In my role as a Master Fitter with True Spec Golf, I am ostensibly dialing in golf equipment to individual characteristics. As you can imagine, fitting sessions often turn into much more than that.
It’s not uncommon for customers to walk through my door struggling with poor contact. Invariably, my customers are golfers who either have taken the game seriously for a long time or intend to begin taking the game seriously, investing resources in their equipment and swing instruction.
One thing the era of launch monitors has taught us is that clubhead speed equals ball height and ball spin. But for 90 percent of my fittings, we’re looking to create height and spin because of a lack of speed. These 60-minute sessions are a mission to find peak height and steeper land angles.
Perhaps my favorite fitting is the iron fitting with a customer who’s hanging back to get the ball in the air. Not because it makes my job easier to illustrate a gain, but because of the lightbulb that goes off when they realize that expertly fit irons can make swinging the golf club correctly easier.
The most common archetype I am referring to is the customer who is playing an iron set that doesn’t help them get the ball high enough to achieve adequate stopping power when the golf club is delivered in a manner that compresses the golf ball.
One of the joys of my job is giving this customer a properly fitting iron and watching them drop their angle of attack from hitting up at the ball to 2 degrees down or lower. The strike point then goes from all over the map to right in the center every time. The distance we all crave undoubtedly follows from striking the golf ball correctly.
Whether a customer is in an iron set with too little loft, not enough offset, or playing a shaft that doesn’t properly load due to their transition speed, erratic contact is often the result. If you can imagine a golf club moving upward prior to impact, attempting to strike an object resting on the ground is a recipe for disaster.
This is one of the many conundrums of our game: you have to hit down for the thing to go up! But, in order to have the confidence to hit down, something or some things in your equipment better be producing some height and spin. What’s more, an iron set that consistently delivers higher peak height and spin will dramatically reduce your shot dispersion both east/west and north/south due to the ball landing softer.
Too often, I see iron sets that are too long in length, too strong in loft, and too heavy and/or stiff in shaft flex. The aforementioned club specs are geared to achieve greater distance. But at what cost to your mechanics?
