Although I believe that the reading of golf magazine articles and videos of pro’s is helpful to most amateur golfers. I
think the idea of the slightly descending blow with the driver was just for tiger and other top pro’s to squeeze the maximum out of their swings, and not for all golfers to follow literally. For most average golfers trying this would be difficult to get right and maybe detrimental to their games in the long run.

Clampett is exactly right, what every one of you is not taking in to account with this whole issue is that each and every player who’s swing you are looking at is striking the ball with a decending blow relative to the line of there shoulders, we all keep the spine angled away from our targets when we swing the cluband when we release into impact we are all decending into impact thus compressing the ball and bottoming out somewhere in front of the ball location, even with a driver. The problem with impact video is that you only see the clubhead and not what the body is doing with the clubhead. Too many people take hit up on the ball literally and too many instructors make too much money from people who ruin golf swings trying to hit up on the ball to actually tell anyone the truth about how an ascending blow actually works. The truth is that the golf swing is a decending blow in relation to the body and the driver swing can be an ascending blow in relation to the ground because of spine tilt angle not because the golfer is hitting up on the ball.

As we kind of discussed in the above comments, I think there’s an issue of semantics here. The problem happens as soon as someone mentions hitting the ball with an ascending blow or “hitting up”. It gives people the idea that there’s some kind of special move to produce that kind of swing, when there’s certainly not anything of the sort. We’re simply talking about the position of impact compared with the low point of the swing.

I don’t know if you saw this, but Golf Magazine did some research a while back that showed that a positive angle of attack produces optimal distance. You can read more here: http://www.lifeintherough.com/2009/01/18/hitting-up-with-the-driver-yet-again/

It’s all about optimal launch conditions and there are so many cases where measurements show that a positive angle of attack (i.e. an “ascending blow”) creates optimal launch conditions.

The main problem is that when you tell people to hit up on the ball, they start hanging back on their right sides or tilting their shoulders way right and other things to help that happen. In reality, we’re talking about setup changes.

The idea of hitting down is better imagery to put you in a good impact position and is conducive to a proper golf swing. To me, that’s all about making a good swing. The idea of a positive angle of attack is more about setup. You’re still going to use something similar to the swing that Clive and Manzella and Clampett advocate.

But if you look at the videos I linked in the post above and read the research that I linked in this comment, there’s a mountain of evidence that says that a positive angle of attack is crucial for maximizing distance, and in the case of the videos, we see that in practice the angle of attack is fairly neutral in practice (though Golf Magazine says that Tiger’s angle of attack is -3 degrees, so it may not be detectable in the video or it could be something that has just varied over the years).

Again, that doesn’t necessarily mean doing something special with your swing unless it just happens to be very steep to begin with. It’s mostly a setup thing.

I think we’re all on much more common ground than we might think and I really do think we’re debating semantics and misunderstandings about what both camps are really advocating. Unbelievably, I haven’t finished Clampett’s book yet, so I hope to get through it at some point so I can better understand where he’s coming from.

But I think the opposite problem can happen when a player is told to hit down with the driver, without understanding what that really means. If he fixates on that, it’s easy to see where he could get very steep, hitting a weak slice, a smother, or even a skyball off the top of the face.

Clearly, since the club head moves downward for the first half of the downswing, a player is technically hitting down. There’s really no other way to swing a club, unless it looks something like a baseball player swinging at a high pitch. The main point I’ve been trying to make is simply that the ball is struck while the club is on it’s way back up (with a driver) because of its position relative to the bottom of the swing arc.

I’m pretty sure we’re all on just about the same page.