Knucklebombs, Explained

Knucklebombs, Explained

This chart might honestly be the most important chart in all of golf. That’s because this chart from Ping represents perfection. It puts into cold, hard numbers the kind of drives that we all dream of hitting. The kind of drives that Rory hits and Bryson hits and Ludvig hits. The drives that launch high into the air and fly flat, then land and roll. That’s the middle of the middle. at that head and downtown. I call them knuckle bombs. It’s probably the most important shot in golf today. And if you can hit one consistently, whether you’re an amateur or a pro, you’ll get respect. Annihilated one here on Friday. Starts it on the same line. Look for this to carry over 300 and the rest. 338. That’s crazy. Now, in our last film study video, I asked you guys a simple question. If you’re interested in this kind of shot and you want me to do a future video on them, let me know in the comments below, and the answer was a resounding yes. So, this is that video. We’re going to get into the physics of knuckle bombs. We’re going to dive into some golf swing stuff as always, and we’re going to talk to some experts. Beautiful T- shot. It looked like he hit it high on the face. And most of the time that that’s going to be the the knuckle bombs. My goal here is to explain what knuckle bombs are, how pros hit them, what makes them so effective, and even how you can hit one yourself. Let’s dive in. Now, back in the day, professional golf was a simpler game. A game of fairways and greens and control and shot shaping. He loves it. And there you see why. But a lot has changed since then. Professional golf has gotten longer and faster. It’s become a lot less about hitting fairways and greens and more about hitting bombs, specifically knuckle bombs. Now, if you want to understand why the ball flies through the air the way it does, in simplest terms, it’s a balance of two things. It’s a combination of how high the ball takes off, which if you’re not familiar, is measured by the angle the ball launches into the air at the moment of impact, and how much backspin the golf ball has, which again is measured immediately at the moment of impact. Launch and spin, they’re the core ingredients of every golf shot. Get the right combination of each and you’ll unlock power and distance you didn’t know you had. That’s how we get knuckle bombs. Without getting into the specifics, there are four basic combinations of launch and spin that result in four different types of ball flights with your driver. A few years ago, I actually crunched the numbers on these and I gave a name to each one. First, there’s the tumbler. A shot that launches low with less spin. So, it flies low and then runs. Walkin Neman is a perfect example of a tumbler on tour and so is Daniel Burgerer who actually talked about it right here. I think what’s helped in my game is I have two different kind of shots. I have the what I call the bullet which is like a really kind of low shot that’s a fairway finder and um I hit that 80% of the time and just I don’t really send it that often which is completely different than like if you watch Rory Maroy he it looks like from what I see he looks like he hits it as hard as he can on every hole. He gains strokes by distance. I think I’d do it more off of accuracy. So, it’s just a different way to play. I mean, if I had 190 ball speed, I’d be doing that, but I don’t. Then, there’s the riser, which are shots that kind of launch low and then have more spin, so they kind of balloon into the air. This can give guys a lot of control with their drives and especially with their irons. Cory Connors and Aaron Ry hit a lot of risers and 2006 era Tiger did, too. It’s one of the reasons why he was so elite at controlling his long irons. Then there are floaters, which are drives that launch high into the air and have slightly more spin. Think of these like hitting a fly ball in baseball. They just kind of hang in the air. Interestingly, Scotty Sheffller’s stock drive fits into this category in each of his last two seasons, even though he is really good at hitting the ball low on command. And then there are knuckle bombs which are drives that launch high into the air but without much spin. So they have a kind of arching boring flight to them. You can see the concept in other sports too. A free kick from Cristiano Ronaldo is a perfect example. Unlike David Beckham who would use the side of his foot to kind of spin the ball into the air, Cristiano would push the ball into the air using more of the bottom of his foot. This technique gave the ball less spin, which means he could kick it really hard without fear of it ballooning away. The stereotypical great drivers of the ball, think of Rory or Ludvig or Bryson or now Aldrich Port, all consistently fall into this knucklebomb category. So the obvious question now is how do you do it? And the answer to that is that you have to hit up on the ball. But there is a right and wrong way to do it. There’s a trap that a lot of us can fall into if we’re not careful. So, as we’ve talked about before, the club head travels on an arc at the bottom of your golf swing. The club head comes down, bottoms out, then rises up again. Where you hit the ball on this arc is called an angle of attack. Now, on iron shots and on spinny chips, you want to hit the ball on the descending part of this arc. You want a negative angle of attack because when you do this and then add in a higher lofted club, it generates lots of backspin. So tumblers and risers, they’re generally good at hitting a little more down on the ball than guys on the other end of the spectrum. They both use spin to get the ball into the air. Knuckle bombers are hitting the ball more on the upswing. They don’t rely as much on spin to get the ball into the air because they’re lofting it higher into the air initially. I remember playing with Rory. This is a great story. I played with him in Dubai the final event of the year and I’ve smoked one down the second and I think I think he’s got hold of it and we’re level like side by side and I was like damn like I’m I’m getting quite long with this. This is this is good. And then I get to the third hole and I’ve hit a 3-wood off the tea because there’s a bunker in the middle of the fairway at like 330 to carry and I’ve hit three-wood short of it and I’ve hit it well and then he’s just teed it up higher and hit this thing and it’s flown it by like 10 easy over this bunker and he’s flicking a lob wedge in and I was like I don’t have that in the locker, right? I don’t have that. whatever he’s done when I thought we were hitting two good ones side by side on a par five where I thought he might step on one as well and that’s what I thought was genius from probably the best driver of the golf ball possibly in history that he could change you know his dynamics and change his launch and and get an extra 10 15 yards out of something and yeah that’s that’s what makes him so good hitting up on the ball like this is kind of like an archer firing an arrow. The archer isn’t putting backspin on the arrow. He’s just trying to figure out how high to point his bow. Now, the different methods do have different pros and cons. For a lot of golfers, using more spin can give you more control, and less spin can mean less control, but you get more distance out of it. It’s why if you look at all the range data from all the players at the 2025 RDER Cup, there are players with lower ball speeds but who hit the ball further. And you could see that same thing play out in competition. Here’s an even more specific example. Let’s say there are two golfers who each have an average ball speed of 180 mph. Let’s say golfer A hits 2° down on the ball, which is pretty common, and creates a little more spin. The furthest that golfer could possibly hit the ball is 290 yd of carry. Golfer B is a knuckle bomber. He hits 2° up on the ball and puts 10% less backspin on the golf ball because of it. The furthest he could possibly hit the ball is 298 yd. That is 8 extra yards. And someone like Rory Maroy hits more like four to 5° up on the golf ball. The furthest he could carry the golf ball is 301 yards. That’s 11 yards further than the first guy, which if you do the strokes gained math, is about 0.25 strokes gained per drive. That means the knuckle ball gains a full stroke over the other guy for every four drives they hit, even though they have the exact same ball speed. All because of the physics of launch and spin. Okay, so you’re sold on knuckle bombs being awesome. The next question now is how do I actually hit one? Fundamentally, and in theory, it’s pretty simple. You’ve got to hit up on the ball with your driver. You have to tee the ball up high, at least half the ball above the top of the driver because that’s what gives the club head room to rise into the ball. It’s as simple as this, and I say it all the time. Just try it out on a driving range. Just test it. put that tee half an inch higher and you’re going to look at that and go, “There’s no way I’m going to top the ball. There’s no way.” And all of a sudden, you’re going to hit shots and go, “Wow, that was amazing.” Especially for 70 80% of golfers who come over the top and hit down on the ball. Raising that ball up on the face can get you an extra 15 yards if you’re hitting it on the lower third of the club face. And the beauty of this hack, you don’t have to do anything. You don’t have to have any swing tips or anything. just raise it vertically on the on the face. It’s also why you can’t hit up on the ball with an iron because the ground is in the way. Hitting up on the ball also means the low point of your golf swing needs to happen before the club head hits the ball. That’s why it’s so important to play the ball forward in your stance. That way, the club goes down, then rises again as it hits the ball. Add in a driver that’s properly fit for you, and voila, you have knuckle bombs. Now, a slight wrinkle here is that it’s essential in the golf swing to shift your weight forward towards the target. If you don’t, you’re just leaking a huge amount of power. A lot of amateurs fall into the trap of hitting up on the ball, which is good, but not shifting their weight forward while they do it, which is bad. Their weight stays pretty even across both feet at impact. So, they start throwing and flipping the club instead of using the power of their entire body. In other words, they’re cheating this really important move. They’re getting half of it right, but in exchange for the other half. You may be able to get away with this with your driver falling back onto your right foot, but it can make hitting iron shots really difficult. And if you struggle with duck hooks and drop kicks, this is probably why. This is actually something I struggle with in my own golf swing. I don’t get to my left side early enough. And you can see that I’m hanging back a little on my right side. So, I end up flipping my hands instead of using the full force of my body. Yes, I can hit up on the ball with my driver, but this flipping can cause headaches in my iron game. Pros avoid this trap with a very specific move. As they approach the top of their back swing, they begin falling into their left leg. Notice how much Rory’s left leg bends right here. He’s really pressing his whole weight into the ground. That’s what helps him shift his weight towards the target. Then, as he pushes back off the ground with his left leg later in his swing, that tilts his upper body back away from the target. Now, he’s got the best of both worlds. He has the momentum of his body shifting his weight forward, but he’s using the ground to reorientate his body so he can still hit up on the ball. Instead of hanging back and flipping, he’s pushing and then pulling. Here’s Titus staff member Joe Pleer explaining a drill you can do to feel this move. You’re just practicing the forces and the timing. So, as you get the weight of the club below your hands and you hold the grip again, make a full swing, fall, back away and up, and you’ll feel speed. Do this a few times to get the timing of it and then run through a full swing. And throughout all of this, if you’re wondering, why do I need any backspin? The higher the launch, the lower the backspin, the better, right? I’m so glad you asked, but that’s actually not true. You see, there’s a sweet spot. That’s what that chart from Ping earlier was showing. The optimal combination of launch and spin for maximum distance. A ball without spin wouldn’t stay in the air. For pros, spin in many ways is control. When you start living on the fine line of swinging more and more up, chasing higher and higher launch with less and less spin, your knuckle bombs become uncontrollable. That was the issue Bryson was struggling with with his whole driver sucks controversy a few years ago. Now, the driver sucks. It’s uh not a good face for me and we’re still trying to figure out how to make it uh good on the mish hits. He was hitting so up on the ball with so little spin that even the slightest mishit on the toe would inch his spin down to uncontrollable levels. Like an engine that runs too hot then explodes. His knuckle bombs were turning from power draws into dive bomb hooks. Again, as we said up front, it’s a balance. finding the launch and spin combination that you can repeat. If you can get into that higher launch, lower spin optimal zone by teeing it up high, hitting up on the ball the right way and adding in a properly fit driver, you’ll have your knuckle bombs. Whether you’re doing it 180 mph or 150 mph ball speed, it doesn’t really matter. The basics are the same. You’ll be squeezing maximum distance out of your swing by hitting the kind of drives that every type of golfer dreams of. I hope you enjoyed this episode of Film Study. If you have ideas for future episodes or other swing stuff you want us to dive deep into, let us know in the comments below. Thank you for watching. I hope it helps and we’ll see you back here on the Golf Digest YouTube channel soon.

Have you ever watched a Tour pro launch a drive that looks like it just hangs in the air, carrying well over 300 yards? Ever wondered how they hit those shots? This is the video for you. Luke Kerr-Dineen breaks down the “Knucklebomb”, how the best players in the world hit them and how you, too, can hit them.