25th Dec 2008
A Golf Simulator is Perfect For Curing Your Slice
When you first take up the game of golf you will probably find that hitting the ball straight is much harder than it looks. After all, you are swinging a stick with a fairly small knob on the end and trying to hit a little golf ball in a controlled and precise way.
What are the odds of doing that with any amount of accuracy? Not very good. At least not without a lot of practice.
The biggest enemy of the beginning golfer is the dreaded slice. Almost anyone who swings reasonably hard will have a tendency to “slice” the ball until they learn how to avoid it. This is such a common problem that the slice is just second nature for most of us.
Curving shots are caused by making the ball spin a certain way. When you put side spin on the ball - either clockwise or counter clockwise - this will make the ball curve either to the right or left. For a right handed golfer putting clockwise spin on the ball will make it “slice” to the right. For a left handed golfer putting counter clockwise spin on the ball will make it slice to the left.
To cure the tendency to put side spin on the ball it helps to know what causes it. The slice usually happens because the club head is not striking the ball squarely and in a straight line. These are actually two different things - the path of the club head, and the angle of the club face when it strikes the ball.
It helps to visualize what happens when the club head strikes the ball. Imagine the club head traveling on a path straight along your intended line of flight. Now imagine that the face of the club is angled slightly to the right (for a right handed golfer) when it strikes the ball. While the ball may fly more or less straight off the club face, it will be spinning in a clockwise direction and the result will be a curving slice to the right.
Or imagine that you swing the club head “across” the ball at an slight angle to the intended line of flight. You start out to the right of the line and you pull the club across towards the left. Even if you strike the ball with a square face (perpendicular to the intended line of flight) the action of “coming across” the ball will result in clockwise side spin.
Fixing these kinds of swing faults is not easy. Even experienced golfers often have a difficult time visualizing their swing. They think they are doing one thing when they are actually doing something quite different.
This is why having an instructor or a knowledgeable friend watch as you swing can be helpful. Video taping your swing can also help you see what is really going on. It is not unusual for someone who sees their swing for the first time on video to say “Wow, what an ugly swing. No wonder I’m not very good at this game.”
But watching a video of your swing will not help much if you don’t know what you are looking for. And unless the video is of fairly high quality and taken from the correct angle, it will be difficult to see things like the path of the club head or the angle of the club face at impact.
Without knowing these things it will be difficult to know what to work on. That is why a golf simulator can be such a valuable tool for correcting common swing problems - especially the tendency to slice the ball.
A golf simulator is both a type of video game and a golf swing analyzer. You strike a real ball with real clubs, just as you would on a real golf course. But in this case you strike the ball off a special mat and into a net or, in some cases, a special projection screen.
Used as a swing analyzer the golf simulator will show you things that it is almost impossible to know any other way. A series of sensors in the mat pick up things such as club head speed, swing path angle and club face angle at the point of impact.
These are three of the most important factors that determine how far and in what direction the ball will fly when it is struck by the club. After analyzing your swing the system translates these factors into a projection of what your shot would actually look like on a real course.
But even more important, the simulator gives you real time feed back on your swing path and the angle of your club face at the point of impact. As we’ve seen, these are the two most common causes of a slice.
If you are serious about curing your slice, there is little doubt that analyzing your swing is the best place to start. And there is no more effective way to get an accurate and helpful swing analysis than with a golf simulator.
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