If you are searching on the Internet for golfing videos, you’ve likely seen ads promoting professional-level golf club fitting and selection. These golf shop studios use the latest in high tech launch monitors and swing analyzers to provide a dizzying array of metrics on your golf swing, guaranteed to help you choose the best golf club for you and your swing.
But as PGA Golf Coach Tony Brooks indicates in the following video, Is the Golf Industry Scamming You?
Those Golf Club Fitting ads are persuasive. If you are willing to spend a few bucks and an hour or two hitting balls in a studio, maybe you can solve that golfing problem that has been bugging you. Getting “professionally fitted” for a new driver or perhaps a whole new set of clubs could be all you needed to restore golfing happiness.
But some who have taken the plunge and bought new clubs have found those great launch monitor numbers for your new clubs you got in the indoor golf suite somehow didn’t transfer to lowering your score or eliminating those nagging slices and pushes.
Why didn’t the apparent success in the golf studio show up on the course?
Most likely all those fancy metrics in the studio, from smash factor to spin to carry and more, omitted a critical factor – you and your uniqueness.
The technician at the golf fitting shop is trained to understand and use very sophisticated diagnostic equipment. He also has some deep experience in different brands and models of golf clubs. But is he a veteran golf coach with experience helping average golfers correct flaws in a multitude of individual habits that affect how the golf club and golf ball behaves?
His job is to sell you new golf clubs. As one of the largest club fitters’ states in their ads “Our Master Fitters are trained to improve the golf game of any golfer through better equipment . . .” And by focusing on all that launch monitor data it is likely you’ll find a club that produces better numbers than your present one. Easy. Part with $500 or well over a $1000 and success and happiness is here. But was not having a new club the cause of your golfing issue?
Maybe the problem is you and how you are trying to swing the club. You needed the right golf coach.
A Club Fitting Alternative?
I recently went to a club fitter I’ve used in the past. He has been building custom golf clubs and providing club fitting services for many, many years. I went to him complaining about my 7 iron. My complaint: I can only get a couple of yards more distance out of it than with my 9 iron.
This guy doesn’t work out of fancy golfing studio. He does his fitting assessment outside, at a golf course in a real golfing environment, not in a simulator or indoor golf practice suite. He wants to see how a customer handles the clubs in the golfing environment. A session with him can be a combination of golf coaching and golf club fitting. His number one priority is seeing his customers improve and better enjoy their game.
By watching me on the golf course, he understood that my natural iron swing is more vertical. The longer length of the 7 iron (compared to the 9 iron) needs a swing plane that is more level. Chocking up on the 7 iron and using my natural vertical swing helped a tiny bit but I still had this yardage gap I couldn’t fill.
My problem was not the club or finding a better 7-iron fit; it is how I am trying to use the 7-iron. So, if I had gone to a “high tech” club fitting emporium and found a 7-iron that carried more yards, I wouldn’t have solved the basic problem.
If I were younger, I’d have the patience to change my technique and figure out how to get more speed out of my 7-iron swing. But accepting that reality, we went a different direction. We ended solved the problem by fitting me with a 9-fairway club. With an easy, relaxed swing, it does what I previously expected out of my 7-iron.
BTW related to my 7-iron problem. Just read an interesting article from MYGOLFSpy “Why Your Irons All Go The Same Distance“