The club specifications you should be playing

What a golf club fitting actually decides

A fitting will not make you a better golfer. It is worth saying that first, because the industry implies otherwise and the disappointment that follows is what makes people sceptical of the whole idea.

What a fitting does is stop the equipment from making you worse. That sounds like a smaller claim and it is not. A driver with three degrees too little loft costs a 90 mph golfer fifteen to twenty-five yards of carry on every good swing they make. Irons two degrees too upright send well-struck short irons left of target with no help from the swing. A wedge ladder with a nine-degree step in it leaves a twenty-four yard band of the golf course that cannot be covered with a full swing. None of those is a skill problem, and none of them responds to practice.

Specifications do not add ability. They stop you paying for a handicap you did not earn.

The specifications that matter, in the order a fitter works through them, are: length, lie angle, shaft weight, shaft flex, loft, and gapping across the whole set. This page works through each of them and links to the detailed treatment of every one. The tool above does all of it at once.

Why the order matters

Most fitting advice presents these as an independent list. They are not independent, and the dependencies run in one direction only.

• Length changes lie. Every half inch of added length makes a club play about one degree more upright at impact. Fit lie first and you have fitted it to a club that no longer exists.
• Length changes flex. Cutting a shaft removes its softest section, so a shortened club plays stiffer — half an inch is worth roughly a third of a flex.
• Weight changes what flex feels right. A heavier shaft at the same flex feels stiffer through transition, and golfers reliably mistake that for a flex problem.
• Attack angle changes loft. Static loft is what is stamped on the head; dynamic loft is what the ball actually experiences, and attack angle is the whole difference between them.

Work through them in order and each decision is made once. The full sequence, with the reasoning behind each step, is set out in the full bag fitted spec by spec .

The two measurements everything starts from

Every geometric specification in the bag — length, lie angle, and to a lesser extent driver length — comes from two numbers. One of them is your height, which you know. The other is the measurement most golfers have never taken.

Wrist-to-floor

Stand up straight on a hard floor, in the shoes you play in. Let both arms hang loose at your sides — do not reach down. Measure from the crease at the base of your palm, where the hand meets the wrist, straight down to the floor. Have somebody else read the tape, because reaching for it changes the number by half an inch.

That figure captures something height cannot: how long your arms are relative to your body. And that is what determines where your hands sit at address, which is what determines the angle the club has to be built at.

Why height alone is not enough

Take two golfers who are both exactly six feet tall. One measures 33 inches wrist-to-floor; the other measures 38. Both figures are entirely normal.

Five degrees of lie angle and three quarters of an inch of length between two golfers of identical height. Any chart that asks only for height is giving one of them the wrong club, and it has no way of knowing which. That is the whole argument of why height alone gets lie angle wrong .

Your pitching wedge loft: the number that decides half the bag

If you take one thing from this page, take this. The loft of the pitching wedge in the set you already own determines more of your bag than any specification you are about to buy.

It sets three things at once:

1. Your iron loft ladder, because the rest of the set is spaced from it — and therefore your iron distances.
2. Which iron a hybrid replaces, because that is a loft comparison and not a number comparison.
3. Your entire wedge configuration, because the wedges hang below it.

Across the 201 sets in this site's database, pitching wedge lofts run from 38° to 47°. That is nearly a full wedge of difference between two sets sold in the same shop, in the same year, to golfers of the same ability.

How that happened

Gradually, and without anybody announcing it. Manufacturers compete on distance, distance comes partly from loft, and the number stamped on the sole is not regulated. So lofts strengthened by four or five degrees over two decades while the numbers stayed the same. A 7-iron that was 35 degrees is 28 degrees in some sets today.

This is not a scandal — a strong-lofted set is a legitimate design with real advantages. It becomes a problem only when the rest of the bag is built as though the lofts had not moved, which is what happens when golfers follow generic advice.

Two golfers hand each other a 7-iron and they are four and a half degrees apart. Nothing on either club says so. This is why the tool above asks which set you own before it answers anything below the pitching wedge, and it is covered in full in what degree wedges you need for your own pitching wedge loft .

Driver loft: the largest single lever on distance

Of every specification in the bag, driver loft moves carry distance most, and it is the one most often chosen by preference rather than by numbers.

The rule that governs it runs opposite to the instinct: slower swing speeds need more loft, not less.

Why that is true

Carry distance is produced by three things acting together: how fast the ball leaves the face, how steeply it climbs, and how much it is spinning. Change one and the others must compensate.

A tour professional carries the ball a long way on a flat trajectory because the ball is leaving at 165 mph or more. At that speed it stays airborne on a shallow launch, and every extra degree costs more in spin than it gains in height. That is why low loft works for them, and it is the context that gets stripped out when the advice is repeated.

At 85 mph of clubhead speed the ball leaves at about 123 mph. There is no shallow trajectory that keeps it up long enough. The ball has to be launched, and the only two ways to launch it are loft and an upward attack angle.

Read the loft column downward: the slower the speed, the more loft. Nothing in it is a preference. It is what the ball needs in order to stay in the air long enough to travel. The full treatment is in why a slower swing speed needs more driver loft, not less , and the specific case most golfers search for is at what loft driver a 90 mph swing speed needs .

Attack angle moves it further than speed does

If you can get exactly one number from a launch monitor, get attack angle rather than clubhead speed.

Attack angle is whether the head is travelling upward or downward through impact. Hitting down strips dynamic loft: the face may read 10.5 degrees but the ball leaves as though struck with considerably less, and that loft has to be bought back statically. Roughly half a degree of static loft per degree of downward attack angle.

A golfer hitting four degrees down at 90 mph needs about two degrees more loft than one hitting level at the same speed — which is the entire width of the window. No chart that asks only for swing speed can distinguish between them.

The reverse is where free distance lives. Hitting up adds dynamic loft for nothing, so you can play less static loft and hold the same launch with less spin. Same height, less spin, more carry — and it costs a higher tee and a ball position change rather than a purchase.

Driver length: the specification nobody questions

Stock drivers are built at about 45.5 inches. The average on the PGA Tour is nearer 44.5. Nobody out there is short of clubhead speed, and they still choose the shorter club.

The arithmetic is not subtle:

• Half an inch of extra shaft is worth roughly one mph of clubhead speed — about two to three yards.
• Half an inch off the centre of the face costs three to five mph of ball speed — six to ten yards.

The loss is two to four times the gain, and it applies on far more swings. Stock length drifted upward because a longer club produces a bigger number on a demo-day launch monitor, and demo days are where drivers are sold. Nothing in a shop penalises the wider strike pattern that same club produces on a golf course.

Testing it costs nothing: mark the face, hit ten, grip down an inch, hit ten more, and compare the spread. The detail is in whether your driver shaft is too long for your height .

Shafts: weight first, flex second

Golfers are fitted for flex and almost never for weight, which is precisely the wrong way round.

Why weight comes first

You feel weight continuously. From takeaway to finish, the mass of the shaft tells you where the clubhead is, and that feedback is what lets you square the face without thinking about it. Flex only really expresses itself in the last fraction of the downswing.

Take away enough weight and you take away the feedback. The club becomes something you steer consciously, and conscious steering under pressure produces misses in both directions — the two-way miss that golfers almost always diagnose as a swing fault.

Weight is also comparable across manufacturers. Sixty grams is sixty grams whoever made it. That is worth a great deal, because flex is not comparable at all.

Why flex is not a standard

There is no industry body defining flex. No specification says a stiff shaft must deflect a given amount under a given load. Every manufacturer sets its own, and the consequences are larger than most golfers realise: a stiff from one brand can genuinely be softer than a regular from another, and two shafts both marked S can bend in completely different places.

So a flex recommendation is a starting point plus a reason, never a letter to trust. It is also where transition matters more than speed — a hard change of direction loads a shaft far more than the mph figure suggests, which is why what shaft flex a 95 mph swing speed actually needs is genuinely undecidable from speed alone.

The weight windows, for driver and irons, along with the steel-against- graphite decision, are worked through in how heavy your shaft should be for your swing speed .

Gapping: fourteen slots, no gaps, no duplicates

With every individual specification settled, the last question is whether the fourteen clubs form a continuous ladder. This is where most bags are quietly broken, and where the cheapest improvements usually are.

The wedges, where the hole almost always is

Two things moved in opposite directions. Iron lofts strengthened. Wedge lofts did not, because wedges are bought individually and 52 / 56 / 60 remained the default recommendation throughout.

Against a 48-degree pitching wedge, 52 / 56 / 60 gives steps of 4, 4 and 4 — perfectly even, which is why the advice took hold. Against a 43-degree pitching wedge it gives 9, 4 and 4. The bottom of the bag is crowded and the top has a twenty-four yard hole in it, sitting at exactly the distance where you most want a full swing you can trust.

Different lofts and a different number of wedges, from the same question. Four to six degrees a step is the working window: under four and you cannot tell two clubs apart, over six and you have a yardage you cannot cover. Finding yours is where the yardage hole sits in your wedges .

The long-iron transition

At the other end of the bag, the question is where your irons stop being playable — and the answer is about launch, not distance. An iron that carries a long way and then runs through the back of the green is not a club you can hit into a green.

When a long iron stops working, a hybrid replaces it — matched by loft, not by the number on the sole. A 22-degree hybrid sold everywhere as a 4-hybrid replaces the 4-iron in a players' set and the 6-iron in a strong-lofted one, because those two sets have 4-irons three and a half degrees apart. That is which iron a hybrid actually replaces .

Above the hybrids, the fairway wood should sit four to five degrees stronger than the longest club you actually hit into a green. For most golfers with a modern set that is a 16 to 18-degree club — a 4-wood or a strong 5-wood, not the 15-degree 3-wood almost everybody buys by default and then cannot launch off the turf. The reasoning is in what loft fairway wood closes the gap above your irons .

Through the irons

The manufacturer set these gaps for you, but they are worth checking in yards rather than degrees, because two adjacent long irons going the same distance is a signal rather than a coincidence. What your set should be producing at your speed is in what your irons should carry at your swing speed .

The three distance numbers worth knowing

Golfers buy clubs to fix distance more often than for any other reason, and usually without establishing where the distance is actually going. Three numbers settle that, and two of them are free.

Ball speed

The single best predictor of carry, because it already contains both how fast you swung and how well you struck it. Roughly two yards of carry per mph with a driver at typical launch conditions: 110 mph carries about 160 yards, 139 mph about 218, 167 mph about 277 — the last two close to published LPGA and PGA Tour averages.

The useful part is the gap between what your ball speed produces now and what it would produce with launch and spin optimised, which is four to six per cent. That is a fitting gain rather than a swing gain, and it is quantified in what carry distance your ball speed should be producing .

Smash factor

Ball speed divided by clubhead speed — the only distance number that improves without swinging any harder. The driver ceiling is about 1.50, set by the rules limiting how springy a face may be. Tour players sit at 1.48 to 1.50, good amateurs around 1.45.

At 95 mph of clubhead speed, a smash factor of 1.35 rather than 1.50 costs more than twenty yards of carry. No equipment purchase available anywhere returns that, which is why what smash factor tells you about your lost distance is the number to check before buying anything.

Carry against total

Total off the tee, carry into a green. Almost every amateur learned their distances by watching where the ball finished, which is total, and then applied those numbers to approach shots, which need carry. On a mid-iron the difference is about eight yards — roughly the width of a front bunker, and a systematic bias toward being short on exactly the shots that were struck well. That is whether to club off carry or total distance .

Why this points at used clubs

Nearly every recommendation on this site points at the used market, and the reasoning is worth setting out rather than leaving implied.

The specification is the variable that still matters

Driver faces have been at the legal limit for well over a decade. A centre strike with a five-year-old head produces almost exactly the ball speed of a centre strike with this year's. What newer heads genuinely improve is forgiveness on off-centre strikes — real, but smaller than the gain from having the right loft in the first place.

Set against that: two degrees of correct driver loft is worth ten to twenty yards of carry at amateur speeds. The arithmetic is not close. Buying the right specification on the used market beats buying the newest head at the wrong specification, comfortably.

Wedges and hybrids barely move at all

Wedge design has been stable for years. The specification is stamped on the club, the only real wear point is the grooves, and a three-year-old wedge with good grooves performs like a new one. Hybrids are much the same. These are the best used purchases in golf, and they are also the clubs most likely to be missing from a badly gapped bag.

What to check before buying used

• Grooves on wedges. The one place wedges genuinely wear, and where spin goes.
• Whether a driver has been shortened. Often a benefit rather than a defect, but measure rather than assume.
• Whether irons have been bent. A used set may not be at its stated lie or loft. Marks on the hosel are the tell.
• The adjustable hosel setting. A used driver may have been left somewhere unhelpful by its previous owner.
• Regional variation. Japanese-domestic versions of the same model name can be a degree away from the version sold elsewhere.

What a static fit cannot do

Everything on this page uses measurements taken standing still. That is genuinely useful, and it is also not everything. Being clear about the boundary is more useful than overselling what is inside it.

• Lie needs a lie board. How you deliver the club matters more than how you stand. Impact tape settles in five swings what a tape measure can only estimate.
• Spin needs a launch monitor. Loft and shaft both move it, and the interaction is not predictable from static measurements.
• Shaft profile needs hitting. Two shafts with identical weight and flex can bend in different places and produce different flights.

None of that is a reason to skip the static fit. It is the step after it — and confirming a specification you arrived at deliberately is a far shorter and cheaper session than discovering one from scratch.

The five expensive mistakes

1. Too little driver loft. The most costly, and the most common. Fifteen to twenty-five yards for a slower swinger playing a low-lofted head because a high number looks like an admission.
2. 52 / 56 / 60 above a strong pitching wedge. A twenty-four yard hole in the scoring range, invisible until you meet it on the course.
3. A light shaft with an aggressive transition. The two-way miss that gets diagnosed as a swing fault and treated with lessons.
4. Lie angle set from height alone. Several yards offline on well-struck short irons, for the golfer whose arms are not average for their height.
5. Buying a new head instead of the right specification. Several hundred dollars for a few yards of forgiveness, when the same money on the correct spec was worth several times more.

How the numbers on this site are produced

Worth stating plainly, because most equipment content implies more than it has.

No launch monitor is owned here and no club has been tested. There are no first-hand test results anywhere on this site, and no reviews or ratings of any kind. Every specification comes from a manufacturer's own published specification table. Every relationship used in the arithmetic — ball speed against carry, attack angle against loft, wrist-to-floor against lie — comes from published fitting and launch-condition research, and is cited where used.

The database behind the tool holds 201 iron sets from 16 manufacturers, 2016 to 2025. Each set carries a status showing whether its figures have been re-confirmed against the manufacturer's own table, and that status is shown to you in the tool output rather than hidden.

Articles are published by SpecMyBag Editorial rather than attributed to an invented individual, and no fitter certification or professional-body membership is claimed, because none is held. The full statement is on what this site can and cannot tell you, and if a figure here is wrong, telling us where you checked it is worth more than anything else you could send.

Grip size: the cheapest specification in the bag

Grips cost a few pounds each and are the only part of the club you actually touch. They are also the specification most often left at whatever the manufacturer shipped, on a club that has otherwise been chosen carefully.

What grip size changes

A grip that is too small encourages the hands to be too active through impact, which closes the face. A grip that is too large restricts hand rotation, which leaves the face open. Neither effect is subtle: a golfer fighting a persistent hook on a grip a size too small can lose most of it by changing nothing else.

The usual measurement is glove size plus hand length, taken from the crease at the base of the palm to the tip of the middle finger. Roughly:

• Under 7 inches of hand length — undersize.
• 7 to 8.25 inches — standard.
• 8.25 to 9.25 inches — midsize.
• Over 9.25 inches — oversize or jumbo.

The practical check is simpler than the chart. Take a normal grip with the lead hand. The fingertips should just barely touch the pad of your palm. If they dig in, the grip is too small. If they do not reach, it is too big.

Wraps, tape and build-up

Grip size is adjusted with layers of build-up tape under the grip, and each extra wrap adds roughly 1/64 of an inch to the diameter. Four extra wraps moves a standard grip to about midsize. This is worth knowing when buying used clubs, because a previous owner may have built the grips up substantially, and a club that feels wrong in your hands may simply be wearing somebody else's specification.

It also matters for arthritis and hand pain, where a larger grip genuinely reduces the gripping force required. That is a comfort decision rather than a performance one, and it is a legitimate reason to move away from the size a chart would give you.

Grip weight, which nobody mentions

Grips run from about 25 grams to over 70. Swapping a 50-gram grip for a 25-gram one changes the swing weight of the club by roughly three points, which is the same effect as adding a couple of grams to the head. If you have carefully fitted a shaft weight and then re-gripped the whole set with something much lighter or heavier, you have moved the specification you paid for.

Swing weight and total weight

These two are constantly confused, and they answer different questions.

Total weight is exactly what it sounds like: how much the whole club weighs. It governs how much effort the club takes to swing, and it is what falls when you fit a lighter shaft.

Swing weight is how head-heavy the club feels when swung, measured on a lettered scale from about C0 to about E0 with D0 to D4 covering most men's clubs. It is a balance measurement rather than a mass measurement — a club can be light overall and still feel very head-heavy.

Why it matters when you change anything

Swing weight is where all the other specifications collide, and it is the reason a single change can make a club feel wrong for reasons the golfer cannot name.

• Shortening a club lowers swing weight by roughly three points per half inch. A driver cut from 45.5 to 44.5 inches loses about six points and will feel like the head has disappeared unless weight is added back.
• Lengthening a club raises it by the same amount, and can make a club feel unmanageably head-heavy.
• A lighter grip raises swing weight. A heavier grip lowers it.
• A lighter shaft raises swing weight for the same head, which is why shaft changes often need head weight adjusted too.

None of this requires you to become a club builder. It requires you to know that changing one specification changes another, so that when a club feels wrong after a modification you look at the balance rather than concluding the original decision was a mistake.

Matching through the set

What matters more than any absolute swing weight figure is consistency across the bag. A set where the 7-iron is D2 and the 8-iron is C8 will produce a strike inconsistency at exactly that point, and no amount of practice fixes a club that feels different from its neighbours. When buying a used set, a mismatch here is one of the more common defects and one of the least visible.

Wedge bounce and grind: the spec that is not a number

Everything else on this page is a number. Bounce and grind are the exception, and they are the reason two wedges of identical loft can behave completely differently.

Bounce

Bounce is the angle between the leading edge of the wedge and the lowest point of the sole. It is what stops the club digging. More bounce means the sole hits the ground first and skids; less bounce means the leading edge gets under the ball more easily but digs on anything soft.

The fit is driven by two things, and neither is your handicap:

• Your attack angle. A steep, divot-taking swing needs more bounce — ten degrees and up. A shallow, sweeping swing needs less — four to eight.
• The turf you play. Soft, wet courses and fluffy bunkers favour high bounce. Firm, tight fairways and coarse sand favour low.

The most common error is a low-bounce lob wedge in the hands of a steep swinger on a soft course. It looks like the specialist's choice and it produces the fat wedge shot that costs a stroke every time it happens.

Grind

Grind is material removed from the heel, toe or trailing edge of the sole so the club can be opened or laid flat without the leading edge rising off the turf. A wedge with no relief, opened for a flop shot, lifts its leading edge and produces a thin shot across the green.

Manufacturers each use their own naming, and the letters mean different things between brands. The general pattern: wide, full soles for steep swings on soft ground; heel-and-toe relief for golfers who open the face; narrow soles for firm turf and shallow swings.

This is genuinely a specification you should hit before buying, which makes it the one part of a wedge purchase that resists remote fitting. What you can settle remotely is the loft, and the loft is what decides whether you have a full swing for the yardage in front of you — what degree wedges you need settles that part.

The putter, which is fitted least and used most

A putter is used more than any other club in the bag and is the club least likely to have been fitted. It has three specifications, and all three are measurable.

Length

Standard putters are 34 or 35 inches. A large share of golfers should be playing 33, and the test is straightforward: set up in your normal putting posture and see where your hands sit. If your eyes are outside the ball and your arms are pushed away from your body, the putter is too long.

The cost of a putter that is too long is that the hands sit away from the body and the stroke becomes an arm-and-shoulder push rather than a pendulum. Cutting a putter is cheap and reversible only in the sense that a new shaft is cheap — so grip down two inches first and putt for a week before committing.

Lie angle

The sole of the putter should sit flat on the ground at address. If the toe is in the air, the putter is too upright and the ball will start left of your aim; if the heel is up, the opposite. This is genuinely easy to check — set up on a hard flat floor and look at the sole — and almost nobody does it.

Loft

Most putters have two to four degrees of loft, which exists to lift the ball out of its own resting depression on the green. Whether you need more or less depends on how much your hands lead the club at impact: a forward press adds effective loft removal and needs a higher-lofted head, while a stroke that adds loft at impact needs less.

The symptom of a mismatch is a ball that hops or skids for the first few feet before rolling. That costs distance control on long putts, which is where three-putts come from.

When your specifications should change

None of this is permanent. Four things move the answers, and three of them will happen to you.

Clubhead speed falls with age

Gradually, and largely unnoticed, because the loss per year is smaller than the variation between rounds. The correct response is to add driver loft as speed falls rather than to keep the loft you played at thirty. A golfer who has lost eight mph over a decade and is still playing a 9.5-degree head has quietly moved from the right loft to two degrees under it.

Lie angles drift

Forged irons in particular bend slightly through normal use — hitting off mats, striking the ground firmly, and simply being carried around. A set checked once when new is not necessarily still at that specification three seasons later. Any fitter can check the whole set in ten minutes.

A swing change changes attack angle

If you take lessons and successfully shallow out your driver delivery, you have changed the input that drives your loft requirement. Moving from four degrees down to level is worth about two degrees of static loft, which is more than the difference between adjacent speed bands.

New irons reset the whole bottom of the bag

This is the one golfers most often miss. Buying a new iron set with a different pitching wedge loft invalidates the wedge ladder you had, and often the hybrid too. If your old set had a 46-degree pitching wedge and the new one has 43, your existing 52 no longer fits beneath it. Re-run the yardage hole check any time the irons change.

When to buy, and why the calendar matters

Equipment prices follow a predictable annual cycle, and knowing it is worth as much as any negotiating skill.

• New models launch in the winter and early spring, which is when last year's model becomes last year's model. That is the largest single price drop of the year on new stock.
• Used inventory peaks after those launches, as trade-ins arrive. Selection is at its best in late winter and early spring; prices soften as supply outstrips demand.
• Demand peaks in spring. Everybody decides to fix their game at the same time, and used prices firm up accordingly.
• Autumn is the quiet market. Fewer buyers, thinner selection, but the least competition for anything that is listed.

The practical advice: decide your specification whenever you like, because a specification does not expire. Then buy when the market favours you rather than when the urge strikes. A specification written down in October is still correct in February, and February is a better time to be shopping for it.

Specifications for slower swing speeds

Two groups are consistently sold the wrong equipment, and for the same underlying reason: the recommendation is made on a category label rather than on a measurement.

The problem with category labels

Clubs marketed by category — one badge for women, another for seniors — bundle several specifications together and assume they belong together. Usually that means light shafts, high loft and shorter length as a package. Sometimes that package is right. Often two of the three are right and one is badly wrong.

A tall woman with a fast swing does not need a shorter, lighter club because of the category she was sorted into. A senior golfer with a 100 mph swing does not need a senior-flex shaft. Both need whatever their measurements produce, which is the same answer everybody else gets.

What genuinely does change at slower speeds

Slower clubhead speed changes the answer, and the changes are real. They simply have nothing to do with which category the club is sold in.

• More driver loft, not less. The single largest gain available, and the one most often refused — see why a slower swing speed needs more driver loft .
• Graphite iron shafts. Below about 80 mph of driver speed there is no launch advantage left in steel.
• Hybrids further down the set. Modern long-iron lofts are too strong to launch at slower speeds, so the transition happens at the 5-iron or the 6-iron rather than the 4.
• More loft in the fairway wood. A 15-degree 3-wood off the deck requires speed that is not there.

Notice that every one of those is a specification change driven by a measured number. None of them requires a differently-badged club, and all of them are available on the used market at any specification you like.

A note on the golf ball

The ball is not a club specification and it does not belong in a fitting sequence, but it comes up often enough to be worth one honest paragraph.

Ball construction changes spin considerably more than it changes speed. Compression matters far less than the marketing suggests once you are inside a normal speed range, and the differences that do exist show up most on wedge shots and least on drives. If you are choosing between balls, choose on how the ball behaves around the green and on price, because those are the two variables you will actually notice over a season.

What the ball cannot do is compensate for a specification that is wrong. No ball recovers the fifteen yards lost to a driver with three degrees too little loft, and no ball closes a nine-degree gap in a wedge ladder.

How to read a manufacturer specification sheet

Every number on this site ultimately comes from one of these, and they are freely available on every manufacturer's website. Being able to read one yourself means you never have to take anybody's word for a loft again — including ours.

What you will find on it

• Loft, per club. The column that matters most. Look for the pitching wedge specifically; everything below it in your bag depends on that one figure.
• Lie angle, per club. Progressive through the set, getting more upright as the clubs get shorter. Note the 6-iron figure as the reference point, because that is the club most fitting charts quote.
• Length, per club. Usually quoted for steel, with a note that graphite builds run half an inch longer. That half inch is real and it changes how the lie plays.
• Offset and bounce. Less critical for gapping, but they tell you what kind of set it is.
• Swing weight. Often quoted as a single figure such as D2 for the whole set.

The traps

Three things regularly catch people out, and all three have produced wrong answers in bags.

1. Model year. A model name is frequently reused across two or three generations with different lofts each time. The spec sheet you want is the one for the year your set was made, not the one currently on the front page.
2. Regional versions. Japanese-domestic models sold under the same name can differ by a degree or more, and are common on the used market.
3. Steel against graphite. Two builds of the same set can differ in length, swing weight and sometimes lie. Check which one you have before comparing.

If you find a discrepancy between a manufacturer's sheet and what this site says, the manufacturer is right and we want to know. The database is only worth anything if it is accurate, and a correction with a source link takes minutes to apply.

Using these numbers in a fitting bay

Nothing here replaces a session with a launch monitor, and arriving with a specification already worked out makes that session substantially better. A fitter who is handed a starting point spends the hour refining it rather than discovering it.

What to bring

• The specification the tool produced, written down or screenshotted.
• Your current clubs, including the ones you are not replacing.
• The model and year of your iron set, if you are only fitting the driver.
• Your own golf ball, if the bay allows it.

What to ask for

1. Your attack angle. The single most useful number a monitor can give you, and the one that most changes the driver answer. Ask for it explicitly — it is often not volunteered.
2. Your smash factor, per club. It tells you whether a distance shortfall is an equipment problem or a strike problem, and those need entirely different responses.
3. Carry, not total. Simulators often display total by default and it is the less useful of the two for everything except a tee shot.
4. Dispersion, not just distance. A shaft that gains three yards and widens your pattern by fifteen is a bad trade, and a distance-only readout hides it.
5. A lie board reading. Five swings with impact tape settles the last degree that no static measurement can reach.

One caution worth holding onto: a fitting bay is also a sales environment, and around a third of golfers who get fitted have the fitting cost credited against a purchase. That is a reasonable commercial arrangement and it is also a reason to arrive knowing what the numbers say. A specification you arrived at independently is the best defence against being sold a specification that happens to be in stock.

The specifications, defined

Every term used on this site, in one place, because equipment writing tends to assume them.

Loft

The angle of the clubface relative to the shaft. More loft means a higher launch and more spin. It is the largest single lever on carry distance with a driver.

Lie angle

The angle between the shaft and the ground when the club sits at address. Too upright sends the ball left of target for a right-handed golfer; too flat sends it right. It matters most in the short irons.

Attack angle

Whether the clubhead is moving upward or downward at impact. Negative means hitting down. It changes the loft the ball experiences, which is why it moves the driver answer more than swing speed does.

Dynamic loft

The loft the ball actually experiences at impact, as opposed to the static loft stamped on the head. The difference between the two is attack angle and how far the hands lead the clubhead.

Ball speed

How fast the ball leaves the face. The single best predictor of carry distance, because it already accounts for both clubhead speed and strike quality.

Smash factor

Ball speed divided by clubhead speed. A measure of how much of your swing reached the ball. The driver ceiling is about 1.50 and is set by the rules rather than by physics.

Carry and total

Carry is the distance the ball travels in the air; total includes roll. Club off total from the tee and off carry into a green.

Flex

How much a shaft bends under load, labelled L, A, R, S or X. Not standardised between manufacturers, so the letter is a starting point rather than a specification.

Bend profile

Where along its length a shaft bends. Two shafts of the same weight and flex can bend in different places and produce different flights, which is why flex alone does not describe a shaft.

Swing weight

How head-heavy the club feels when swung, on a lettered scale. Changes whenever length, head weight, shaft weight or grip weight changes.

Bounce

The angle between a wedge's leading edge and the lowest point of its sole. It stops the club digging. Fitted from your attack angle and the turf you play, not from your handicap.

Wrist-to-floor

The distance from the crease at the base of the palm to the floor, standing straight with arms hanging. Drives club length, and combines with height to drive lie angle.

Gapping

The spacing of distances across the fourteen clubs. Good gapping means no distance you cannot cover with a full swing, and no two clubs doing the same job.

Every question, answered by a tool

Each of these takes your own numbers rather than an average. They are listed in the order they are worth reading for a golfer working through a bag from scratch.

Driver

• Why a Slow Swing Speed Needs MORE Driver Loft, Not Less — The instinct is to drop loft for distance. Below 95 mph that is exactly backwards.
• What Loft Driver for a 90 MPH Swing Speed? Run Your Own Numbers — The flagship query. Speed sets the window; attack angle decides where in it you land.
• Is Your Driver Shaft Too Long for Your Height and Strike? — Half an inch off centre costs more ball speed than half an inch of extra arc creates.

Shafts

• What Shaft Flex Do I Need for a 95 MPH Swing Speed? — 95 mph sits on the regular/stiff boundary. Speed alone cannot call it — transition can.
• How Heavy Should Your Shaft Be for Your Swing Speed? — Weight controls the face more than flex does, and almost nobody gets fitted for it.
• Graphite or Steel Iron Shafts: Which One Your Swing Speed Needs — The question is really about weight. Work out the weight first and the material answers itself.
• Do I Need Senior Flex Shafts? — Senior flex is a label rather than a number, and no two manufacturers mean the same thing by it.

Irons & Long Game

• Which Iron Does a Hybrid Actually Replace? Match It by Loft — The number on the sole is marketing. The loft is the club it replaces.
• What Loft Fairway Wood Closes the Gap Above Your Irons? — Most golfers buy a 3-wood by habit and leave a fifteen-yard hole under the driver.
• What Should Your Irons Actually Carry at Your Swing Speed? — Every iron distance chart online assumes lofts you may not own. This one uses yours.
• Lie Angle for a 6-Foot Golfer: Why Height Alone Gets It Wrong — A tool, not an article. The generic answer fails anyone whose proportions are not average.

Wedges

• What Degree Wedges Do I Need? It Depends on Your Pitching Wedge — Nobody can answer this without knowing your set. A 43° PW and a 47° PW need different wedges.
• Where Is the Yardage Hole in Your Wedges? — Four to six degrees is the working window. Most modern bags have one step of nine.
• What Bounce Wedge Do I Need? — Two variables, both of which you can answer without a launch monitor: your divot and your turf.

Distance & Ball Flight

• Ball Speed to Carry Distance: What You Should Be Hitting — The one query in the whole sample where Google declined to generate an AI Overview.
• Carry or Total? Which Number You Should Club Off — Most golfers know their total distance from watching, and their carry not at all.
• Smash Factor: The Number That Explains Your Lost Distance — A strike-quality measurement wearing a physics name. It is worth more than a new driver.
• How Far Should I Hit My 7-Iron? — The average is meaningless without the loft. A 7-iron is 28 degrees in one set and 34 in another.

Full Fitting

• Golf Club Fitting: The Full Bag, Spec by Spec — The long-form reference. Every spec, why it exists, and what changes when you get it wrong.
• How Long Should My Putter Be? — Height charts answer this badly. The measurement that actually sets putter length is wrist-to-floor.

Common questions