Fitted Up

Today I took a half day from work and went to Mizuno’s National Fitting Centre in New Malden. It’s a free service provided for people looking for a new set of clubs, which is a very good service of Mizuno, as they could easily charge £50 upwards for the service.
I went in and was invited to hit balls for 15 minutes or so with my own 6 iron to warm up, then we used various tools to analyse different measurements.

One that can be decided without hitting a ball is the length of the club. This is done by standing up straight with arms at sides, measuring the knuckle to floor distance and plotting it against a chart. I came out absolutely standard.
Attaching a device to the shaft of a 6 iron and hitting a few balls gave quite a few readings. The first was an average (and very consistent for each shot) swing speed of 82mph. I was quite surprised and pleased by how fast this was, my dad was recently measured and came out with 68mph, tour pros are in the region of 90-95mph.
Shaft flex, and transition (from backswing to downswing), were both right in the middle, indicating that my tempo is neither slow nor fast. Very pleased with this.
Release timing; very early. Basically, I break my wrists too early, which causes a loss of power. I’ve tried breaking my wrists later, but I find I can’t control the ball so well, in fact most of the time I don’t know where it’s going.

These readings gave recommended shafts, and I then hit several balls with each of the shafts. I was surprised by the difference in results that different shafts gave. Shaft 1 gave an average distance of 161.6 yards, compared with 144.5yds with Shaft 2 and 148.3yds with Shaft 3. That is quite a big difference. Shafts 2 and 3 also had much less ball speed and way more side spin. Shaft 2, which had a lighter shaft, gave a ridiculous amount of side spin which would have given me a huge slice.
Having decided on the shaft, we then checked the lie of the club at impact, and to my surprise it much pretty much in the middle of the club. Another pleasing result.

After all was said and done, we settled on standard length, standard loft, standard lie, with stiff shafts. With the results being so standard, these could have been bought off the shelf, however I feel a lot more confident knowing that the clubs I get will absolutely fit my swing and body shape.
I also decided to take their Fli-Hi 3 iron, which is not quite a 3-iron, not quite a hybrid, more like a driving iron. I only hit about 10 balls with it but it felt absolutely fantastic.

Overall, it was a very enlightening experience. It was very thorough, I learnt that I hit the ball differently from how I thought I did, and although it wasn’t a lesson, the data it provided has given me some hints on what I need to work on. One thing I was astounded by was the difference between range balls and real golf balls. I previously knew that range balls weren’t as good, but to hit 2 shots in succession, one with a range ball and then one with a real ball, the difference in ball flight was absolutely astonishing. I would recommended everyone to be custom fit for irons, if you are going to play many hundreds of rounds with these clubs, it makes sense to get ones that are right for you.

In other news, I did get the “call” (email actually) from the Craws Nest Tassie, I made it into the tournament, all I have to do now is phone them, pay the £185 entry fee, and book my practice round time.

Also, when I was at the golf club today, it looks like it’s still going to be a while longer before I’m able to start talking about actually playing golf. The photo left shows the 18th, 9th and 7th greens. I think that all this snow may make the course a lot better when it comes to summer, it’s a bit annoying for all those people who are desperate to play in January though.