at would be clubhead speed.
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So obviously it's very hard to monitor clubhead speed unless you have a launch monitor,
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but if you do have a launch monitor, you can always just pop it up quickly, take a few
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swings or even just a radar monitor, quickly take a few swings and see if you've lost
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it.
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I'll tell you that that seems to be the least common.
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Usually I'm going to look at contacts first, then I'm going to look at clubhead speed
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that when rarely is it.
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The third thing we'll look at will be ball flight and specifically we're going to look at the height
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of the shot as well as the curve.
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So if my long drives are kind of having this nice little plateauing kind of climbing high
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and then plateauing and then landing and today I'm hitting a ball that's kind of spinning
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a little bit high off to the right, that's going to help me understand what I might be
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doing differently with my face or my path that's causing me to have basically a decrease
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spin loft and I'm not transferring as much energy to the golf ball.
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Now the last little I'm going to call it kind of 3B or 4 is going to be what are the
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conditions that you're playing in.
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Now frequently I've had players especially since I've been teaching here in Colorado where
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we have dramatic changes in temperature.
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You could have a day where you're hitting ball great and then the next day is about 20 degrees
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cooler and now I've got a jacket on, I've decreased the range of motion, I've probably
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slowed down my clubhead speed a little bit, I've affected my spin loft and because of having
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to swing around all this clothing and that's caused me to lose this.
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So I try to communicate that every day you kind of have to gauge a little bit unless
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you've got all these variables under control.
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So use the logical kind of post shot routine to be able to really zero in on why you
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may be losing distance and that will help you develop a plan to adjust your pattern to
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get either the path or the face to the path back on track so that you can get contact.
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And if it's because of the temperature near the fact that you're wearing more clothes,
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you're just going to have to deal with the fact that today what I would normally hit my
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eight iron, I'm now going to grab a seven iron.
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But that's kind of the big picture of how you play golf and how you adjust for how your
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game is going to change a little bit.
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But by tracking it, we'll figure out these patterns and you'll know what you should adjust.