How to use ground reaction forces in golf
25 February 2025
Leverage ground reaction forces to increase shot length in your golf swing!
You have mastered the golf swing motion, worked on the impact details, maybe even built some extra muscle. What could be the next step for more hitting distance? We suggest a deft usage of body momentum during transition, supported by one of BAL.ON’s advanced metrics. Here’s how.
There are several options if you want to work on your shot length. Some of them you might have come across already in the lessons you have gone through with your coach: improving your ball contact for instance or working on your attack angle.
Outside the coaching hours, you might find speed sticks a useful tool to increase club head speed. Or you resort to the more fundamentally oriented training routes and go to the gym to increase the muscular base of the movements. However effective these ways are, the drawback is that they mean more training time on top of your regular golf training.
A training principle easily integrated
If your schedule for golf practice is limited, it seems a little more promising to integrate the work on shot length into the range training you have to do anyway. Relying on BAL.ON and ground reaction forces, your approach could be to focus on a tiny space between late backswing and the beginning of the downswing.
What you do, in technical BAL.ON terms, is a short separation between center of mass and center of pressure. Before we go deeper into why this increases your clubhead speed, let’s briefly explain the two terms and what they indicate.
Center of Mass vs Center of Pressure
The center of mass (COM) is the point in your body around which your body mass is evenly distributed. In a stance such as the golf setup, this would be a little below your navel. The center of mass simply indicates where your bodyweight is. The center of pressure (COP) is the point (or combination of points) where you apply force into the ground. It indicates where the force created by your bodyweight goes to.
The picture gives an impression of how these points interrelate: in setup, they are on one plane; in a (hypothetical) one legged setup, they differ clearly.
Now, let’s look again at the short phase when your backswing is about to end, and the downswing is about to begin. If you train yourself to create a maximum distance between these two points in this small window, you get a maximum of body momentum into the swing. This will increase clubhead speed, and, all other things being equal, make your shots longer.
Confirmed by leading pros
Our work with professional golf athletes has largely confirmed the effectiveness of this approach. One example is Alex Fitzpatrick, recently signed as brand ambassador for BAL.ON. He explains: “In driving however, my coach Mark Blackburn and myself want to see a good separation between center of pressure moving forward and center of mass staying behind the ball.”
In the following picture, you can see this technique applied. Alex’ COP is already widely on his left foot, whereas is COM is still quite centered. (The picture shows him well into downswing, as Alex has a habit of creating the separation of COP and COM relatively late.)
Alex Fitzpatrick deliberately creating a distance between center of mass and center of pressure in his drive.
Tough to master, but great in results
The body mechanics behind this approach might seem a little abstract, especially if pressure-based training is something new within your regimen. However, you can make it a little easier and approachable: simply focus on the metric “Transition Timing” within the BAL.ON smart app.
In case your rating here is a little below par at first, there is a specific drill available to support you in mastering the timing of transition. Also, your coach will certainly be more than ready to check your shifting now and again. You may also want to have a look on our articles explaining transition and pressure as a training principle.
Do not expect immediate results, as transition is particularly hard to master for most golfers. For those that hang in, however, a special reward is in the waiting: the effortless grace and baffling efficiency of a movement where just about everything falls into place. Plus your ball falling a good fifty yards wider down the fairway.
FAQ – Ground Reaction Forces (GRFs)
Ground Reaction Forces are the forces exerted by the ground on a body in contact with it. These forces are equal in magnitude and opposite in direction to the forces that the body exerts on the ground, according to Newton's third law of motion.
There are four main power sources in a golf swing. BAL.ON was designed to help golfers and instructors optimizing the arguably most important one: vertical thrust. Its amount and timing highly correlate with clubhead speed.
The kinematic sequence. As the result of foot action and leg work, pressure influences the pelvis motion, which in turn influences trunk, shoulders, arms – and ultimately what the club is doing.
Because pressure is invisible. You have to measure it. To get the most clubhead speed out of a golf swing, there is a very distinctive sequence to follow – a motion pattern all best players in the world have in common, despite their unique swings. Key driver and start to this chain is the lower body. Before anything is even visible on video, BAL.ON can measure if a player initiates their kinematic sequence correctly in their pressure pattern.
Definitely not. Yet there is what we call a corridor of the ideal. Especially in timing relations, there is a certain pattern of power and consistency that almost all elite golfers follow. Vertical force should peak around the moment the lead arm is parallel to the ground but not later than the shaft being parallel to the ground. With BAL.ON you can precisely measure this timing to give you an indication on downswing effectiveness and ultimately speed. That's why BAL.ON serves as your foundation of fast.