If you look at the world rankings, you will see a lot of players who hit it very far. It is very obvious that driving distance is a major factor in playing consistently good golf. The only exception in the top 10 is Brian Harman who ranks 151st on the driving distance statistic. Contrast him to Matt Fitzpatrick who increased his driving distance by about 10 yards and finally won a major and jumped into the top 10 of the OWGR.
The interesting thing about Matt Fitzpatrick, is that his fairway percentage went down 5% in 2022, and then another 8% in 2023, yet his greens in regulation went up 2.4% from 2021 to 2022 (and was worse in 23, but still higher than 21). This proves that hitting it closer to the green off of the tee is a huge factor in lowering your scores.
There is a lot of data out there to show that the closer you are to the green equals less expected strokes to hole out. I won’t get into that here, but my point is that driving distance is an easy way to lower your expected strokes to hole out. As a friend of mine said recently, it’s low hanging fruit.
I am going to track my swing speed journey over the next few months and see what works, what doesn’t work, and make any adjustments accordingly. I have played around with different training tools like Speed Sticks and the Stack System, and I may experiment with those at some point. My initial training is just going to be working out and swinging as hard as I can with my driver and track the data using Trackman.
Here is the data for my first session:
My first swing was not necessarily as hard as I could, but I would consider that my on course baseline (cruising speed). If we remember these data are all with range balls (NXT Tour Practice), that’s not too bad a place to start. It took me 10 swings to warm up to the 120s and then I basically stayed in the 120s for the rest of the session. I added an extra row to get the averages for those swings after my 10 ball “warmup.”
The ultimate goal is to increase my ball speed, but obviously club speed will lead to better ball speed. I’m not too worried about the ball speed right now for a couple reasons. The first being that I am using range balls, so these data are obviously going to be a little off. The second being, I’m swinging as hard as I possibly can, so my contact is going to be sporadic. My smash factor has been historically low, however, so that will be something I take a look at as I go.
That’s my first session. I’m pretty pleased with the starting point, so it will be interesting to watch the progress as we go on.
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