Why hanging back kills power

Gary Alliss asks why hanging back kills power and provides tips on how to prevent it and how optimising your attack angle can help you gain lost yards.

Why hanging back kills power

If you aren’t producing the optimum flight off the tee then you won’t be getting all of the potential power out of your swing.

Getting the ideal flight with driver stems from the angle that the club approaches the ball through impact, which can be either too shallow or too steep.

Quite often players will hang back on their left side in an attempt to launch the ball in the air. This is often coupled with a flicky hand action at impact to help lift the ball.

This results in hitting too much on the up and the ball tends to make contact with the driver off bottom of the face and never reaches its optimum trajectory.

What you are looking for with your driver is that the club approaches the ball almost on a zero angle, parallel to the ground or one degree on the rise at the most.

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This will results in a strike out of the middle of the face, with an optimal launch and spin rate.

To encourage this, and to give you more confidence that you don’t need to hang back, you should tee the ball up with more than half the ball above the face of the driver.

Teeing the ball low can encourage an unwanted descending blow which results in a low launching, high spinning shot. Teeing the ball higher will promote an upward attack angle, and a result high launch, low spinning shot.

Guard against this!

Don’t overcompensate by hitting down on the ball. This will cause the opposite problem of hitting the ball off the top of the face. Focus on approaching at a level angle through the impact.

Shot on location at the Montgomerie Maxx Royal, Turkey by Tom Miles