Five Ways to Improve Your Release – Part 3

Over the past two articles, we’ve reviewed three of the fundamental elements of improving your release: direction, rev rate, and ball speed. For this article, we’ll discuss axis rotation and axis tilt, some of the misconceptions surrounding them, and bring each of these components together to help you better understand your game.

As a quick review, improving both the consistency and versatility in your launch angle requires a combination of swing drills and slide drills that focus on your upper body movement. You also want to consider alignment and the visual challenges of changing your target path.

Improving your rev rate isn’t simply about maximizing your RPMs. What you really want is to balance your rev rate and ball speed so that you can achieve a more powerful and predictable ball motion. Rev-dominant players might need to tone it down a little at the release, while speed-dominant players can work on increasing their rev rate, reducing their ball speed, or some combination of the two.

I view these three elements as the foundational pieces of a good release. Most of the time, if your approach mechanics are good and these three pieces of the release are strong, you can get to a pretty high level of performance. You’ll usually naturally produce reasonable amounts of axis tilt and axis rotation that complement your game. When combined with ball choices, layouts, and surface changes, you should be fine on a fairly wide variety of conditions.

But what if you roll the ball too forward and struggle to create back end motion, despite having an optimal rev rate? What if your axis tilt is a bit too high to capitalize on the strengths of your game? Exceptional cases notwithstanding, too much tilt can negate a lot of good habits in your ...