Visualizing the Optimum Launch Angle
February 29, 2008 – 5:30 pm | by GolfdirtOriginal published in HumanGolf.com
My neighbor sidled over for a quick chat while I was tending to my lawn the other day, suburbanite that I am. Relatively new to the game but already quite an avid golfer, he told me he was going to the local pro shop to schedule a Ball Launch Monitor Fitting Service session for his driver.
“Guy at the office said it’ll give me an extra 10-20 yards,” he said.
“No doubt about it, optimizing your launch conditions will help,” I said. “What’s your driver’s loft?”
“8 degrees. I figure the lower trajectory will help get it to fly farther and roll more.”
Without thinking, I looked him up and down, sizing him up. On the smaller end of average. “Umm,” I asked, “I’m no expert, but do you know why you want to know your optimum launch angle and shaft flex for your swing speed?”
“Not a clue,” he laughed.
I took out my garden hose and turned it on. “Here, let me show you,” I said as I arced the stream to a spot about 5 yards away. “Can’t show you shaft flex, but launch angle’s easy. Let’s say this is the flight of your ball at your given swing speed and 8 degrees of loft. Now, let’s raise the angle a bit.”
He was silent as we watched the water land a bit further away.
“Now let’s keep raising the angle,” I continued, as we watched the water’s landing area keep going away from us… until it stopped and started going backwards. “There,” I said, “that’s the optimum angle for this swing speed.”
A silent “Wow” was all I heard him say.
“By the same token,” I went on, “we can see the effect of a swing speed change by playing around with that water spigot. Of course, that’ll affect our launch angle to get optimum distance, so on so forth. You get the point.”
Lightbulb. “Ah,” he said with a twinkle in his eye, “but there’s little sense playing around with that water spigot since there’s not much we can do about our swing speeds in a short amount of time…”
“Bingo.”
“…and a lower loft, as we’ve seen, does not necessarily mean more distance! It all depends!”
He got it.
Again, I’m no expert, but I read somewhere that most of us will do much better with higher lofted drivers. I think the optimum launch angle for average swing speeds is somewhere around 15 degrees. That means that for us average blokes, we should be looking at drivers with 11 to 13 degrees of loft or even more.
Don’t take my word for it; just play around with that old garden hose and watch these principles in action. Better yet: Go to your local pro shop and play with their launch monitor.
