Why You Need This:

This video explains the mechanics of a golf ball’s flight path based on the clubface angle and swing path at impact. It highlights how a closed clubface relative to the swing path causes the ball to draw or hook, while an open face results in a fade or slice. Using examples and graphical data, the video demonstrates how the degree of openness or closedness of the clubface affects the ball’s trajectory. Clay emphasizes the importance of clubface position at impact as the primary determinant of ball flight, with additional details to be covered in subsequent weeks.

What's Covered: Learn to read ball flight by understanding how clubface angle relative to swing path determines draw, fade, hook, or slice.

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Video Transcription:

Hey, it's great to have you here today. Now, one thing that I mentioned in this course is whenever your club face is closed or to the left of the direction, I'm swinging at impact. The ball's gonna draw or hook depending on how much is closed. Whenever my club face is to the right or open at impact for right-handed player of the direction I'm swinging, it's gonna fade or slice.

And here's what I mean by that. Let's imagine I, I make a swing with a driver and this stick on the ground represents what direction the head was moving as I hit the golf ball. That would be my path, or what's called path on launch monitors. So it's just where is my head moving as I hit the golf ball.

Let's say that this white line represents my path right when I hit the golf ball. Well, when I hit the golf ball, if my club face is close to that, if it's a little closed or pointing kind of this way, the ball's gonna draw. If it's a lot closed to my path, it's gonna hook. Same thing with a fade. If it's a little open, it's gonna fade.

If it's a lot open, it's gonna slice. One question I get all the time is people will say, well, when I slice it, I tend to drag it too far to the inside. Then I slice it. That may be true. Drag it to the inside could make you slice it more, but only if it makes the face more open when you hit the golf ball, the only thing that determines the ball flight itself, and this is, this is something I got wrong forever.

I was always worried about my swing and what was happening in the swing, and I kind of thought that that would control everything. And then I realized, well, all we're really doing here is trying to control what's happening right when I hit the golf ball. If the face is open to the direction I'm swinging, or to the right of it, it fades.

If it's closed, it draws. It doesn't matter which direction I'm swinging. I could be swinging way out to the right. If my club face is pointing the same direction, I'm swinging, it goes dead straight. If it's to the right of it, it fades. If it's to the left of it, it draws. Let me go over to the computer. I have some cool graphics where I can actually show you this.

I do wanna mention this one small caveat. This is from the science standpoint. This isn't perfect. The face is gonna determine about 80% of what makes it curved. Now, when we get to week two and week three, we'll go into that last 20%. But for now, the way I want you to read Ball Flight is just realize every time it draws, my face was closed at impact.

Relative to the direction I'm swinging. Every time it fades, my face was open to the direction I'm swinging. Let's jump over to the computer. I'm gonna show you on real swings what this looks like. Alright, so let's take a look at this first swing. Now I know this ball hooked quite a bit. Started pretty straight, and then it curved a good, you know, 40, 50 yards probably to the left.

Um, so I know that since this ball turned over from right to left. My club face had to be closed or pointed to the left of the direction I was swinging. So now the cool thing is when I have my flight scope, I can go into what's called D plane and we can actually see this. We can see it from different angles, shows a lot of cool stuff.

If I can even go like a full 3D of what the club was doing when it was moving through there for all these shots. But basically, I'm gonna take this D plane and just look at it from this angle and this white line, this thin white line would be. My target line or where my target is going in the distance.

Now I can see this yellow line was where my face was pointing at impact. Now the cool thing here is it doesn't matter what I did in my swing. It doesn't matter if I drug it back to the inside or I took it outside. Doesn't matter if I rolled the face open in the back swing, or I was across the line or laid off, or any of that stuff that happens in the swing.

The only thing that determines a hundred percent of the ball flight is gonna be what the club did right when it hit the golf ball. Now this yellow line is, is telling me where my face was pointing, and this orange line is telling me the direction I was swinging. So we can see in the top right here, I was swinging 8.1 degrees to the right.

So I was swinging well to the right here on this orange line, and my face was only one degree to the right. So my face was essentially pointed seven degrees to the left. Or if we look at this picture again, my, my yellow line or my face angle was seven degrees to the left of where my orange line was. So since my face was closed to the path, I know this ball's gonna draw every single time.

Let's go back and talk about one of the biggest misread shots in golf, in my opinion. Let's go to this kind of pull hook shot. So this ball started left. But then it curved another 30, 40 yards more to the left. Now I know my face had to be closed relative to the direction I was swinging, so I know that I swung somewhere either straight or out to the right.

A lot of people will misread this and say, oh, I pull hooked it, meaning I swung left and my face was closed too. But there's no way to get this ball to curve that much if my face wasn't to the left of the direction I was swinging. If my ball started to the left, I know my path had to be somewhere over here.

So let's go back to the D plane again and look at it and we'll see the same thing here. I actually swung to the right on this one. So this orange line was two degrees to the right. My face angle was 3.2 degrees to the left. That's of the target line. So my face was 5.2 degrees to the left of the direction I was swinging.

And you can see it when I go back over this left screen again, my face angle was pointing well left of where the direction I was swinging. And the cool thing about this, we'll get into this later, but if you draw a plane between these two angles, so if I look from this one, the difference in these two angles, if I draw a plane of glass in there, my ball is gonna spin perpendicular to that plane of glass.

It's getting really technical. We don't need to be at that technical now, but there's just pure physics that are working here. Um, anytime my face is pointing to the left of my path, that ball is gonna draw unless we get into strike location, which we'll get in week three and we really start to fine tune this.

So that's all my draw side, and I can go from swing to swing here. Doesn't matter which one I take. If I take this shot that started way out to the right and drew back again, I know my face is closed to my path. And when I go and look at the 3D. Yes. Now everything was going to the right, but look how much further left my face was that yellow line relative to the direction my path was going.

So I even though that wall started way out to the right, since it drew back, I know my face was closed relative to the direction I was swinging. We can see it here and then we see in the actual data, I was swinging way to the right, 20.5 degrees to the right of my target line. My face was also to the right of my target line, nine degrees.

But my face was closed about 11 degrees relative to the direction I was swinging. So it doesn't matter if you swing left, right straight, if your face is closed to the path, you're gonna, you're gonna draw it. If your face is open to the path, the direction you're swinging, you're gonna fade it. Same thing here.

This is the, again, a shot to where it started, fairly straight, really sliced off to the right. I know my face to get this much slice had to be really open to my path. So I know I definitely swung somewhere to the left with my face open and if we go into the D plane, we can see the same thing. So my face was way to the right of the direction I was swinging.

Doesn't matter if I'm swinging left, right, or straight again. I could take these other shots where I was swinging over here again, I had to be swinging way to the left 'cause my face had to be open to the path for that ball to curve that way. And we see it here. My yellow line of the direction my face was pointing was pointing, or excuse me, way to the right, uh, way to the right of the direction that I was swinging.

And that's what created that curve. And again, we can kind of see that D plane. We'll get into this later in the course. We don't have to realize or know this now. For now, the only takeaway that I want to have is that anytime my face is open to the direction I'm swinging, it fades or slices. Anytime it's closed, it draws or hooks.

Now, the only big key takeaway that I need to have on top of that is that the more the ball curves, the bigger those two angles had to get away from each other. So for example, if I have a ball that starts dead straight and slices like 90 yards to the right, I know my path had to be way left of the direction my face is pointing.

Or in other words, my face had to be way open to the direction that my path was moving. So the bigger that ball curves, the more separated those two angles are getting. Now in this course, what we're working on, as we get to levels two, three, and four, we're gonna work on not only straightening out your path, so you're swinging straight.

We're gonna work on straightening out your face so that it's matching your path. And at the end of this, we're gonna be working on getting everything to be really nice and tight and straight. Again, don't worry about all the details here, just take the key points. We'll build on it in week two, week three, week four.

The best players in the world hit the ball really, really straight. If you watch on tour, when they hit a good shot, and you'll see tracers, if you Google Scotty Scheffler range session, he's there with his coach and it shows the tracers for a bunch of shots. He's hitting the range notices. He is hitting those shots.

When he plays his fade, you know, his quote unquote fade. They pretend like on TV that he has these big monster slices. When you actually see the tracers for those, they, when he hits a good shot. They go almost dead straight and fade like a yard. He actually hit some draws on there about as much as it's fades.

They're just so straight. They may fall left. They may fall right. There's just not much curvature on it. The key with this is that in this course, just recognize anytime I fade it, my face was open to the direction I was swinging. Anytime I draw it, it was close the direction I'm swinging, and then we'll get into the details later on in the course.

So best of luck. Let's go ahead and keep on rolling with the course. I'll see you soon.