The Benefits of a Club Fitter

Golfers are always trying to improve their swing.  Taking lessons, practicing, setting goals for each club in your bag, and working hard on improving your golf game and your golf scores is a great path to becoming a better golfer.  In addition to this route to becoming a better golfer, there is another route.  It is called “club fitting,” but it is more than that.

Your size, your physical abilities and limitations, the position in which you have your hands at address, your club head speed, the angle (steep or shallow) of how your club head approaches the ball just before impact, all influence what type of golf clubs and golf club shafts you should have, and to a trained club fitter, suggest certain adjustments that can be made to your golf clubs to improve your results immediately.

Improving your “results” can mean several things –

• improving your distance
• improving your club head speed
• improving the trajectory of the ball flight (higher or lower)
• improving the results you achieve with “mis-hits,”
• reducing the dispersion (yards left or right, or short or long, of your target thereby improving consistency)
• improving your ability to hit the ball crisply on tight fairways
• improving your ability to “compress” the ball
• improving your ability to control the intended curve of the ball (draw/fade)
• improving (higher or lower) the spin rate on your golf shots

These are just some of the ways you can “improve” the results of your golf shots, and you can achieve each one of these “improvements” if your clubs are properly fit in terms of:

• Size of club head
• Amount of “forgiveness” the club allows for mis-hits
• Type (and performance characteristics) of your shafts
• Length of shaft
• Lie of the club
• Loft of the club
• Size of the grip

For many golfers, every club in the bag should be checked for lie and loft since many clubs, unfortunately, come from the factory with the wrong degrees of loft or lie, and cause their owners much misery in bad shots that the owner could never figure out on their own. Buying named brand used clubs is a good way to break into the game of golf, where new golf clubs can be expensive for the beginning golfer or fixed income golfer.  However, when you buy used clubs, or even new clubs, there is no guarantee that the clubs you buy will have the right loft and lie for the irons or the right shaft or grip size on all of your clubs.  While most people don’t think about having their putter checked out, we know of some of the best named golf club companies that ship putters with varying degrees of loft angles (from 1 degree to five degrees) and lie angles.  Every golfer’s putting stroke is different, and just a couple of degrees in loft and lie angles of putters, just like full swing clubs, can make a world of difference in the results you get from your normal putting stroke.

We encourage every golfer to get lessons from a professionally trained golf instructor.  However, most golf instructors are not trained in “golf club fitting” and therefore cannot tell if your clubs are not a very good fit for you.  At the beginning of each golf season, take your swing and your clubs to a trained golf club fitter.  Have your clubs evaluated, and you might be surprised how some minor changes to your existing set of golf clubs, or switching out a “misbehaving” four iron for a “better behaving 21 or 22 or 23 degree hybrid, might improve your golf results from the same golf swing.