United States Golf Teachers Federation

16 Jan 2020 admin

Clubfitting Tweaks That Work

As golf teachers and coaches, we work on technique and the mental game, but often overlooked is the equipment that our students are using. Most of us farm that aspect of their games out to clubfitting experts, and that’s okay. And most of us have a good basic understanding of equipment, such as shaft flex, driver loft, etc., but there are some often-overlooked and subtle equipment tweaks that will benefit some of our students for whom traditional teaching instruction isn’t helping them as we think it should.

The problem may indeed lie in their equipment. Here are some considerations for certain problems that we see time and time again:

Driver length

Driver lengths for men today average 45 ½ inches (116 cm). However, did you know the average driver length for male tour players is 44 ½ inches? Now, why is it that the best players in the world don’t play drivers the same length that are sold to everyday players at retail stores?

Korn Ferry Tour player Corey Pereira said he plays a 44 ½ inch driver “…for control. I already hit it far enough.” If you were to ask any other tour player who plays a shorter driver, they likely would say the same thing. Think about this: If a tour player has a hard time controlling a 45 ½ inch driver, then many our students will, too.

In the days of the persimmon driver, the standard length was just 43 inches. Today, that’s the standard length of most companies’ 3-woods. While we’re not advocating a return to the 43-inch driver, consideration should be made to cut the driver length for our students who have control issues. If a driver is cut down one inch, that would lighten the driver by six swingweight points. To restore the swingweight to the original, 12 grams of lead tape would have to be added to the clubhead. The problem then is that the shaft dynamically may be too flexible, even though by shortening it the shaft dynamically is stiffened. So instead of restoring the club to its original swingweight, adding six grams of lead tape – a compromise – should keep the feel of the shaft nearly the same.

Using a 3-wood

In the late 1980s, Golf Digest printed some at the-time astonishing information. They said that if someone could not carry their driver at least 150 yards, they would be better off hitting a 3-wood as it would provide more distance.

Today we know why. Lower ball speeds mean that a ball not launched high enough would fall out of the air more quickly than desired, as the aerodynamic properties of the ball are not being utilized as they would with higher ball speeds. If the ball speed is high enough, the backspin of the ball would provide enough lift to keep the ball airborne at lower launch angles.

While that 150-yard number may be up for debate, the fact is that many of our students need either a driver with a lot of loft – perhaps in the 15° range – or a 3-wood off the tee. And speaking of a 3-wood, many of our low-ball-speed students would probably do well to ditch it when hitting off the fairway in favor of a 5-wood for the same reason.

Iron lie angle

We’ve all been told that it is desirable to have the iron’s leading edge lie level at impact. This works for more skilled golfers, or golfers who hit the ball fairly straight. But what about those golfers who consistently hit a draw or fade with more curvature than is desired?

There’s nothing wrong with adjusting the lie angle a maximum of +/- 2° to help mitigate the problem. On his Sirius/XM radio show, former tour player Larry Rinker said that many tour players deliberately play their irons 1° too flat to help eliminate the dreaded leftward shot (for a right-hander), and they often flatten the lie angles on their wedges 2° for crisper contact and greater control. Most irons have a cambered (rounded) sole, so even if the iron isn’t perfectly level at impact, turf interaction should still be good. Lie angles that are more than 2° off from a level leading edge at impact run the risk of making centered contact too difficult, and for some players, even 2° is too much of a difference. But almost everyone can be 1° from a level lie angle at impact with little problem.

Toe-hang vs. face-balanced putters

According to Ping, if a player is consistently missing putts to the right (for a right-hander) and they are using a toe-hang putter, they should use a face-balanced putter. Their theory is that, in this case, since a toe-hang putter tends to open on the backswing, the golfer is unable to adequately square it at impact. And if a player is consistently missing putts to the left with a face-balanced putter, they should use a toe-hang putter. This makes sense, except that…

Callaway/Odyssey says the exact opposite! So, whom are we to believe? The best course of action is to have one putter of each design handy and see how your students use them. It is still thought by both, and other, companies that a straight-back and straight-through stroke would benefit most with a face-balanced putter, and an arcing stroke would benefit from a toe-hang putter. But if misses are consistently one way or the other, having a student try a putter with different characteristics is a good option to see what works best for them.

Grip sizing

Many of us have been told that grips that are too large will prevent golfers from adequately releasing the club through impact, and grips that are too small will promote too much hand rotation. This may or may not be the case; individual results may vary, as they say. Longtime USGTF professional Leslie Duke has said that if he uses grips that are too small, he actually tends to hit push shots as he’s conscious that the smaller grip may make him pull shots!

Professional golfers for years have had the lower-hand part of their grips built up with extra wraps of tape, but now that trend has come to grip design. Golf Pride has a series of “+4” grips, which feature less taper and are built with the equivalent of four extra wraps of tape under the lower-hand portion. These grips can be especially beneficial to our students who fight a hook.

There are also many resources online that further delve into the topic, so we would do well to explore them. For example, a lot of good information is available at www.GolfWrx.com, as many industry leaders hang out there. The bottom line is it benefits us to learn as much as we can about how equipment works and the tweaks that can help our students.

What All Teaching Pros Need To Know

Beyond the obvious technical knowledge needed to teach the game effectively, golf teaching professionals need to know a myriad of other things to be a well-rounded professional. Seeing what someone is doing wrong and what the correction should be is often the easy part. The hard part is finding the right fix or program that will help students play their best golf, or the right way to communicate it.

These are some of the aspects that are necessary for teaching professionals to be as good as they can be:

Technical knowledge

Every bit of instruction we give should focus on five things: clubface angle, clubhead path, solidness of contact, angle of approach and clubhead speed. Sound familiar? These are the five aspects of the ball flight laws, and all teaching professionals know what they are and their cause and effect. But getting students to execute certain movements in order to get the club to move correctly through impact is imperative.

In general, on the backswing the body should respond to the movement of the arms and hands, and vice versa on the downswing. The plague of amateur golfers everywhere is the arms and hands getting active far too soon in the downswing. As Ben Hogan said in his book Five Lessons, the hands “do nothing active until after the arms have moved on the downswing to a position just above the level of the hips.” This is probably the hardest thing for amateur golfers to not only execute, but wrap their heads around. The SwingRite training aid, endorsed by the USGTF, is a wonderful tool for helping students to understand and execute this concept.

Equipment knowledge

If you don’t have a good working knowledge of what launch angle, spin rate and ball speed are and how equipment affects them, then now is the time to get going on this. You don’t need a launch monitor such as TrackMan for FlightScope to fit equipment to your students, but it certainly doesn’t hurt. Yes, we realize these launch monitors are quite expensive, but as we go forward, teachers who aren’t using such technology will be left behind. Fortunately, there are less expensive options such as mevo by FlightScope, along with other bargain launch monitors, available.

Almost all drivers sold today have some sort of adjustability. Moveable weights can help to promote a draw or fade, or mitigate a slice or hook. Lofts and centers of gravity can be adjusted, both of which can affect launch angle and spin rate.

When it comes to irons, the correct lie angle is paramount in helping our students hit straight shots. Simply watching the divot shape is instructional. Divots that are toe deep mean the lie angle is too flat, and heel-deep divots mean the lie angle is too upright (the latter situation is far less common). Ironically, “incorrect” lie angles may be needed for some students. For example, if you have a student who is hooking the ball and you have come to a technique impasse, having that student play with a lie angle that is one or two degrees too flat can help to overcome this. The key here is making sure the student is still making center-face contact.

Motor learning knowledge

Studies have shown that when using a drill, the best course of action is to have the student execute the drill movement (whether striking the ball or not), hit the ball with the desired “real” swing, then repeat. Most teachers will have their students do the drill a number of consecutive times and then hit a number of real shots consecutively, but this is not as effective as alternating the drill with the real shot.

“Random” practice, which in golf means hitting a different shot or using a different club every time, has been found to be better in most cases than “blocked” practice, where the same exact shot and club are used over and over. There is evidence that “random blocks,” where a movement is executed for two or three repetitions before changing to something different, are also effective. In other words, the student should hit the same shot no more than three times consecutively before changing it up.

Students are notorious for making great practice swings that look nothing like their hitting-the-ball swing. Sam Snead famously said the problem with most amateurs is they don’t hit the ball with their practice swing. If you have a student who makes great practice swings but then comes over the top when hitting a ball, have them duplicate their over the-top swing as a practice swing, have them make a good practice swing, and then have them tell you the differences they perceive. This has been proven to be effective in getting students to feel the flaw in their swing.

You cannot help everyone

It happens to every teacher: You have failed to help a student improve. No less than David Leadbetter and USGTF professional Bob Toski have had the same thing happen to them. Whether your teaching and/or communication style doesn’t match up with what the student needs, or they are too ingrained in what they are doing to make any sort of change, we need to accept that not everyone who comes to us will get better. Some students may not practice enough to allow the changes to take. Maybe it was our fault as we were asking the student to do something they weren’t physically capable of. Maybe they don’t want to feel something different for the length of time it may take to change. Maybe they don’t want to get worse before getting better, a common happening with people taking lessons. Whatever the reason, it is our responsibility to accurately figure out what went wrong.

Business acumen

Teaching golf is a business, and unless our reputation is such that people will seek us out with no effort on our part, we have to go get students. Using social media and having a website are critical for today’s teacher to maximize revenue. Then there is the aspect of finding a facility or location in which to teach. Being able to show the general manager or owner how you are going to positively affect their bottom line is what they are looking for.

Summary

There are more things teachers need to know than what was present in this article, but due to space constraints, it would be impossible to list all of them. However, having a good working knowledge of what was presented here should put any teacher in good stead.

2020 Winter Issue