Todays blog post is brought to you by Maderas teaching professional John Darling.

There is a simple formula any golfer can follow to achieve more distance: Distance = Club Head Speed + Square Impact

Most golfers are influenced by certain myths in playing golf. One such myth would be to slow down their swing. Thinking like that is exactly why golfers can not hit the ball as far as they want. Let’s do some reasoning with club head speed. Take any club you want with everything being the same. Same impact on the face, same loft at impact, the following is going to be true. Swing the club slower and the ball will not go longer, it will go shorter.

There is only one way to increase the distance you hit your metal woods or irons. You must use a combination of increased club head speed and how solid you hit the ball on the center of percussion, a.k.a. “sweet spot”.

If each golfer focused on learning to hit the ball solid and in the “sweet spot” they would be amazed at how much distance would be picked up. Now, most golfers are influenced by certain myths in playing golf.

Ben Hogan shared in a letter to a friend, “The average golfer’s problem is not so much a lack of ability as it is a lack of knowing what he should do.”

What is the problem? The problem is simple, poor impact. Golfers practice the wrong thing and get good at doing it wrong. The contact with the golf ball and golf club face at moment of impact is not consistent.

Why is this important? Impact controls trajectory, distance, and direction of each shot. These three things are affected each time the club face and ball collide. A golfer’s only feedback is the flight of the ball. Every fifth or sixth shot most golfers make good contact by accident. As a result, the golfer does not know what they have done differently to make the good contact happen.

Golf Digest recently published an article on the top 75 toughest Golf Courses in the country. The article opened with the question, “What is it about the difficult course that holds so much appeal for many golfers? Is it simply, to borrow George Mallory’s overused line about Everest, “because it’s there”? Or is there something [...]