You hear teachers talking about it all the time on Instagram, maybe you’ve even encountered it at a club fitting.
But what exactly is rotational inclination? Why should you care about it?
In a recent episode of GOLF’s Fully Equipped, Trackman’s Harrison Shih explained the metric and why Trackman came up with it to help golfers better understand their game.
Simply put, spin loft is the player’s dynamic loft (the actual loft presented to the ball during impact) minus the angle of attack. Shih gave the example of a player with a dynamic loft of 21 degrees, an angle of attack of minus 5 degrees, and a rotational loft of 26 degrees.
The higher the number, the more spin is produced on the golf ball. In other words, the steeper your swing is and the more dynamic your loft is, the higher the spin loft will be, resulting in more spin.
vice versa. A lower rotational inclination will produce less spin due to the smaller angle of attack and smaller dynamic inclination.
Maintaining a consistent spin angle is key to distance control, Shi said.
Jake Morrow, co-host of “Golf’s” Fully Equipped, noted that this is often a more valuable metric for understanding how a golf ball flies through the air than traditional statistics such as launch angle. Launch angle is the angle at which the ball leaves the club head.
“Spinning loft is going to be where the club hits the ball into the golf ball,” Shih said. “So the angle of attack is either down into the arc of the golf ball or back up.”
He noted that long-hitting pros hit their golf balls very high with little dynamic loft, which creates a counter-rotating loft, which is why their golf balls launch so high with very little spin.
For the average golfer who values control, controlling the spin loft gives you control.
;)
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“You want to be able to get those numbers in a window that you can control,” Shi said, referring to dynamic inclination and angle of attack. “To my point earlier, spin is your friend. It’s going to help you find more fairways and give you a little better distance control.
“So if you can control how hard you hit the club, whether you’re hitting the driver up for four or you’re hitting the driver down for two, if you can, if you can control that and the loft of the impact that you’re having, it does lead to more consistent distance.”
For more from Shih and Everything Equipped co-hosts Johnny Wunder and Jake Morrow, listen to the full episode of GOLF’s Everything Equipped here or watch below.
