As golfers, we often want to put backspin on our shorter shots to help us control our distance and get us up and down—particularly when we’ve got the wedge in our hands.

When hitting shots, a small amount of backspin is required to keep the ball in the air. However, too much backspin will hinder our yardage, increase the height of the ball, and reduce the amount of forward roll. And, of course, we don’t want any spin (be it backspin or sidespin) when we’re hitting a driver.

Finding the right balance can be tricky, but knowing how to put backspin on a golf ball is an essential skill that you’ll use time and time again out on the course—so it’s well worth your precious practice time.

If you’re on a launch monitor, an optimal spin rate would be between 2000-3000 RPM for most players. So, how do we go about it? Read on for our tips to get you started.

How to put backspin on a golf ball

1. Use the right equipment

We have to clean our grooves before we do anything else.

Think about all the spin we got when we first bought our wedges compared to now. The grooves were fresh and free of dirt, and the spin was probably unrecognisable compared to now.

We want friction between the clubface and ball, but dirt reduces the friction and, hence, the resulting spin. A newer wedge will spin more than an old one, which is why the pros will often change theirs, but most of us can help ourselves by better looking after what we’ve got.

So, always have a wet towel and a wire brush to hand to get into the grooves after every shot.

2. Use the right ball

There’s a reason premium golf balls are so good for our game. They offer great distance, spin, and feel around the greens.

Titleist and other leading golf brands will fit for a ball, starting with wedges and working backwards. A softer ball will grip more onto the clubface, while harder balls won’t maximise our spin. Most golfers are more interested in getting as much distance off the tee as possible and, therefore, play with a harder ball, but if we play a softer ball instead, we can expect to get more spin around the greens.

Modern-day premium golf balls are designed with multi-layer construction and a soft urethane cover to enhance the grip between the clubface and the ball. They also offer a more moderate level of spin for mid-iron shots and low spin for the driver. The most popular balls on Tour are the Titleist Pro V1 and Pro V1x. The Pro V1 is known to have a slightly lower spin off the tee compared to the Pro V1x but has excellent greenside control. Meanwhile, the Pro V1x provides more spin on mid to long-iron shots for players who want a higher trajectory and stopping power.

Related: How to choose the right golf ball

3. Employ the right technique

Every shot has spin; it’s just the amount of spin that is different. To put backspin on a golf ball, we need the right amount of loft, which means we don’t want the ball back in the stance, as this will de-loft the shot—and we don’t want to add too much loft, as we’ll lose friction on the ball.

The shaft angle needs to be straight to our body, with the butt of the club pointing at our belly button, or with a very slight amount of forward lean. We also need to have the ball in the middle of a narrow stance. We don’t want to take a large divot either—instead, we’re looking for a relatively shallow divot. Apply slightly more weight on your lead side and rotate your body as you would on a full shot.

There’s no real secret to this shot, but the strike is a key factor in generating backspin, so think about rotating around your lead side. 

Speed is also crucial here. If you have a 30-yard pitch, you’re not going to be able to create much backspin, if any at all. However, if you have a 70-yard pitch, there’ll be more speed and, therefore, more spin.

4. The right lie

Lie is another important factor in putting backspin on a golf ball. The tighter the lie, the better it is to create spin. On Tour-level rapid greens, being able to find the fairways is massive, as that’s where the pros are pretty much guaranteed to get the perfect amount of spin on the ball.

That said, however, in the modern game, great golfers can still get plenty of spin from the semi-rough thanks to their strike, equipment, and ball—but, for our purposes, backspin is only likely to come from the ‘short stuff’.

So, factor this in, and when you’re in the rough, expect a less clean strike and more run, as there’ll be more grass between the club and the ball.  

Related: Why does loft and lie matter?

5. Apply the right grip pressure

Short-game specialist Dan Grieve talks about this a lot and is a huge advocate of a lighter grip around the greens.

“If you get tight with the grip, the ball will jump off, and I really think 99% of amateur golfers grip it way too tight. If I’ve taught tens of thousands of golfers, I don’t think I’ve ever told anybody to grip it tighter, ever. So I think grip pressure is huge.” 

6. Use the conditions to your advantage

Of course, an element of luck is involved here, but spin will generally increase when we’re playing the ball into the wind. So, when we have a 90-yard shot into a 20mph wind, for example, we should expect the ball to stop pretty quickly or even spin back with the right execution.

On the other hand, when we’re playing a shot downwind, spin will reduce, so we need to factor in more run.

Similarly, receptive greens will encourage our ball to spin more so keep this in mind, too. If the green surface is similar to that of a links course, we shouldn’t expect to see our ball checking up, either.

All in all, learning how to put the right amount of backspin on a golf ball can take time and a lot of practice, but by thinking more about the factors outlined in this article, you’ll be well on your way to getting started. So, what are you waiting for?

Very few of us put much thought into golf psychology and how we can improve our mental game. We might buy a new driver or a new set of irons every now and then, but a much easier way to knock a few shots off our rounds is to think and talk to ourselves more helpfully.

Mental performance coach Duncan McCarthy works across all the main professional tours. We caught up with him to ask how we can improve our thinking and psychology on the golf course to help lower our scores.

Read on the find out what he had to say.

5 golf psychology tips for success

1. Self-Talk: The quality in between shots

We’re always talking to ourselves—whether it’s about things around us, judging, analysing, looking to the future or the past, and so on. So, when we step on a golf course, self-talk is normally going on inside our heads, either about the last shot, what’s coming up, what we need to do, or what we shouldn’t have done before.

This will always happen—it’s part of being human. But many people have a bad relationship with the voice inside their heads, as it’s normally more hurtful than helpful.

When thinking in the context of golf psychology, the top piece of advice I’d give to any amateur golfer is to go out there and set a goal purely related to self-talk, i.e. today’s goal is to have good self-talk. So, we’re thinking less about the obvious, such as shooting a number, and more about being better towards ourselves internally.

Good self-talk is where we talk ourselves up with compliments, give ourselves a break, and don’t berate ourselves for a bad shot. It’s not false positives, it’s more about being kind to ourselves.

When we get off the course later on, that’s the time to be honest. It’s really important to go out there and pat ourselves on the back and say that was a really good effort, we committed well to that, and we’re proud of the decision we made. Then, when we get on the next tee, we’re going to really commit to our target. These are all helpful statements and ones we should also make to our playing partners.

We don’t often say these kinds of things to ourselves, but I think it’s really important that we do because they have a big impact on our performance. When we get off the course, then it’s time to look more in detail at what was good, what wasn’t so good, and how we can improve next time. 

2. Intention: Be clear with our instruction

We take this for granted, especially nowadays with equipment like rangefinders. Amateurs all have yardage devices, which is great, but they’re always zapping the flag, and without even realising it, they end up playing to the flag. We don’t see the top players going at flags—instead, they’re playing away from it. Many amateurs end up just aiming at the flag rather than picking an intentional target, so we need to be clearer on that. Golfers should identify a target beyond where they’re actually going so it’s easier to commit to it.

The main reason it’s important to have that target in mind is so that we can send our brain clear messages. The brain waits for us to instruct it, but amateur golfers usually don’t instruct it well enough. They instruct it with ‘don’t go left’ or ‘don’t do this’, and our brains get confused. It doesn’t know exactly what we want, so being clearer with our intentions from the start makes everything easier.

Every golfer has a different method when it comes to setting targets. For me, though—if I know I want to hit the ball down the right side of the fairway—great, that’s a clear intention. Now, I need to identify a target beyond that, on that line, where I want to aim.

When standing over the ball and having a last look at the target before playing a shot, it’s much easier to look at a target in the distance rather than one on the ground. I always want my players to have their heads up, and having a target in the distance will help ensure they do.

3. Do golf, not don’t golf

Most amateurs (and even some pros) often use unhelpful self-talk phrases such as ‘don’t go left’, ‘don’t go in the water’, ‘don’t fat it’, or ‘don’t three-putt it’. As we touched upon earlier, these are confusing messages for the brain. The subconscious mind can’t always interpret ‘don’t’ and will only hear the words after it.

So, if we were to tell our brains ‘don’t go left’, all the brain might hear is ‘go left’. With this in mind, remember that we’re the ones who instruct our brains, so let’s instruct it well. If we were caddying for a player, we would say, ‘I want you to hit this here,’ but we never say that to ourselves.

A good golf psychology tip is to eliminate the word ‘don’t’ from your course vocabulary and heighten your use of ‘do’.

I do want to do this. I do want to do that. Let’s instruct ourselves better. 

4. Acceptance: Draw the line

Acceptance is such an important part of golf and golf psychology. Too many of us get upset at hitting poor shots and we then get frustrated. We give ourselves a hard time for hitting a poor shot, but the fact is we’re always going to hit poor shots. Nobody ever plays a round of golf in which every outcome is exactly what they want—and that’s the same at every level of the game.

So, instead of giving ourselves a hard time, let’s focus on the skills required to get better for next time and just accept the poor outcome. Acceptance allows us to move on, and time that we’re not accepting is time when we can’t move on, and we’re dragging bad energy with us.

Acceptance doesn’t mean that we like the shot or that we’re OK with the outcome, but that we are willing to accept it and move on, and that’s massive.

Whether we’re on the fairway or the tee, it’s really important to stand still, take two or three deep breaths, and draw the line. That’s the beauty of golf. There’s always a new challenge ahead, so being able to slow ourselves down in that moment is a great skill to have and develop.

5. The game within a game: Three-hole loops

We all normally view golf as one round of 18 holes, but we don’t always have to see it like that. We can change the lens through which we see it and reduce the timeframe that we’re competing on. Eighteen holes is a lot of time to remain focused on, and there’s so much that can happen during that time. However, if we break things up into smaller, more achievable sections, we can make our time on the course more manageable.

A great way of doing this is to play three-hole loops in our heads. My tour players do it, and if they play the loop in under par, then they’ve ‘won the loop’. Level is a half, and over-par is a loss, so it’s easy to adapt to when we receive strokes on a hole.

The beauty of this is that we get a reset walk after each third hole. Then, we start a new loop, which takes us away from the bigger picture and keeps us closer to the present moment and challenge at hand. We might be thinking of the front nine or the chance of finishing off a good round, and this makes us focus on starting again. If we’re truly bought into this mindset, we’ll step onto the 16^th tee playing to win that final loop of three. 

About Duncan

Duncan McCarthy is a mental performance coach who works with golfers across all tours, including Marcus Armitage, Mel Reid, and Major champion Ashleigh Buhai.

If you put the time in on your long game, you can reap the dividends when you’re out on the course. A fast and powerful golf swing will increase the distance of your tee shots and improve your work on the fairways.

But what can you do to boost your golf swing speed? In this blog, we’ll look at how to increase golf swing speed through exercise, practice and technique.

How to increase golf swing speed

Increase your flexibility

You know the feeling. You step out onto the course and feel good and loose. Your swing feels easy, but it’s fast and powerful too.

Being loose and in the zone might feel like a state of mind, but your flexibility has a huge part to play in this as well. And you can work on your flexibility before and in between your golf sessions. Stretching exercises that target your shoulders, hips and back are key to get warmed up properly and increase your flexibility before you play. Check out some of these golf warm up exercises to do before your next round.

You should also try and build yoga or Pilates into your regular workouts and exercise routines too. If you’re new to yoga and don’t fancy a class, Yoga with Adriene on YouTube is a great place to start. She even has videos dedicated to yoga for golfers.

Boost your strength

A lot of swing speed is down to technique and putting the hours in on the driving range and course, but the gym helps too. Strength training like squats, the Superman, the leg swing, and the hip crossover will help increase your strength in your back, neck, shoulders, core and hip muscles.

More strength = more speed and more power.

Lucky for you, this helpful blog also details how you can do each of these exercises and how to incorporate them into your routine.

Work on your technique

It makes sense that your swing technique plays a pivotal role in the speed of your swing. This is where you can put the hours in on the driving range or course. But it also a good idea to spend some time with the pro at your local club to check on your technique.

Stance, alignment and follow-through will all play their part. Get them right and you’ll up your swing speed in no time.

Choose the right golf ball

There’s no point just grabbing any ball and hoping for the best. Choosing the right ball can have an impact on your swing speed. For example, distance golf balls will fly off the tee and quickly increase your swing speed. Just remember, they might not be the best on the green, so you’ll likely need a little compromise.

Test them out on the driving range and putting green to see which balls bring the right balance to your long and short games.

Get the right clubs

You want clubs that work for you and your individual golf game. Anything too long or too heavy will reduce your speed and power. But you want a little bit of weight, too, for that increased power and speed in your swing.

Again, it can be a delicate balancing act. If you’re willing to invest in your golf game (and let’s face it, who isn’t?) custom-fitted clubs will likely be the way to go. You’ll get your swing analysed, with clubs custom-fitted to match your swing, style and game. Winner.

Improve your grip

Again, this is something a quick session with a golf pro or coach can help you fix.

With the right grip, you can significantly boost both the speed and power of your golf swing. If you hold it too tightly, you’re potentially restricting yourself, but too loose and you can’t get enough purchase. A firm, but relaxed grip is the sweet spot.

Get this right and it’s one of the main building blocks of a faster swing.  

Create a smooth rhythm and tempo

If your rhythm and tempo are a little erratic, it likely won’t create sufficient shaft load at the top of your swing. This in turn leaves you with little to release on the downswing. By creating a consistent rhythm and tempo, you’ll get a smoother transition from the top down. This should enhance the speed and power of your swing.

Often counting from the time you set up to the time you finish your swing can help create consistency with your swing, too. Build this into your practice on the driving range and it will soon become second nature on the course.

Get your diet in order

Yes, we all deserve a splurge in the clubhouse after a strong round but you really need to consider your diet to increase that all-important swing speed. If you’re training in the gym, doing yoga and working hard on the driving range, you need to fuel your body with the right things too. That way, you’ll reap the benefits of your hard work.  

Always keep hydrated before you play and out on the course. Soluble electrolytes are always good to have in your water bottle during 18 holes. When it comes to nutrition, aim for a balanced diet rich in lean proteins, complex carbohydrates and healthy fats. This will help increase muscle strength and aid recovery.

Now you know what to do to improve your swing speed, it’s time to put our helpful tips into practice.