Flip through the latest issue of Gulf Weekly.
Think about this for a minute: What would another 42 yards on your tee shot do for you, besides get you excited to play more golf? Maybe make some of those long par 4s reachable in two, or even the par 5s.
You might be able to hit a short iron into more greens? We love those new hybrids, too, but who wants to pull them out on every hole? The fact is, distance makes golf a more enjoyable game.
It's commonly said that power comes from 'hitting from the inside' - this is not a new theory.
Horace Hutchinson, whose book Hints on Golf basically invented the art form of written golf instruction, suggested it in the 1880s.
The great British champion J H Taylor discussed it about a 100 years ago in his own volume on instruction. And J Douglas Edgar, winner of the French and Canadian Opens before the introduction of the steel shaft, actually created a training aid in 1920 to groove what he called 'the movement', saying 'it has the exhilarating effect of champagne, without the aftereffects'.
It's what we call today 'hitting it from the inside', otherwise known as swinging the club on a path that approaches the ball from the golfer's side of the target line as opposed to outside. And though it's a common refrain from instructors and a somewhat obvious swing theory (everybody knows that swinging from out to in is a sure way to hit a weak slice), for the first time testing using the latest launch monitor technology has documented the real value of the inside move.
Just how important is it? In the bluntest of terms, it's 42 yards more important. Champagne effect, indeed.
Utilising a robot simulation of the golf swing from industry testing leader Golf Laboratories Inc., testers were able to mimic downswing paths at six angles, as well as a straight-on, or neutral, approach.
At a swing speed of 95 miles per hour (slightly faster than average), the results showed that an inside path of three, six and even nine degrees, as well as the neutral swing path, combined to produce drives averaging 244 yards.
But when those paths veered outside the target line, bad things started to happen. The average on as little as a three-degree out-to-in path was 233 yards, or a loss of 11 yards versus the neutral-inside paths. At six degrees the loss of yardage was a whopping 30 yards. At nine degrees, average drives were going just 202 yards, for a loss of 42 yards, as in the numerals '4' and '2'.
What was going on? Looking at the numbers on the ball-flight radar system, it's fairly simple physics. Shots hit from the inside were mirroring the distance maxim of high launch/low spin. (Generally speaking, the higher you launch the ball with a lower amount of spin per degree of launch angle, the farther your drives will go.)
In the test, the out-to-in swings were doing just the opposite: launching low with a lot more spin per degree of launch angle. The neutral and inside paths produced launches more than twice as high (13.6 degrees versus 6.2) with spin rates less than half those of the out-to-in swings (203 revolutions per minute versus 452 rpm per degree of launch).
Those severely out-to-in paths might seem outrageous, but sadly, they're not.
Fredrik Tuxen, the inventor of theTrackMan launch monitor, has studied swing path at the tour level.
His research shows that a great influence on distance is the trajectory the clubhead takes into the ball.
Specifically, players who hit down on the ball are not maximising distance.
According to Tuxen, two players can have the same swing speed, but the player who attacks the ball on the upswing can produce as many as 28 more yards than a player with a downward strike.
To see the real benefits of the inside path, you need to make a swing change, and that is where your local professional can help you.
Biomechanically, great players look so good because they're so efficient at using their bodies. How often do you hear, 'They swing so slow and hit it so far - how do they do it?' The reason is, everything is moving in harmony.
