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Gaining strokes on a 5 handicap- Part 1: Driving

onthehunt526

Entry posted by onthehunt526

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Remember my plan to get better at golf, that I wrote a few weeks back. Well I'm going to dissect it down to what I need to do in order to get my handicap down under 5...

For wanting to be an sub 5 handicap, My driving well stinks. Probably 240, if I was lucky, and not-so-straight, It was absolute shit in comparison, but when I drove it well I was driving 280-290 with no problems. But it was Tiger inconsistent.

You won't believe what led me to what happened with my new driver. But this is a blog, so I'll tell the story. I shot a 76, October and the only 6 I made was on a par-5 after a seemingly fine tee shot. But I was outside of 250, didn't have the lumber in the bag to go for it, so I laid up (bad Shane). I got home that night, and I pulled out my old Wilson 1200 GE Maple Laminate Drive that plays 43.5" long. (mind you actual "woods" can be difficult to hit, however after about ten shots that all went similar distances (not long maybe 220-230) I realized something. I don't need a 45.5" driver to hit it long. I probably should to my fitter and figure this out.

I started a thread linked above. Which I actually did this experiment today. We actually did a version of this when I was settling on my length in my new EX10 driver. We actually started at 45.5" which is where I was at. Then we worked down to 45".... Which was a little better. Then I went too short... he actually has a couple shafts that make the driver play 42 and 43" respectively... and the strikes were there, but the distance was too short. (I joked if Tour Edge had a 15° or 16° driver head, I might use that for a 6 or 7 club set) So we went from there to 43.5" which was actually really good... but the launch was a little high. So we stuck made the Driver 44", The launch was around 15°, spin around 2500 (which is a hell of a lot lower than I had), and I was flying it 260... Consistently... So we tried 44.5" and the inconsistency creeped in. I'm 6'5" I have average length, limbs, a long torso... And I have a Driver an inch shorter than most of the guys at my course... wait till they play with me... they are in trouble.

But as Dave and Erik say in LSW... 250 yards is plenty to be a scratch golfer (if you're playing from the proper tees, which I think I am, my course is 6,385 yards). I don't think I can get to scratch just by becoming an excellent driver of the golf ball, that is both long and reasonably straight. And I'm longer than 250 consistently... I'm probably going to be pushing a legit 270-280 yards once the season gets in full swing. If I can keep my shot zone in a nice 30 yard wide oval. I'll start gaining strokes. All I want to know from @iacas is trying to make your misses smaller, okay, if your only giving up say 5-10 yards of potential distance to do it?

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