Low stingers are perhaps the nastiest shot in golf. A shot so cool that people gave it its own name, and even that nickname was awesome.
The stinger; it’s a shot that pros usually use off the tee that rips through the air very low and usually pretty straight.
There are three things that golfers absolutely need in order to hit a perfect stinger, along with one shortcut for those that can’t do those three things.
You can watch the full breakdown in Golf Digest’s latest episode of Film Study, right here…
1. You Need to Hit Down on the Ball
If you want to understand how stingers work, you really need to understand spin-loft—a metric first created by TrackMan. Spin-loft is the difference between the loft of the club at impact and the upwards or downwards direction of your swing.
For stingers, you need a really low spin-loft, and you need to hit down on the ball. There are a few ways of doing this, but the easiest way is to just play the ball further back in your stance, like you see Tiger doing.
The reason why this works is because the bottom of every golf swing is shaped like an arc. The more you play the ball up in your stance, the more you hit the ball on the upswing. When you play the ball back, you’re naturally going to hit more down on the ball, which will launch the ball lower and solve half of this spin-loft stinger formula.
2. Shaft Lean Is Critical
When pros hit stingers, they want the ball to start low and then stay low. It’s what makes a good stinger such a weapon in the wind. Putting the ball back and hitting down will help you launch it low, but you need to deloft the club pretty significantly with shaft lean.
This is tricky because the way golfers get clubhead speed is by releasing the club—braking their hands so the clubhead releases aggressively through. But to create more shaft lean and deloft the club, players often talk about feeling like they’re covering the ball with their body, releasing more with their body and hands turning while leaving the clubhead behind.
3. Speed Makes It All Work
In order to hit a really nasty stinger, you need to have speed. It’s what makes these first two elements work because if you didn’t have enough speed, the ball simply wouldn’t get off the ground.
Let’s say you hit one of Rory McIlroy’s driver-style stingers. If you hit this drive with 180 mph ball speed, it would apex at just 50 feet high and carry just shy of 280 yards. But if you hit this exact shot with a standard ball speed of around 150 mph, this drive would peak at just 25 feet and wouldn’t even carry 200 yards.
Tip for you: The Amateur-Friendly Alternative
Because most of us don’t have the ball speed for a true stinger, the stinger-inspired shortcut that lots of coaches suggest for the rest of us is to follow the first two steps of moving the ball back and leaning the shaft forward. But instead of trying to generate lots of speed, coaches will often say to do the opposite—to take more club and swing softer.
You still have the bones of a stinger, but the extra loft will get the ball just high enough into the air, while the lack of overall ball speed will still keep it low. Done right, this shot will have a more arching flight than a traditional stinger, which flies more like a laser. It doesn’t look quite as cool, but it’s more useful for the rest of us.
This article was originally published on golfdigest.com
