Training with Impact Tape to Improve Your Ball Striking

To play good golf, you need to hit the ball solidly on a regular basis.  While there is far more to the game than just that point, ball striking should be considered the foundation of your game.

If you can’t strike the ball cleanly throughout most of your round, it won’t matter how many putts you make – you score will still be disappointing.  Raising your overall level of ball striking is the most-effective way to improve your game, but it isn’t easy.  To become the ball striker that you would like to be will require plenty of effort and practice time at the driving range.

One of the best ways to track your progress as a ball striker is to use impact tape.

Example of golf impact tape. Available through Amazon or most golf equipment retailers.

When you place impact tape on the face of your club, you get an immediate visual representation of the contact that you make with the ball each time you hit a shot.  Since the moment of impact is far too fast to observe visually with the naked eye, impact tape is a great way to get a snapshot of the action.

Once you hit a shot, you can look down at the tape to see where on the face the ball made contact with the club.  If there is a mark perfectly on the sweet spot, you will know you struck the shot nicely. I f, however, the mark is somewhere else, you will know that you need to make an adjustment in order to correct the error.

Off the Toe is a Common Problem

Many amateur golfers, when they first start using impact tape, will notice that they consistently strike the ball out toward the toe of the club.  This is a common problem. As a result of the ‘over-the-top’ move that many players make when they transition from backswing to downswing, it is common for the average golfer to swing across the ball from outside-in on the way through impact.  When that happens, contact out near the toe of the club is the most likely result.

Here’s a simple drill you can do using an alignment stick as a swing guide to help eliminate any outside-in tendencies you may have:

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To correct this issue and move impact back towards the sweet spot, you will need to eliminate the over-the-top move from the transition of your swing.  The best way to do that is to create more room in your backswing by keeping the club farther away from your body.

Remember as you swing back to keep your arms mostly extended and keep the handle of the club away from your right side (if you are a right handed player).  When you reach the top of the swing, you will have plenty of room between the club and your body so you will be able to drop the club to the inside nicely.  Once the club has dropped into place, you can swing from the inside-out through impact, making it far more likely that you will find the sweet spot.

Watch for Thin Contact

Missing off the toe or heel of the club is only one of the things to look for when you are using impact tape.  In addition, you should be looking at how high or low on the face you are making contact with the ball.

While it is pretty rare to hit the ball too high off the face (unless you are hitting from a tee) it is certainly possible that you are hitting the ball too low on the club face – meaning that you are hitting thin shots on a regular basis.  If you notice that many of your shots fail to get very high up into the air, or they lack backspin, thin contact is probably to blame.

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The likely cause of thin contact is poor balance.  Ideally, you will keep your weight nicely balanced throughout the backswing before making a move toward the target during the downswing as you turn your body through the shot.  However, many golfers get stuck on their back foot, meaning their weight never gets onto the lead foot in the follow through as it should.  This is commonly referred to as ‘hanging back’ on the shot, and it will almost always lead you to strike the ball low on the face.

Obviously, if you would like to correct this problem you will need to work on moving your weight toward the target in the downswing.  However, you don’t want to slide toward the target – instead, use rotation to gradually pull your weight to the left (again, for a right handed golfer).

Don’t Try too Be Perfect

One of the dangers with using impact tape is that you can become too obsessed with trying to strike the ball perfectly in the middle of the face.  Do you want to strike the ball on the sweet spot as often as possible?  Yes.  Should you worry about it so much that it starts to affect the rest of your game?  Certainly not.

Using impact tape is a good way to help you identify problems in your swing that need to be addressed, but don’t use it all the time.  Hitting too many balls with impact tape on your clubs will only cause you to obsess over your impact position, and that is not going to help you play better golf.

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If you would like to try out impact tape for yourself, you can certainly order some online if you can’t find it at your local golf shop.  You shouldn’t have to spend much money to purchase a roll of tape, so the financial investment in this game improvement product will be rather low.

Even if you only learn one or two things about your swing from using impact tape, it will have been worth your time and money.  Many players have trouble finding a direction for their practice sessions, so this is a great way to identify what it is you need to work on.

Once you see where your misses are landing on the face of the club, you can get down to the business of correcting the swing mistakes that are keeping the ball off of the sweet spot.

Cover Photo by Steven Wilke on Flickr