What is spin loft and how can it help your golf game? | Fully equipped

You hear teachers talking about it all the time on Instagram and you may have even encountered it during a club fitting.

But what exactly is spinloft, and why should you worry about it?

On a recent episode of GOLF’s Fully Equipment, Trackman’s Harrison Shih explained the metric and why Trackman created it to help golfers better understand their game.

Basically, spin loft is a player’s dynamic loft (the loft actually presented to the ball at impact) minus their angle of attack. Shih gives the example of a player with a dynamic loft of 21 degrees and an angle of attack of minus 5 degrees with a spin loft of 26 degrees.

The higher the number, the more spin is imparted to the golf ball. In other words, the steeper your swing and the more dynamic the loft, the higher the spin loft will be and therefore create more spin.

The reverse is also true. With a smaller angle of attack and a less dynamic loft, less spin will be imparted with a lower spin loft.

Shih says maintaining a consistent spin loft is the key to distance control.

GOLF’s Fully Equipped co-host Jake Morrow pointed out that this can often be a much more valuable metric for understanding how a golf ball flies through the air than a traditional statistic like launch angle. The launch angle is simply the angle at which the ball leaves the club head.

“The spin loft will be the club delivery into the golf ball,” Shih said. “So the angle of attack as it works down into the golf ball on the arc or works back up.”

He pointed out that long drive professionals hit the golf ball extremely high with almost no dynamic loft, which creates reverse spin loft, which is why their golf balls launch so high with little spin.

For an intermediate golfer who values ​​control, controlling your spin loft is what can get you this.

“You want to be able to have those numbers in a window that you can control,” Shih said, referring to the dynamic loft and angle of attack. “And what I said before: spin is your friend. And that’s something that’s going to help you find more fairways, make your distance control a little bit better.

“So if you can control the delivery of the club into the golf ball, whether you hit four with the driver or two with the driver, if you can do that, as long as you can control that and the amount of loft you impact, it will lead to more consistent distance.”

For more from Shih and Fully Equipped co-hosts Johnny Wunder and Jake Morrow, listen to the full episode of GOLF’s Fully Equipped hereor watch it below.