How Important Is Distance For Your Golf Game?

Happy Monday,

This week we have a powerful visual for you to think about how to work on your driving performance. We also have the usual tip of the week, skills game and short video.

Enjoy.

Driving Performance Chart

Great visuals give you a clear message in seconds.

Below we have three graphics showing i) average score, ii) fairways hit and iii) driving distance by handicap level.

As you can see, handicap and score to par have a near-perfect correlation (no surprise there), but then as we move to the middle image we see that fairways hit % barely changes from a 25 handicap to a 0 handicap. Now look at the righthand image and see what happens to driving distance as we move from a 25 handicap to a 0 handicap.

These are averages taken across thousands of golfers, but the graphics show you the importance of driving distance for lowering your handicap.

We’re going to create a video on improving your driving distance, use the poll below to leave your questions so we can make the video as helpful as possible.

What does this mean for your golf game?

Driving distance is important. If you can’t reach par 3s and 4s in regulation you will always feel like golf is an uphill battle and will often get stuck at certain handicaps.

When we move from 15 handicappers down to 10 handicaps we see a 25-yard jump in driving distance. We see another 30-yard jump when we move from 5 handicappers to scratch golfers.

Interestingly, there are plateaus between 20 to 15 and 10 to 5 handicaps. Consider where you are currently and if you need to work on driving distance in your golf game (leave your questions in the poll above so we can create a great video for you).

Does accuracy matter?

Accuracy is still important. Even though the fairways in regulation data stay pretty consistent, golfers’ relative accuracy increases as their handicap progresses. The degree of error needed to hit the fairway reduces as you hit the ball further.

How can I increase my driving distance?

99.8% of golfers can improve their diving distance, and there are many options to do so. However, the number one variable in predicting and improving driving distance is your club head speed (CHS) at impact.

Every 1mph increase in CHS equals 2.5 yards extra in driving distance. A 10mph increase in CHS equates to 25 extra yards – a profound change for a golfer of any level.

What about a loss in accuracy?

There is a trade-off when you first start working on increasing driving distance. We’ll dive into this topic in our upcoming video, however, some rough maths suggests that the gain you’ll see from hitting the ball 12 yards further on average over 18 holes would be wiped out if you lost one more golf ball a round…

More to come on that calculation, but I hope this mini article has given you some insight and food for thought when it comes to lowering your handicap.

Will @ Golf Insider

Break X Golf Practice Session

Break X Golf is a sister project to Golf Insider and was co-founded by Will Shaw. You can check it out here.

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