08/20/2015

Hitting Up on Your Driver:  Does it help or hurt overall distance?

Unless you have professional caliber swing speed, chances are good that you should be hitting up on your driver.  Technique requires more than just having a positive angle of attack, and in this edition of On the Lesson Tee, Todd Kolb is back to get us swinging in the right direction, and it all starts with the proper setup.

I’m PGA Professional Todd Kolb with another segment of On the Lesson Tee, and today I’m going to talk to you about hitting up on your driver, which is going to definitely increase your distance.  Now we all know from advancements in technology that when we hit up on the driver and we have a high launch with low spin, the ball travels and carries further, and gives us more roll.  But the question is, as a golfer, how do I do that without getting overly complicated?

Well one of the things that I like to tell all of my amateur golfers to do is to focus on the hand path, or the path of the hands; or sometimes we might call it the path of the handle.  See, because when we focus on the hands, the hands are what actually control the golf club.  So we use a simple phrase of swing and arc up to the right when you’re hitting your shots.

So what we do in this drill is we literally—we don’t even use a golf club—we just take our hands, which start down by the right knee, and just arc the hands up and to the right.  And the key phrase there is “up and to the right.”  Because when the hands track up, and when the hands track to the right, the club is going to track up and to the right; and then therefore, you’re going to be able to hit up on your driver.

So if we want to maximize distance, you’ve got to be hitting up on your driver.  The focus on the path of the hands will help you do just that.