3balls Golf
TaylorMade and their performance lab.
As modern golfers have continued to seek ways to gain more yards off the tee, hit more fairways, and sink more putts, club fitting has become an increasingly popular step in purchasing clubs. While each club fitter is different, this process generally involves ensuring that your clubs feature the correct length, loft and lie, given your height, stance and swing style. More advanced club fitting procedures include customizing grip width, swing weight, shaft weight and face angle. Professional golfers have left no stone unturned in their search for the most optimal features for their respective games, and now amateurs are capitalizing on this customization revolution as well.
Benefits of Custom Fitting
Having your clubs custom fit certainly offers a range of benefits, particularly for the more advanced golfer. Subtle changes in the clubs’ features have significant impacts on the ball flight, distance and accuracy. When Tiger Woods fist signed with Nike, he reported even having his golf balls custom fit to reach a particular audible pitch when struck. The legendary Ben Hogan was notorious for the level of precision he dedicated to custom fitting his clubs, both as a player and designer. As golf contains such a substantial psychological component, the ability to manipulate features of your equipment can also improve your confidence.
Considerations
Although custom fitting offers several benefits, some myths and issues exist about this process that are worth noting. First, many golfers assume that the club head is the most important element of the club, and changes to the head will have the most profound effect on performance. This actually is not the case. Changes in the shaft have the most significant impact on a shot, as the length and weight of the shaft are more involved in generating club head speed and impacting the launch angle than the head itself. It’s also good to know that changes to shafts are much simpler than those of the club head, and you can easily have the shaft adjusted or changed at any point in time.
Another myth about club fitting is that clubs you purchase “off the rack” or online don’t already fit. Factory models generally are designed to fit the average golfer of medium build and height. Such models are likely suitable for most golfers between 5’10” and 6’0″. If that’s you, you probably will find that no significant adjustments need to be made to the club head.
One final consideration is that modern clubs are highly adjustable, rendering custom fitting somewhat obsolete. Major brands, such as Titleist, TaylorMade and Callaway, all feature club head designs in which the loft, face angle and weight can be adjusted to suit your game or shot preferences. Future brands are likely to feature even greater levels of adjustability, such as lie and shaft length.
