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

You hear teachers talk about it all the time on Instagram and maybe you’ve even come across it during a club fitting.

But what exactly is spin loft, and why should you care about it?

On 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 games.

In short, spin loft is a player’s dynamic loft (the loft that is actually presented to the ball during impact) minus their angle of attack. Shih gives the example of a player with 21 degrees of dynamic loft and a minus-5 degree angle of attack having a spin loft of 26 degrees.

The higher the number, the more spin is imparted on the golf ball. In other words, the steeper your swing and the more dynamic loft you present, the higher the spin loft will be and thus creating more spin.

The inverse is also true. With a shallower angle of attack and less dynamic loft, less spin is going to be imparted with a lower spin loft.

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Shih says that maintaining consistent spin loft is a 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 stat like launch angle. Launch angle is simply the angle at which the ball leaves the clubhead.

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

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

For an average golfer who values control, keeping your spin loft in check is what can give you it.

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“You want to be able to have those numbers in a window that which you can control,” Shih said, referring to dynamic loft and attack angle. “And to my point earlier, spin is your friend. And that’s something that is 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’re hitting four up on it with driver or you’re hitting two down on it with driver, if you can, as long as you can control that and the amount of loft that you presented impact, it’s going to lead to just more consistent distances really.”

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

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