Michael Breed and the New Ball Flight Laws

Many golfers that read the blog already understand this, but I quite often get questions as to why I think D-Plane and the 'new ball flight laws' are important. Here, Michael Breed gets it correct (although I would've just said that initial ball flight is about 85% face and 15% path)



IMO, understanding this is SOOOOO important. It takes out a lot of mystery and thus confusion and frustration out of your game. One of the things I used to struggle with is the old ball flight laws had me drawing erroneous conclusions. And because I thought I had such a problem with the PATH, I would then constantly work on my address alignments when really I needed to work on the clubface first.

Now, it's not that address alignments are unimportant, but you can still hit very good shots and have your address alignments off.

For example, if I hit a pull hook, my assumption would be that I made an outside to in path with a closed clubface. The 'new ball flight laws' tell us that my path MAY have been dead square or even inside-to-out, but my clubface was closed and that was the culprit of the hook.

Because I now understand the CORRECT laws of ball flight, I am on the right track to figuring out the issue.

This has mad golf a lot more enjoyable for me because it's no longer a mystery.

Today I was on the range with a friend who is a 12 handicap whose typical miss is a low, pull hook. He decided to switch from an overlapping grip to an interlocking grip and said he couldn't understand why, but it made a big difference. I then explained to him that for whatever reason, the clubface was no longer getting closed at impact.

Who knows if the interlocking grip will make the difference for him, but now that he understands that his path is pretty good, but his closed clubface causes him problems, the game has become simplified for him and I think he'll start enjoying it more.





3JACK