The WHY for being professionally fit is simply because it is the ONLY way a golfer is ever going to obtain golf clubs with which he can play to the very best of his given ability. Of course I know you know that. In other various articles and information on our website we do try to say things along these lines to golfers who are not as well versed in professional fitting or in the whys for fitting. We’ll hope the visitors to our site do check these out because we do try to make some of them more evident on our home page.

TOM

The 13 KEY fitting specs that distinguishes the difference between professional clubfitting and anything less than that are:

Length, Loft, Lie, Face Angle, Shaft Weight, Shaft Flex, Shaft Bend Profile, Total Weight, Swingweight or MOI of the Club, Grip Style/Texture, Grip Size, Set Makeup, Clubhead Design.

Within the Clubhead Design we do identify a sub set of key fitting specs which are important to the fitting of the clubhead to the golfer – but we don’t confuse the issue by listing all of these when we talk about the Key 13 fitting specs – we prefer to talk about that simply as the Clubhead Design.

But since you are into the field for sure, the sub set of fitting specs within the Clubhead Design are Center of Gravity position, Moment of Inertia, Sole Design, Face Progression/Offset, Head Size, Face Design.

Thanks,
TOM

Thank you for your comments for sure. Much appreciated. No matter what, when it comes to the 6 iron on down in the set for 99% of all golfers, lower loft hits the ball farther. No golfer wants a set of clubs that hit the ball shorter distances than what he played previously. So that means “shrinking loft disease” is here to stay. Back in the late 90s to early 00s when I saw some OEM sets based on a 25* #5-iron, I thought that shrinking loft disease had to be over. That there was no way the big companies would keep lowering the loft on their irons because they’d gone as far as they could go.

But I was wrong. There are sets out there now which have a 23* #5 iron with all other irons based off that! So the secret to overcoming this is not to go back to higher lofts. All that will do is hit the ball shorter for most of the irons. The secret is creating the perfect SET MAKEUP to go around the shrunken loft irons. Which means either more high loft fairway woods such as down to a #9 or even #11 wood before you go with your first real iron. Or using more hybrids such as down to a hybrid 5 and 6 to replace the 5 and 6 irons, before the irons then begin with the #7. When you are talking low loft, fwy wood heads and hybrid heads are always going to be much easier to get up in the air to fly than an iron of the same low loft because the wood/hybrid heads have a lower AND more rear located center of gravity than the iron of the same loft. And those two CG advantages are what helps the golfers more easily get the ball well up to fly.

And on the other end of the set, you’d then have to at least have a gap wedge and possibly even a second gap wedge to bridge what would be a rather large loft difference between a very strong PW and the more normal lofted SW. Set Makeup is a very powerful fitting tool that can really help a very large number of golfers.

Again, thanks very much and best wishes to you in this great game,
TOM

Louis

Our webmaster just hit some fix switch for this, or whatever the electronic wizards like him do, and so this should be remedied. Don’t know if this requires a refresh or a clear cache on your part, but we’ll hope that it’s fixed now that I asked our webwizard to take care of it. Thanks for the heads up.

TOM

Most of my older clubhead speed information came from Golf World USA magazine. For years now they have been a part of the Golf Digest USA family and it was from my being part of GD’s old Technical Advisory Panel in the 90s that I was close to the editors at both magazines. So they used to share data with me that they got from whatever sources they had. I think I remember that Golf World used to take one tournament a year on the PGA Tour and commission someone to gather data on various things related to equipment and club performance. I remember the clubhead speed information was from that annual check they would do.

Keep in mind that 1996 was when Titanium driver heads really took over as the predominant driver material in the golf industry. I remember this very clearly. 93-94 was when the industry first began to see Ti drivers. 95 was when all the companies began to scramble to find factories that could make them, and by 96 Ti driver heads had really begun to take over as THE hot club of the golf business. So that era was when everyone in the game got a little jump in driving distance because of the automatic COR increase the Ti driver heads produced.

1998 was when the USGA enacted the COR limit at 0.830. That number was chosen simply from the USGA taking a COR test of all Ti driver heads that had been submitted to them for normal conformity ruling. 0.830 was the highest COR seen on any drivers submitted to them so they set this as the limit. Reason for that was because the USGA felt if they set the limit lower than 0.830, the companies that had drivers over a lower limit would file lawsuits against the USGA. At that time, the USGA was a little gun shy about a lawsuit because they had just dodged a very large lawsuit bullet in their confrontation with Karsten Solheim in the late 80s over the PING scoreline controversy. Back then the USGA did not have the cash to survive a protracted litigation trial so they felt if they set this COR limit at a level that no one had yet exceeded, that would allow them to avoid any possible lawsuits.

The limit was then changed from COR to the CT measurement in 2002-2003 I think I remember. This change came about because the actual air cannon COR test was taking too long to conduct. They needed a faster test procedure for spring face conformity. USGA engineers created the CT test to correlate to COR and thus we live with a rule that limits the spring face capability to 257 microseconds, which they say corresponds to an air cannon COR test of 0.830.

TOM

I’m enjoying these blog discussions. but wanted you to know there seems to be a formatting issue with the software. As the threads nest over the course of a discussion they get narrower and narrower. The last post is one word wide horizontally, and very long vertically. If this continues they will be one letter wide.

Do you know if and where there are any swing speed stats prior to 2004?

From 2004-2008, Trackman stats showed an average Tour swing speed of 110.x. The swing speed data on the Tour website from 2007-2012 shows an average range of 111.8-112.6…which in each year translated to 2.6 yards in total distance per mph of swing speed. So at least since 2004 the swing speeds haven’t changed significantly, just 1-2 mph.

Out of curiosity, a few months ago I went back to 1980 with the driving distance averages on the Tour website. From 1980-1995 the distances held steady between 257-263…basically 260.

From 2004-2012, the distances didn’t really changed either…ranging from 286-291, or about 288.

The bulk of the 28 yard increase seems to have come in the years 1996 (which I assumed might have been from more players using lighter graphite shafts that could be swung faster) and 2001-2003 (which I assume was from new balls like the ProV1 that would spin less and launch higher off the metal woods…and to a lesser extent like you say the higher COR metal woods that could reach the 2003 .830 COR cap set by the USGA).

Since most of the yardage seems to have come from 2 points in time, I guess I’m just curious if the average swing speeds really have changed that much. I would agree that Tour players are fitter these days…but fit doesn’t always mean fast.

Fun topic.