Should you hit up with the driver? Robot testing says it can be worth 28 yards, or nothing at all

If you've been through a driver fitting in the last decade, you've likely been fed a tried-and-true pitch to gain more distance: hit up on the ball. Launching it higher with less spin can help you locate untapped distance potential.

A positive angle of attack (AoA) has been preached from so many hitting bays that it's become the modern-day version of "keep your head down"—handed out freely and questioned by almost no one.

To be fair, it's mostly right. What tends to get left out is that the loft stamped on the head plays an important role as well. Find a way to optimize AoA and loft, and you're likely going to see meaningful gains, even more so if you've never undergone a fitting.

To find out if AoA or driver loft plays a larger role in gaining distance, we had the Golf Laboratories swing robot hit a Titleist GTS2 driver in 8-, 9- and 10-degree heads at two club speeds: 95 mph, a common amateur speed, and 105 mph, a faster player speed.

At each speed, the robot delivered the club two degrees negative (hitting down), neutral and two degrees positive (hitting up), with six shots being recorded in each combination.

While hitting up on the ball is a real distance lever, how hard you can pull it depends on the stated loft.

What a positive attack angle does

With the robot delivering the club head at neutral, all three lofts carried the ball to nearly the same distance at both speeds. That might seem odd until you look at how each one got there. The 8-degree head launched lower and spun less, causing the ball to fly on a flatter line. The 9- and 10-degree heads launched higher but spun more, resulting in more optimal carry numbers. The trade-offs canceled out.

However, if you adjust the AoA in either direction, the distance delta becomes apparent.

Swinging up does two things at once. It adds loft at impact (what fitters call dynamic loft, or the loft the face actually presents to the ball), so the ball launches higher. But because the club is also traveling upward, the angle between the face and the path, which is what creates backspin, changes much less than the launch does. That's the appeal of a positive attack angle: you get launch without paying for it in the spin department.

Hitting down works in reverse. It strips launch from the shot while spin stays roughly where it was, which is how you end up with a lower ball flight that never gets going.

So the real question isn't whether hitting up adds launch, because it always does. It's whether the ball needed more launch in the first place, and that comes down to the loft on the head.

Toggle between speeds in the interactive chart above and watch how differently the three lines respond once impact goes positive or negative.

Taking off and stalling out

With less loft, the 8-degree head needs help getting the ball up. When the robot hit down on it, the ball came out like a stinger and fell out of the air before it could optimize. However, give that same head a positive attack angle and the launch it was missing shows up, with only a small bump in spin. The ball actually left the face slightly slower, not faster. It simply spent more time in the air, and at 105 mph that was worth nearly 28 yards.

The 10-degree head started with the opposite problem. It already had plenty of launch and more spin than the lower lofts, so there was nothing a positive attack angle could fix. The extra launch gave the driver too much of a good thing, impacting distance in the process.

Think of it like a garden hose. Tilt it up and the water goes farther, right until you tilt it past a certain point, and then it only goes higher. At 105 mph, the 10-degree head was past that point. Swinging up sent the ball more than 100 feet in the air, brought it down at a steep angle and left it in essentially the same spot as when the robot hit down on it.

The 9-degree head split the difference, gaining about half of what the 8 did before the added spin started to catch up. That's how the same upward swing produced a 17-yard gap between the 8- and 10-degree heads at 105 mph. To be clear, nothing about the strike changed; the only variable was whether the head needed the launch it was being offered.

Toggle between heads in the flight graphic and the pattern is hard to miss. The 8-degree flights stretch out, while the 10-degree flights mostly stack on top of one another.

A gentler slope

At 95 mph, every loft gained distance from swinging up, just less dramatically. From two degrees negative to two degrees positive, the 8-degree head added 15.5 yards total, the 9-degree 8.6 and the 10-degree 2.4 yards. Swing level or up and the 8-degree head was the longest of the three.

Hitting down is where the loft choice tends to bite golfers. At two degrees negative, the 8-degree head peaked at 33 feet and carried 207.6 yards, 12.5 fewer than the 10-degree head. The lower ball flight shrank the total-distance gap to 3.4 yards, but carry is what gets you over a bunker and is, quite frankly, a more reliable number when determining if a driver is best suited for your game. For a player who hits down, adding loft remains the cheapest carry in the bag, and it can usually be accomplished with the turn of a wrench.

One wrinkle when comparing the two speeds: at 105 mph, the robot delivered one to two degrees less dynamic loft than it did at 95 for the same head and attack angle. The faster setup started lower, which gave the 8-degree head more launch to gain. Some of the extra sensitivity at 105 comes from that starting point, not from speed alone.

So what's the lesson to be learned? Simply saying "hit up on it" doesn't always lead to more distance. Attack angle and loft go hand-in-hand. For the faster player in this test, swinging up on a 10-degree head bought nearly 50 feet of extra peak height and zero extra yards.

At the end of the day, that's a loft problem, and it's the easiest one in golf to fix in a hitting bay.