In recent years the quest for distance has been the most common theme in lowering scores and getting handicaps down. The easiest way to improve is to hit the ball further. The big headlines on Tour mainly centre around Bryson DeChambeau and the dramatic change in his body shape and driving distance and, with that, he now has two Majors.
In the women's game there is less talk about the quest for extra yardage but there is also less data to measure the gains that are being made and the shorter clubs that players have in. But, if you were to look at Charley Hull for example, she works relentlessly on her game and physical shape and she has seen notable gains off the tee. In 2016 she averaged 261 yards off the tee, this year she was 14th in driving distance, averaging 272 yards.
In the amateur game Arccos owns the largest on-course dataset in the world across players of all skill levels. They have leveraged the data over one billion shots and over 180 million driver shots from par 4s and 5s and their findings from 2023 have now been released.
The headline figures centre around the average driving distances and the story here is that there aren't the sweeping gains that we seem to be seeing in the professional game.
Male And Female Driving Distance - Last 5 Years
In the women's bracket the average distance was actually down on every year other than 2019. In 2018 it actually registered the second highest at 179.2 yards.
If we were to drill a bit deeper into the figures Arccos neatly breaks down the figures into different age ranges (20s, 30s, 40s and 50s) and seven handicap brackets, covering five shots at a time and then 30+.
Here we are interested in the 40s bracket and this shows that those with a handicap of 0.0-4.9 average an impressive 231 yards off the tee. From there we see fairly uniform drops in distance as the handicaps go up.
Average Driving Distance - Men And Women In Their 40s
If we were to compare the same age bracket of players in their 40s we can see how the amateur men and women stack up. Here it is noticeable that as the women’s handicaps go up there is a more drastic drop in yardage.
Jo Taylor is a PGA Professional at Walton Heath and is one of Golf Monthly's Top 50 coaches. She works with women golfers of all ages and abilities and she explains how women in their 40s, and indeed all of us, can gain some extra yards.
Better Technique
Women in their 40s are still pretty strong and pretty active so they can still generate a lot of speed. Distance becomes generally more difficult to maintain when you are in your 60s, with men and women. Obviously it's not just physical strength, it is technique too. So, if a player is able to move quite well, you can gain some speed quite quickly and quite easily. With better mechanics you could easily add 10-15 yards if you can learn to deliver the club more efficiently.
This is based on a better understanding where you generate power in your swing from. I think a lot of people tend to just use their upper body and think that if they're putting more effort in, then it's going to come from the upper body. So it's trying to get people to create a better coil.
Weight transfer is something that a lot of people don't do very well because they're always very conscious of swaying and they stay very static. It's about getting people to create a better pivot and a better turn. You can do some fun stuff in trying to create more speed. I coach players to practise swinging the club like a baseball bat. It's a bit of a generalisation but a lot of golfers have played tennis and it's getting them to think how they would move in other sports.
Go For A Fitting
Loft, and getting more of it in the driver, can be a big help but the weight of the shaft is also a big factor. If someone's got a driver that's just simply too heavy for them, they're not going to be able to swing it as fast. So it's looking at things like their spin rates.
If you've got someone who's playing a women's driver and it's really whippy and really lofted, you'll tend to find that you'll get a lot of spin and it will just kind of balloon up. So it's also about actually getting someone into the right set-up which isn't necessarily a women's driver as such.
If someone is looking to gain some speed then you wouldn't really want to see them in a driver with more than 12˚ of loft because I think that's when it does start to balloon up and you get too much spin and that costs you distance. So, if someone's generating a good amount of speed, I'd say 10.5-12˚ is about right.
Not enough golfers still aren't getting fitted and proportionately fewer women get fitted compared to men.
What To Aim For
If a player can get their clubhead speed to around 75-80 mph then that's not going to be far off. A distance to target for someone who is pretty active and strong, is around 220 yards. But there's certainly no reason why a lot of women can't get the ball out to about 200 yards.
