Who buys irons without getting fitted and feels good about their choice?

[theothertwo]

I buy iron sets and sometimes have the lie fitted/adjusted if forged clubs.  Never got fitted for shafts and length.  

[Justsomeguy]

8 hours ago, dekez said:

 

I am also 5'8".  I like to tell everyone that I am 5'9", though.  It makes me feel better.  But like you, I don't benefit much from iron fitting.  I have been fit in the past and always comes back standard lie and length.  My 16 handicap doesnt provide enough repeatability for any variability in the numbers to be valid.  I know which shafts I like, so I prefer the used club carousel.

 

Nailed it. My joke is I'm 5'10" in the right shoes.

Very similar handicap too. I'd drop strokes if I were longer with no other improvements, but I'm not gonna play the senior tees at 44, so...

My miss is always right. I'm very tempted to try going upright a little.

 

[clinkinfo]

I think this is an interesting question and probably isn't discussed with as much honesty as it deserves.  We all swing and deliver the club differently, the more distant you are from a delivery that matches an OEM standard spec, the more a fitting will help you.  If you deliver a club with the toe up 4 degrees and don't get the lie adjusted, you'll be hitting stuff left or even worse, thinking your thin shots are all mechanics.  but if you deliver within 1 or 1/2 a degree, you probably will have a hard time noticing much of a difference until you're better.   And we can all sorta "guess" what type of irons we belong in based on our ability and comfort level, so fittings don't generally have earth shattering results where a GI player ends up in a blade.

 

Plus, I think once you do a fitting or 2, and if you like golf enough to be here on a golf forum, you start to understand your specs and what you're looking for.  You can probably get pretty close without another fitting, just from your own knowledge and understanding of your game and what you're trying to accomplish.   But maybe my perspective is skewed from years and years of golf, I don't know.   There's also a component of fitting that is ability based.  I feel like it kinda goes like:

 

True beginners - don't get fit because they don't think their swing is consistent enough (they aren't good enough) to be fit.

 

beginners - pretty much the same as above, but maybe they will do a driver fitting at a box store just to see what they get on the LM.

 

intermediate - Definitely will get fit, but are always trying to improve and change their swings at the same time, so it's kinda hard to know how to fit.  And some of those fittings probably turn more into lessons, not fittings.

 

Advanced - Easiest to fit, generally know what they use and what specs work, only curious about LM numbers for each OEM head and shaft differences for them.  
 

An odd additional point, back before the Launch monitors were so commonplace, fitting was exciting because people on forums like this would talk about the drastic differences in ball flights between say project x (new at the time) and dynamic gold in your irons.  And you didn’t really know because there wasn’t tons and tons of fitting data out there.  If you read some of the forums you might think those iron shafts performed 1-2 clubs different in distance with dramatically different flights.  So you wanted to get fitted / on a monitor and see which fit you best.  Now, maybe for someone there was that big a difference across models, But in the end, for most golfers, the data kinda shows the iron shafts are all more similar than dis-similar in performance results.  I think that was a bit of a fitting kill-joy for some of us addicted types lol.

 

 

Edited April 2, 2021 by clinkinfo

[mantan]

Count me as another one who's lukewarm to the whole fitting process.

 

I think there is some value in drivers. There are a lot of adjustments that can be made and different shafts, weights, lengths can help somebody maximize their game.

 

But iron fitting seems 90% length and shaft fit for most golfers. Fitting irons off a mat seems worthless as you don't play golf off a mat. I do think the Mizuno shaft optimizer is a good tool to find out what shaft works for a swing. But once you know the shafts that are a good fit for you, I think most golfers can self fit.

 

The golf industry is also hurt by the lack of consistency in the quality of fitters. That results in most golfers having a poor experience and not buying into the process.  If golf fitting was even fairly effective at making someone a better player, every guy on here would be clamoring to get fit.  But most have done it a few times with zero benefit, so it seems like a waste of time.

 

 

[North Butte]

If someone were a new or somewhat inexperienced golfer and *totally* not into the equipment ho'ing thing then I think it'd be worth having some sort of basic fitting before buying clubs. They might one set, without really knowing much about options and specs, and then play them for a decade or two until they were completely worn out. In that case, without someone helping them find the right specs they might be stuck with a badly fitted set of clubs for hundreds and hundreds of rounds.

 

But if you're interested enough to learn the basic ideas behind matching clubs to your body and swing and if you're willing to do some trial and error, the whole fitting thing can be skipped IMO.