Why Are Golf Clubs Progressively Shorter Golf Tip (Video) - by Pete Styles
Why Are Golf Clubs Progressively Shorter Golf Tip (Video) - by Pete Styles

I remember one of the first golf lessons I ever taught, it was about 15 years ago, but this lesson really stuck out in my head. There's been something a bit more memorable. What happened is I gave the lady the 7-iron that we normally give people on the first ever lesson and she played with that for a few weeks, and then came the next lesson and I said, “Okay, this time we’re going to try something different, there's a pitching wedge.” And she looked at me and said, “Well, why is it shorter to the other one?” And it kind of struck me that I’ve always known that golf clubs are of different lengths and I always know why they’re different lengths but from an outsider’s perspective as a beginner like she was, she just thought it was just confusing. She had just learned to get the right distance from the ball, the right swing height, she was clipping the 7-iron away really nicely, and suddenly I gave her something that was two inches shorter and she had to make all these adjustments. You have to stand nearer, you have to move the ball position, she felt like she had to swing lower, and then again two weeks later guess what? I gave her a bigger golf club and suddenly she had to stand further back and she had to get further away from it. So why don’t we have a full set of golf clubs that are all exactly the same size?

It would make it easier in terms of being consistent. You could always stand in the same place; you could always swing it the same height, the vertical issues of hitting the ball at the top and the bottom would probably disappear. Because all the clubs will be the same 14 swings all exactly the same. But what you would find a very, very big difference in is how far the shots would go. You can see I’ve got two golf clubs here. I’ve got my longest golf club, I got my shortest golf club. So this is my lob wedge and this is my driver. And simply by swinging the longer club head that club head is going to travel far faster than a lob wedge. If I measure my driver swing it travels about 110 miles an hour. If I measure my lob wedge swing it travels about 85 to 90 miles an hour. So a massive difference not because of necessarily the weight or anything like that just simply the length of the club head. So the length of the shaft, sorry that would make the club head swing a lot quicker. You could imagine if you stood there with a 20-foot long cane right out here and swing it round your body, that club head would be moving incredibly quickly. So when you make a golf swing, the length of the shaft is going to dictate the club head to a certain degree. It also therefore dictates the level of control that you have and actually having something that’s longer gives you a lot less control. That’s why when we go down to the shorter shots that produce shorter distances, we want more control out of this. Likewise your putter could be the shortest club in the whole bag because it’s not about hitting it a long way, it’s about hitting at a controlled fashion. And then as we look at the irons progressively each iron steps about half an inch. So it’s half an inch longer as you go through your bag. That would equate to a one or two miles an hour of club head speed and that would equate for some of the distances that we see differ. So most irons are half an inch different in length, three and a half to four degrees difference in loft and about 10 to 12 yards difference out there in terms of the distance you’re hitting them. So when you’re looking at a set of golf clubs, we don’t just have to look at whether the shortest club or the longest club is the right length for you. But can you manage with quite a short wedge, quite a long three or four iron and a very long driver. Interestingly drivers are now capped at a certain limit you can’t go more than a 45 inch driver. So a 45 inch driver tends to give us plenty of distance and it’s difficult enough to control if you were to go out to a 50-55 inch driver, you’d find that when you hit it, it goes for miles but you’d never hit it consistently enough and straight enough. So it’s an interesting question why are golf clubs different in lengths? From an outsider’s perspective maybe they should all be the same length but as golfers we know that the change in the length and the change in the loft all goes to make up the different shots that we need to hit out on the golf course. 2014-03-28

I remember one of the first golf lessons I ever taught, it was about 15 years ago, but this lesson really stuck out in my head. There's been something a bit more memorable. What happened is I gave the lady the 7-iron that we normally give people on the first ever lesson and she played with that for a few weeks, and then came the next lesson and I said, “Okay, this time we’re going to try something different, there's a pitching wedge.” And she looked at me and said, “Well, why is it shorter to the other one?” And it kind of struck me that I’ve always known that golf clubs are of different lengths and I always know why they’re different lengths but from an outsider’s perspective as a beginner like she was, she just thought it was just confusing. She had just learned to get the right distance from the ball, the right swing height, she was clipping the 7-iron away really nicely, and suddenly I gave her something that was two inches shorter and she had to make all these adjustments. You have to stand nearer, you have to move the ball position, she felt like she had to swing lower, and then again two weeks later guess what? I gave her a bigger golf club and suddenly she had to stand further back and she had to get further away from it. So why don’t we have a full set of golf clubs that are all exactly the same size?

It would make it easier in terms of being consistent. You could always stand in the same place; you could always swing it the same height, the vertical issues of hitting the ball at the top and the bottom would probably disappear. Because all the clubs will be the same 14 swings all exactly the same. But what you would find a very, very big difference in is how far the shots would go. You can see I’ve got two golf clubs here. I’ve got my longest golf club, I got my shortest golf club. So this is my lob wedge and this is my driver. And simply by swinging the longer club head that club head is going to travel far faster than a lob wedge. If I measure my driver swing it travels about 110 miles an hour. If I measure my lob wedge swing it travels about 85 to 90 miles an hour. So a massive difference not because of necessarily the weight or anything like that just simply the length of the club head. So the length of the shaft, sorry that would make the club head swing a lot quicker. You could imagine if you stood there with a 20-foot long cane right out here and swing it round your body, that club head would be moving incredibly quickly.

So when you make a golf swing, the length of the shaft is going to dictate the club head to a certain degree. It also therefore dictates the level of control that you have and actually having something that’s longer gives you a lot less control. That’s why when we go down to the shorter shots that produce shorter distances, we want more control out of this. Likewise your putter could be the shortest club in the whole bag because it’s not about hitting it a long way, it’s about hitting at a controlled fashion. And then as we look at the irons progressively each iron steps about half an inch. So it’s half an inch longer as you go through your bag. That would equate to a one or two miles an hour of club head speed and that would equate for some of the distances that we see differ. So most irons are half an inch different in length, three and a half to four degrees difference in loft and about 10 to 12 yards difference out there in terms of the distance you’re hitting them.

So when you’re looking at a set of golf clubs, we don’t just have to look at whether the shortest club or the longest club is the right length for you. But can you manage with quite a short wedge, quite a long three or four iron and a very long driver. Interestingly drivers are now capped at a certain limit you can’t go more than a 45 inch driver. So a 45 inch driver tends to give us plenty of distance and it’s difficult enough to control if you were to go out to a 50-55 inch driver, you’d find that when you hit it, it goes for miles but you’d never hit it consistently enough and straight enough.

So it’s an interesting question why are golf clubs different in lengths? From an outsider’s perspective maybe they should all be the same length but as golfers we know that the change in the length and the change in the loft all goes to make up the different shots that we need to hit out on the golf course.