Can Changing Your Driver Settings Make You Hit Farther?

🏌️‍♂️ Modern drivers offer adjustability features like movable weights and loft changes to customize ball flight.

⚖️ Moving weights in the driver head alters the center of gravity, affecting spin and ball trajectory.

🔄 Adjusting the loft of a driver changes the face angle, influencing the direction of the ball.

🎯 Placing weights towards the heel of the driver makes it more draw-biased, while towards the toe makes it fade-biased.

📐 Lie angle adjustments in drivers have a minor influence compared to other factors like weight and loft.

🛠️ Professional fitting is recommended to optimize driver settings for individual swing characteristics.

📊 Testing different driver settings can reveal significant differences in ball flight and spin.

🏌️‍♀️ Lexi's driver setup with a draw plus setting and 10.5° loft produced optimal launch angles and backspin.

‍

00:00:00 - All right, I am here with Lexi. Today we are going to talk about adjustability on a driver. So, there's a lot of cool things with modern technology, with modern drivers that you can do uh to move some weights around, potentially even change the loft. You can adjust the line angle. So, we'll kind of talk about just some different things that maybe you can experiment with your clubs with at home if you need to potentially change the ball flight or change some numbers. So, let's dive in.

00:00:28 - So, I use the Ping G430 and I actually have the draw to draw plus uh model and I have the weight and the drop plus setting because I do have a fade or I do play a slice. Yeah. Um so, yeah, that's what we we'll be working with. Cool. So there's So, when we're talking about movable weights in a driver head something that's really important for everybody to understand is what happens when you move the weight around is you essentially are moving the center of gravity location in a club head. And so

00:00:53 - what that does is then it's going to influence potentially a couple of variables. It might influence the amount of spin that you're creating on a shot. Uh so if you were to move the weight in a head, the heavier weights closer to the face, that would help reduce backspin. So that's one way you can do uh adjustability wise there. If you move the heavier weights towards the back or away from the face, it can potentially help to raise the backspin. So depending

00:01:15 - on what your problem is, you could move the weights forward and backwards. You can also move the weights more towards the heel or more towards the toe in a driver. So when you do that, it's going to influence the amount of axis tilt or the amount of curvature that you see in a golf shot. So what you were describing when you said I have it in the draw plus setting, that's going to have the weight as far into the heel as you possibly can get it. And what that essentially does

00:01:37 - is it effectively makes the toe of the driver bigger. So when you hit a shot on the toe of the driver, something called gear effect happens. And what gear effect does is it actually curves the ball back to for you in this case back to the left for a right-handed player. So moving the weight more towards the heel makes your driver more draw biased. Moving the weight more towards the toe makes your driver more fade biased. So depending on what type of ball flight

00:01:59 - you are trying to basically counteract uh that's that's one way that you can do it to just move the weights around driver. So that's that's the first option. Um there's also the adjustability pieces with the loft. So with a lot of drivers, you can change the loft, you can add loft, you can take loft away. Uh something to keep in mind when you do that, for every degree of loft you either add or subtract, it changes the face angle. So when you add loft to a driver, when you make a driver

00:02:23 - go from 105 to 115, uh it changes the face angle by 2°. And what it does is it actually closes the face. Okay? So when you add loft, it closes the face. It's like a 2:1 relationship. Every degree you add, the face closes by two. Every degree you take away, the face opens by two. So, it's just something again to keep in mind if you're adjusting the lofts on your driver and you have a particular ball flight that you're trying to fight, just be aware that those loft adjustments can change the

00:02:48 - face angle and could potentially make the ball go further to the right or to the left. Okay. Yeah, cuz I have noticed I play a 10 and a half um degrees of loft. But if I go any lower, then I do have a harder time keeping it straight. It usually starts to to slice. Yep. That's why when you lower the loft, the face effectively opens. That's why you're seeing that type of shot. Okay. So, just something to keep in mind there. And then the last one, we're talking about lie angle with a driver.

00:03:09 - So when you have uh clubs that have a very minimal amount of loft, in this case like a driver, 10°, 9, 12, whatever it is, uh the lie angle doesn't have a major influence, but it is still something that you can use to fine-tune. So there's typically settings on your driver that will maybe potentially say upright or flat. So this is what a lot of fitters will do to help kind of influence the ball flight one way or the other. If you have somebody who's hitting a shot like yourself who tends

00:03:34 - to curve it too far to the right, you can put the driver in the upright setting to potentially help with that. Exact opposite happens if you have somebody who tends to fight a hook. You can put it in the flat setting to potentially help with that as well. So just know that it doesn't play as major of a role as it would in like an iron fitting. Okay. Um, but there is still a a reason to potentially pay attention to it. It's just there's other factors that going to have a much bigger influence on

00:03:54 - your ball flight versus the line angle with a driver. Okay, cool. So, should we hit a few in each position? I think what we should do is we should test some stuff out. So, I'll I'll put the driver in a couple different spots. We'll put it on the screen, show people what we've got, and then we can take a look at the data and show the difference. All right. So, Lexi's got her driver. It's just set up in her standard position, the way that she always plays it. So, it's in

00:04:13 - the 10 1/2° loft setting. She has the weight all the way in the heel. So that's the draw plus option. Let's hit a couple shots. Let's see what the data shows. [Music]

00:04:46 - Yeah. [Music] All right. So, Lexi, you hit a couple shots with your driver in the current setup. I can see why you have it set up that way. Those were two really good shots. So, you had an average launch angle right around 16 degrees, which is which is really good. Your backspin was in that 2,200 range. We're typically looking in the 2,000 to 2500 for a driver fitting. Um, so that one, that number is really good. Uh, you hit a lot of shots with just a teeny tiny bit of

00:05:16 - draw. Um, so that's basically what I would expect to see with that driver set. Um, so what I'd like to do now is let's move the let's change the loft. So we'll just kind of change one thing at a time. So we'll do kind of what you described of maybe going a little lower loft. Um, and let's see what that does to the sid spin number as well as the launch angle. Yeah, I'm super curious to see that. Cool. All right, Lexi. So we took the loft on that driver from a 105

00:05:43 - down to essentially a 95. So we changed the loft by a degree. Um, so effectively what happened is that opened the face angle by two degrees. So, let's hit a couple shots. Let's see what changes with the numbers. Sounds good.

00:05:59 - Oh, big slice. Yep. So, kind of what I would expect with as the again, as the face angle changes, that ball is probably going to curve more to the right. Um, you still launch that ball plenty high. So, so that's a pretty drastic difference for just one degree difference in loft. Is that like typically what you would see or I just got I mean, it's So that's part of why you go through like why we recommend going through a fitting all the time. Why you would do these types of things

00:06:25 - is to test it out. It really depends on the individual because you're not a robot. You don't make the exact same swing. Your path isn't the exact same. Your face isn't the exact same. Um, but what we have seen with different robot testing and different studies that have been done is as you start to move the weight around, especially the the movable weights in the head and move the center of gravity, you'll start to see pretty big dispersions when you're doing

00:06:47 - testing on robots where they're hitting the same shot every single time. Um, so there's been tests that have been done where you move the weight from all the way in the heel all the way to the toe and you'll see up to like 20 yards of dispersion from left to right um with everything else basically staying the same. Wow. Okay. [Music] Okay, so shots number three and four those were the two where we changed the loft. So, not much change in the launch angle actually. So, you still had very

00:07:25 - similar numbers there, um, which is fine, but you can see the big difference in the sid spin. So you went from call it an average of around 400 RPMs to the left when you're hitting those nice little draws to now that ball's curving drastically to the right. Yeah, that's a pretty big difference. So it's something just to pay attention to. So if you're somebody out there who tends to fight a hook and you're looking for potentially either a driver or a fairway wood that's

00:07:50 - maybe not the exact stated loft on the head. So you have a 10 five and you want to maybe take it down to a 9 and 1/2 or 9°. might not be the worst idea in the world for you to potentially do that because it's going to help you fight that ball curving too much to the left. Okay. For someone like you, I would say that's probably the exact opposite of what you want to do because that's just going to make the ball curve further to the right. Yeah. Which we saw here.

00:08:11 - 100%. So now what I'd like to do is let's move the weight around in the driver. So you have it on the draw plus setting. I want to just move it to more of just kind of the draw setting. Still going to have that weight more in the heel than what you would typically see on just a standard neutral driver, but we can do the same type of thing. and we'll turn the loft back to 10 and 1/2 and we'll just move the weight back so then we can compare those two versus

00:08:30 - what you use out on the course. Awesome. Sounds good. Okay, Lexi. So, we moved the weight from the extreme heel position to it's still got a little bit of that heel draw bias, but it's not quite as severe. Um, so again, what we should see, this is again why you test stuff, you should see that ball not curve to the left as much as we were seeing earlier. It might still curve to the right a little bit. Uh, we took the loft back to 105, so nothing changed there. Um, but let's see what happens

00:08:56 - with your spin. Okay. Be curious to see by moving that weight around what it changed. Yeah. Okay. Let's do it. [Music]

00:09:36 - Okay, so shots five and six. That was with the weight not so severely in the heel. So again, launch angle was fairly similar. Backspin maybe just jumped up a teeny tiny bit, but it's still really close to 2500, so it's not anything I'd be that worried about. And both of those shots were extremely straight. I think you missed the center line by maybe a combined half of a yard. Um, I would recommend maybe you try that setting in your driver. Yeah, honestly, I think I

00:10:00 - think this is showing me that I should be hitting in the draw position. So it's just something to to keep in mind. There's a lot of different ways that you can you can adjust your driver. Uh, it really depends on what you're trying to accomplish with your particular club. This is why I would recommend to go get fit. Make sure a professional is helping you out with this stuff. Um, but there are some different things that you at home could potentially tinker with if

00:10:20 - you want to change your ball flight one way or the other.

‍