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A Brief Overview of Our Technology

A core piece of technology in any custom fitting shop is the technology commonly known as a launch monitor system; we currently utilize the Vector Pro Launch Monitor. As can be seen in the accompanying screen shot, a good launch monitor system will provide a lot of information specific to a golfer’s swing.  During a custom fitting session with us, you’ll learn a lot about your swing, and become acquainted with the data collected during your session as we review it and apply it to our analysis.

In addition to carry distance, roll & total distance, you’ll see data that is much more important to a custom fitter, including:  how fast you swing the club (swing speed), how efficient your swing is (ball speed), how high you launch your ball (launch angle), the trajectory that your ball falls back to earth (angle of descent), and spin rates.  For spin rates, we’ll examine back spin – which is a key number when fitting - you need enough back spin to create lift, but not too much or you’ll create drag – and we’ll look at side spin (slices, pulls).  In fact, the visual component to a lot of these numbers will translate into “ball flight” for you.  We’ll talk a lot about ball flight, both during your fitting session and after you leave the shop.  We want to know how you’re doing with your new clubs as you use them on the course; ball flight is a common topic for us as it reveals a lot about how your clubs are performing.

Although we try to avoid giving lessons during a fitting session, we’ll help guide you a bit with respect to alignment, posture and grip if we think you’ll benefit from our instruction.  These tips, if necessary, will help us to achieve an improved fitting experience.  Beyond that, we’ll try to stay focused at fitting you for your current skill level vs. going into a lesson. 

However, you’ll learn a lot from our session that you can take with you onto the practice facility.  As the screenshot above shows you, the launch monitor captures two key additional aspects of your swing:  how you attack the ball (think of your club’s position at impact) and the path your swing takes.  Visually, it will be easy to see each shot and its trajectory on the launch monitor, and then we’ll explain to you which elements can be changed to achieve increased distance and accuracy.

But, if you really want to increase both distance and accuracy, you must be fitted for the best shaft available for your individual swing.   Both accuracy and distance can be maximized if you are fitted for shafts with the optimum flex, weight and torque for your swing.  In fact, this is an area that we really excel at in the shop; we use a unique piece of technology called the FITCHIP, which is designed to calculate optimal shaft specifications for a golfer’s unique swing.

As a result, custom fitting using only swing speed as the primary criteria is now a thing of the past.  In fact, golfers with similar swing speeds, but who do not have the same club release or swing timing, will actually need dramatically different clubs in terms of shaft flex.  The FITCHIP captures the critical swing timing parameters in your unique swing, and uses this information to select the exact shaft flex, and torque, that will return the club to straight and square at impact. A technically fitted club will promote the greatest combination of distance and accuracy off the tee.  That’s why we have a familiar saying around the shop, “It’s all about the shaft”. 

A fitting session with the FITCHIP is a simple and quick exercise.  You’ll need to indulge us with a few swings during a fitting session that will allow us to capture, among other data, the time interval (in milliseconds) between release and impact.  Our goal here is to get the club head square at impact.  To help you understand what we’re trying to accomplish, visualize a spring that’s pulled back; releasing the spring will propel spring forward.  But, depending on how much inherent resistance there is in the spring (or flex in the golf shaft), the time it takes for that spring (or shaft) to return to square will depend on the spring’s inherent characteristic (resistance, or flex in a shaft).  With the FITCHIP, we’ll find out what the interval is between your swing’s release and impact, and then we’ll use the FITCHIP to calculate the optimum shaft specifications for you to return the club to square at impact.

A common customer take-away during a FITCHIP session that’s worth sharing has to do with the scientific measurement that’s used for quantifying shaft flex.  A frequency machine is used to measure the flex in a shaft, and the common measure of flex used is cycles per minute (CPM).  CPM is simply a range of whole numbers, with higher numbers representing stiffer flexes.  What’s important here is not the fact that our customers learn a lot about CPM during a fitting session; but more of the fact that they learn that many CPM’s actually fall within the allowable standards or nomenclature employed by the club manufacturer (ladies flex, senior flex, regular flex, stiff flex, extra stiff flex).  Said differently, our customers learn that a when a shaft has a graphic that says it’s a regular flex, it may if fact be something a bit different (weak regular, true regular, strong regular).  In fact, it’s not uncommon for us to measure a regular flex shaft from a manufacturer that’s not, in reality, a regular flex at all.  The key point to understand here is that we don’t promote the use of letters (W, A, R, S, XS) to quantify flex in our shop; instead, we prefer to use CPM.  This allows us to more accurately fit you for optimal flex.   Remember, “It’s all about the shaft!”