Measuring Your Club Distances

Over the course of the golf season, each month in this column we will be sharing ideas to help improve your golf game without changing your golf swing. By implementing our advice each month, you will see improvement in your game and lower scores.

One of the easiest ways to improve scoring is to have a true understanding of how far you hit each club. Far too often, golfers base the yardage of a club by the best shot or longest shot they have hit with that club rather than average distance the club goes. Most golfers base their club selection on hitting the perfect shot, not their average shot.

To learn how accurate the knowledge of your yardages are, track all of your approach shots over the course of 5-10 rounds. Chart where each shot finishes. Do the shots that were not on the green finish short, long, right or left of the green? Most people would find that the majority of greens that they don’t hit in regulation finish short of the green.

If you find that the majority of your missed greens are shots that end up short, the distances that you believe you hit your clubs is probably not realistic.

The best way to learn your distances is to hit shots on a launch monitor such as TrackMan or the Foresight GC Quad. Hit a series of 5-10 shots with each club in your bag. Any shots that are big outliers can be thrown out, but to get a true picture of your distances you should utilize all the shots.

Once you have collected the data, look at the average carry, the average total, and the high end and low end of carry and total distance. This will give you the dispersion with each club and make your decision-making process with club selection much more accurate. Adjustments need to be made for factors such as elevation, wind, temperature, and firmness of greens, but it you utilize the averages, the number of greens that you hit in regulation will definitely increase.

The biggest influence on scoring is the number of greens a player hits is regulation. By having realistic expectations of the distances we hit our clubs, we will hit more greens and shoot lower scores!