The ball flight laws are the key to knowing why your ball shapes in the air and how you can improve it. The ball flight laws are the result of several different factors but we are going to focus on the relationship between two fundamental ones: the club path and club face angle.

Lets start with the club face. The key thing to know with club face is it determines the starting direction of your shot. A square club face will send the ball on the target line, closed will pull it left, and open will push it right. Reserve those if you're a lefty. So clubface = start direction.

Club path's influence is sligtly more complicated. Your path can be one of three options, straight, in-to-out, or out-to-in. Path influences the shape of the ball in air through the difference between path and face angle.

Lets start with that beautiful baby draw we crave as an example. The club face needs tobe open at impact to push the ball to the right to start. Our club path will be in-to-out, but critically, it will be a couple of degrees more than our face angle. Say our face angle was 2 degrees open, our path at 4 degree in-to-out will produce the beautiful draw. You can reverse this for a tight fade as well! Slightly closed club face, out-to-in path, boom, you've got a fade.

Hooks and slices are what happens at the extremes, when our path to face starts to mismatch (open face, out-to-in path = slice) or the angles get extreme even if matching. A duck hook is a closed down face, plus big out-to-in path.

The diagram below demostrates these examples, plus all the other combinations possible.

So how do we get the face and path data? Next visit ask to use 'View', our launch monitor software. View captures video and photo of everything and impact and clearly displays your face and path numbers to easily digest and work on them. Below you can see how it looks. The bottom left square clearly shows your face angle and club path (two left metrics) so you can self diagnose which one is giving you issues.

There are other factors that affect ball flight, such as club head speed, centreness of strike and angle of attack, but these two are the big ones to start thinking about. We'll touch on the others in future blogs. If you have any questions about the ball flight laws feel free to ask us next time you visit!