12 HANDICAP’S FIRST FITTING // Follower Fitting

In today’s video, Joe takes Tom, a 12-handicap golfer, through his first-ever iron fitting. From testing his current set to exploring new head and shaft combinations, Joe walks him through every step of the process.

If you’ve ever wondered what a proper iron fitting looks like or what it feels like to get dialed in for the first time, this is a great one to watch.

Want to star in a Follower Fitting Video? Drop a comment with your current WITB and which club you’re most eager to replace.

BOOK A FITTING
USA: https://bit.ly/3TtgSli
CANADA: https://bit.ly/41mBbmg

SUBSCRIBE TO THE CHANNEL
https://bit.ly/3TrDLVX

FOLLOW US ON INSTAGRAM
https://bit.ly/48iAyMH

Filmed at: Club Champion HQ in Willowbrook, IL

Yeah, that one looked good. Yeah, very similar numbers. We’re in between two clubs that are producing very, very similarly, right? You have a great problem right now. Which one of these awesome clubs am I going to get? [Music] We got Thomas here. Tom goes by Tom, I take it. Either either or. Okay, so we’re going to do an iron fit on Tom here. He is currently playing Tailor Made M2 irons with some stock trueer 95 g S300 shafts. Okay. Uh Tom, kind of tell me about your game. Yeah, so right now I’m at a a 12 handicap. Uh I play pretty heavy cut, a little bit over the top with the swing, but I’m pretty used to it. Starting to perfect the around the green game a little bit. That’s where I lose a lot of strokes. Normally the irons are pretty decent, but uh a little bit less consistent at the top. Four, five iron. Definitely want to see some improvement there. Okay. So, uh, as far as misses, so if you’re kind of over the top with a fade, is your miss more of a pull or is it more of a big slice? I would say more recently more of a pull. It used to be a really bad slice, but I’m trying to do some stuff with my shoulders on the back swing to kind of help me not come over the top as much. Uh, and so I have noticed a couple draws every once in a while, which is definitely weird, but it kind of means I’m overcorrecting. So, try to get that all dialed in. Okay. Okay. Uh, big thing I like to ask, is there any brands that you for sure want to try that you you’ve, you know, kind of come in? And I want to make sure that you’re hitting stuff that you, you know, that you want to hit. Yeah. Uh, I’ve always liked tailor made and ping. Um, my first irons were some old ping irons that my grandpa had. I feel like a lot of people start that way. Um, and I’ve been playing the the tailor made irons for a while, but I’m really open to anything. I mean, whatever whatever gives me the best results. Perfect. First thing we’re going to do, we’re going to try to fight fit you to the right shaft first. Okay. Shaft is everything. It’s the engine of a club. It’s the only thing that connects your hands to the club face. Okay. So when your swing and your tempo, your ability to square up that face and hit that ball consistently off the sweet spot, it’s all shaft. Once we find the right shaft, we’re going to move on and try different club heads. Okay, you’re in more of a little game improvement iron head here, right? That’s kind of what But you’re a 12 handicap, right? You might have moved out of needing these, right? With game improvement, you you gain a lot of forgiveness, but you you kind of sacrifice consistency with it. Okay. So, we might take a look at uh at other irons that are a little bit less forgiving, but just better for your skill set. Okay. All right. So, go ahead and grab a club out of your bag. Sure. Just start getting loose. But yeah, so obviously everyone wants more power, more distance. The one thing I had to like think about for my long-term game is I’ve already had two back surgeries. Okay. Um I’ve got degenerative disc disease. So, L405. So, I swing harder than I probably should, but Okay. Like if we’re like in between something, I should probably go to like the slower swing speed because I don’t want to like I want to play golf for a long time and I probably shouldn’t be like trying to swing as hard as I can all the time. You know what I’m saying? No, I got you. I got you. That’s actually I’m glad you told me that. Um, how are you towards graphite? I don’t have really any opinions. Uh, I’ve never had graphite irons. I’ve always had steel shaft other than like when I was a kid, maybe. Yeah. All right. So, what we’re going to do here, I’m going to have I just got rid of those warm-up shots. Okay. Uh, you’re nice and loose. You’re nice and warm. What I want you to do is I want you to give me four or five shots. Uh anything bad I’m just going to kind of get rid of. Sure. Okay. It’s not going to be good for the data if you top one, thin one, something like that. Uh I haven’t seen any, so I don’t really expect it. But we’re going to look at what this club does for you on average. Okay. Okay. You already kind of told me what your misses are. So even if I don’t see those, I’m aware of them. Um one question I have is kind of what is your goal here in terms of finding the right irons? Is it distance? Is it consistency? Is it straighter ball flight? Like what are we looking for? I think ball flight would be ideal. Okay. Okay. Normally I play with golfers that are better than me and I’m about a club behind them and I’m perfectly fine with that. Uh so the distance I get on my irons like I don’t know what I just hit that six iron but I think I was like close to 200ish 190ish like that’s perfectly fine with me. So I would say consistency and ball flight. Okay. Little pulley but good contact on the face. Little towy. First thing I like to look at, I mean, if you look over here on the left on the screen there, right, in terms of consistency, right, you’ve got a 205 here that you pulled. You’ve got a 203, then all the way down to 187, right? So, we’re looking at about 15 yards, give or take, right? In terms of your best to your worst. Now, of course, you’ve even got more worst ones here, but I’m not too worried about those right now. Uh, but on shots that you actually squared up on, you got about 15 yards difference. And that’s something that I I kind of expect with that type of iron, okay? Like I said, I mean, obviously, we’re human. We we got to put a good swing on it. But at the same time, the iron needs to to react the same every from shot to shot to shot, right? If you have a force carrier, if you want to pin, you got to know how far it’s going to go. Uh I always like to look at dispersion here. Okay, so you got those two misses here. And then this is, of course, now this is carry distance, okay? This isn’t total. I’m more worried about carry. I want to know how far it’s going to land to. Um and then you’ve got, you know, these right here a little bit to the right, kind of front to back, a couple of yards, what, 5, 10 yards front to back. My job is to try to tighten that up. Okay? I want you to know where the ball’s going to go when you hit it. All right. I mean, irons are scoring clubs, so let’s get it where you know where the ball’s going to go, right? Okay. So, you brought Tailor Made in. I feel like they’ve earned your your loyalty a little bit. So, we’ll start with Tailor Made. Okay. This is a Tailor Made P770. Really good club. Speed slot right here. We see a ton of ball speed and forgiveness. Uh, but it’s not quite like a game improvement iron. Okay. The Qi10, which is the tailor made version, that’s more of a game improvement. Okay. Uh, Project X.io. O 110 g 6.0 which means it’s a stiff shaft. Okay. This is a little bit heavier of a shaft. Yeah. I was going to say is that compared to the other one? Yeah. Then you’re playing your 95, right? But with your swing speed where you’re at, you should be a little bit more than a 95. Okay. Um but we’re going to try to make sure that’s balanced correctly with swing weight so you’re not stressing your back like you were talking. Sure. Okay. Now, do you notice that swing weight’s a little different? It feels a little just heavier at the bottom almost. Exactly. Yeah. So, it’s a little heavier at the bottom there. Uh it might take you a swing or two just to kind of get a feel for that. Yeah, there we go. Go and take a couple more swings. Much better. Very nice. Okay, now you see the consistency in the ball flight here. Yeah. Not pulling it near as much. Right. Right. Not over fading it there. All right. All right, let me see it here. Go ahead and pick that out of your hands here. You swung that just a tad slower. 90 mph on average versus 91 and a half. 91.2. Ball speed came down with that, you know, a couple mish hits here. Get some really good ones. Uh, smash went down. Carry, you know, of course, these numbers over here obviously went down, but Smash came down a little. And we’ve probably got what, four, four bad shots out of six. Yeah. Not quite what I’m looking for, right? So, same club head. We’re going to try a different shaft. This here is a KBS Caper Light 110 stiff. Okay. And remind me again, what was the uh the gram of my current iron? 95 grams was your current irons, right? Okay. So, what what I tend to see is when a a club is too light for someone with swing speeds such as yours, those PJ tour, you know, level there, uh, in terms of speed, it’s uncontrollable, right? It’s it’s just whippy. It’s it’s you just you’re overpowering it and you just really can’t control the face. You don’t know where it’s at. things like that. So, going a little heavier can help stabilize the club throughout the swing path. So, with the the the shafts being at a 110, it’s going to be a little bit heavier, but what we’re trying is is hopefully helping us hit the sweet spot a little bit more, right? Control that club a little bit better. Okay. All right. We’re good to go. KBSC taper light with the Tailor- made P770. Okay. The last one I hit a little towy. It didn’t feel like a guy. Yep. One thing I’m going to do is I’m actually going to go adjust the lie angle right away on this club. Okay. Dynamic lie. Are you familiar with what the lie angle is? I’m not. Every club has a lie angle. The lie angle is when you sit this flat to the ground. It’s this angle right here. Okay. Uh on a sixiron, it’s usually around 62° is that lie angle. So static lie is at a dress. Dynamic lie is when you’re actually hitting the ball. Okay. So at 62 degrees, a club is meant to be hit flat to the ground like this, right? Okay. Now, if you look at your lie, dynamic lie is 69, 68, 69 and a half with those three three different clubs we swung there. Okay? So what that means is you’re hitting it like this. Okay? Right? So that lie angle is a lot higher now. So you’re hitting toe down shots. Yeah. A club is meant to be hit flat because loft of a club will send it up and out. Right? If you do this now, loft is also doing that. So now it’s sending it up and out to the right. Okay? Also, your toe is hitting first and it’s kind of opening the club face a little bit. Yeah, I was going to say I think I hit it a little heel side, but where’d you hit that? A little bit on the heel side. On the heel side. Okay. Oh, yeah. Low heel. Yeah. I mean, the feedback from the face is great because I I feel like I know exactly where I’m missing it. Yeah. Oh, I pulled that, too. Mhm. There we go. Okay, very good. That was okay. Give me one more swing. Let’s do one more. Now that we found that 140 smash, that’s great. Love that. But let’s just I’m again I’m getting ahead of myself a little bit, but the carry distance at 193, spin rate went up to 5,000 with a height of 104. Your height was around little I think a little lower than 80 with your current irons. So Oh, wow. Yeah. 88 with your current irons. You went up to 104 on that one there. Right. So, you’re getting a little bit more height, a little bit more spin. You’re still getting 190 out of it, which is what I expect with 92 milesPH swing speed. Yeah. Um, for all intents and purposes, that right there is a pretty perfect shot. Yeah. Right. As to what a sixiron should be doing for you. Okay. A little bit, but felt still pretty good. Yeah. All right. I’m going to go ahead and just ignore these first two. Right. Okay. Good swing. Oh yeah. Okay, let’s take a look here. How’s that feel to you? The shaft wise, it feels good. It just feels obviously whenever you’re trying something different, the different feels different. Feels different. So, it’s just like I feel like at the top like the weight, it doesn’t feel bad. Just different. So, I just feel like I’ve got to just like kind of adjust for that. I don’t know how else to put that other than Well, that’s and that’s what I was talking about. It can really affect the timing of a swing, right? You’re going to adjust naturally, but if it’s if it’s too off, you can’t adjust and at that point, you’re more inconsistent again, right? That one was pretty good. Got our smash up to 136 with a couple of bad shots. Yeah. Why don’t you go and hand it here? Let’s try another one. This here is a KBS light 100 stiff shaft. All right, let’s swing away. Uh-oh. Man’s a stick. Good shot. Like I would consider that a mishit, right? You didn’t quite hit that just perfect like Yeah, I was going to say I think I hit that. I don’t know if that was the bottom of the face there. Yeah, that one I was harder to tell, but I definitely felt like maybe a little heel side. Oh, it was a little heel side. Just a little heel. Good swing. Yeah. Go and give me one more with that one. I love that. Crushed. All right. All right. So, we’ve got 139 smash, which is exactly what we’re looking for, right? 92 mph swing speed here. Nice light shaft, 128 ball speed, 139 smash. That’s what we’re looking for, right? We want to maintain this. Now, we might question yourself, right? Well, what do we gain, right? Our smash is around the same as it was before, right? So, great smash, great ball speed, like I said, but here’s the kicker, right? It’s that dispersion, right? Now, look at it. So, you got you had some pools over here. We have I didn’t see one pool in these heavier heavier clubs, heavier swing weight, heavier shaft. Mhm. Distance-wise, we’re looking around the same, but that consistency, I mean, you have a missed here. I kept it in there for us, but that dispersion is so much tighter that you know exactly where that’s going to go. Okay. Right. I want to make sure you’re getting great efficiency. Check. And I want to make sure that it’s consistent. And that’s what we’re seeing there. Okay. This one we’re going to try, uh, it’s actually a really cool graphite shaft. It’s called Fujakora Axium. Okay. One of my best friends, his name is Mitch Snder, right? He’s not here today. God rest his soul. He’s not dead either. He’s over there. He’s right in there. He plays Axiom. He kind of turned me on to them. They’re really good shafts. All right. God, I love Mitch. He’s such a great guy. All right. This is an Axiom 105 stiff shaft. Okay. Okay. Yeah. A little bit of a pull on that one. Crushed. I mean, look at everything here. You got 140 smash, 130 ball speed, stopping power of 12 yards. What’ I tell you? 10 to 15. Yeah. 12 yards. Okay. Spin weight went up over 5,000, which is fantastic. Land angle 47.9 almost 48, which is perfect. I mean, those are great numbers. How’s this feel to you? It feels good. I mean, I I don’t think it I wouldn’t say it feels like drastically different from the from the steel shaft. The steel shaft. Yeah. I think it’s a similar weight, but it feels lighter, which is weird. I don’t know if that’s just an like a weird placebo effect. Yeah. From it being the graphite, but I like the consistency is what I like. Yeah. Right. We’re not fading them near as much. Yeah. All right, let’s take a look here. Swung it a little quicker, so maybe there was something to it. It feels a little lighter, right? Uh ball speed at 129, 138 smash, which is really good. Four out of five there. I love that. Carry distance pretty similar. Stopping power very similar. Yeah. And but to me, again, the tiebreaker, it’s going to be this right here. Yeah. Right. You did have a couple more that you pulled a little bit to the left. So, it looks to me like you you hit this one a little straighter. It’s just you do have an over the top swing. Yeah. So, even though you’re swinging it straighter now, you’re pulling it a little more because of your swing path. KBS, you were fading it a little more. So, that’s why you’re getting that land angle just a little bit or that landing zone a little bit closer to the center. What do you like more there? Probably just the the smaller dispersion. Uh, okay. So, that KBS there. Yeah, I I agree. Yeah, I love it. And it’s I mean, it’s bringing it closer to center. We’re not drastically changing your your your ball flight. No. Right. You are a fader of the ball. That’s your swing. Uh, so I’m I’m a big fan of that. All right, let’s move on. Let’s try some heads. This is the Titalist T150. Okay. Okay. All right. Let’s see it, my man. Feels a little heavier. Is it a heavier uh club face? If you say it feels heavier, then it’s heavier, right? Good swing. Okay. That’s a controllable controllable uh fade right there. I love that. Do you feel like you’re hitting it fat on those? A little bit there. Same thing. Yeah. All right. Give it here. All right. This here is a Shrixon ZXi5. Okay. You ever look You ever looked into a Strickson at all? Uh, I’m familiar with the brands. I don’t know their models very well. They have the ZXI line right now, right? ZXI 4, 5, and 7. Okay. The ZXI7 is going to be your more player iron, little thinner. ZXI5 is kind of middle of the road there. It’s player player forgiveness, but still tons of workability. And then your ZXi 44 is going to be more your game improvement. Okay. So, I’ve got you here in the ZXI5. Okay. Little Healy. It’s not caught hazel. What I call it? Elaz. Yeah. El. Yeah. Absolute money. Spin kind of came down though. But again, that’s something I do want to highlight. You hit that high on the face. You hit that a little fat. Still went 188 yards in the air, right? Yeah. Very good. Okay. Spin number still a little low for you. Okay. 137. Still low spin. Yeah. Hander here. I like it. It sounds good. Feels good. You’re getting crazy good numbers out of it. It’s just that spin. Yeah. We don’t want to regress. We’re finding good spin numbers with the P770. So, all right. This here is a Mazuno 245. This here is their uh their pro line. It’s called Mazuno Pros. They got 241, 243, 245. Okay. Uh 241’s are going to be more bladeike, right? 245, you can look at it still a very sleek looking club. Yeah. Right. Thinner top line, thinner, thinner club in general, but tons of ball speed, right, Zuno, let’s do it. Absolutely mushed. Yeah. And you didn’t swing any faster. That was bad. That was just a bad swing. You ever just feel it in the back swing and you just kind of debate even finishing it? And you’re just like, I should probably not swing the club right now, but then you just I’ll work through it, you know? 192. Yeah. All right. You hand it here for me. All right. Let’s take a look here. We got four irons that we just we just hit here. Is there before we move on, is there any other brand you want to try? I would be interested in Ping. Ping. Is there a specific one that you’ve kind of looked at or done a little research on? I don’t know. I think they have like a 200 series 2, but I think that’s more blade i230s is what they have. Um, yeah, we can try those. Absolutely. All right. This is the ping i230. Okay. Okay. Good mit. 183. Yeah. Like it’s not a huge miss. It’s still a miss, right? But that’s a great miss. I mean, yeah, just the trajectory on the miss. Exactly. You’re still down the pipe, right at the pin. You’re just on the front edge now. Sheesh. I think we found a found a contender for the tailor, man. See, man knows what he wants. Can I try the pings? I grew up on them. So, and then I had the R sevens for like a year or two and then I’ve had these since probably 2018. So, all right. Yeah. Love it. A pulley. But, let me see it. Little pull, but not bad. Yeah. 194 on that one. All right. So, right now we’ll do a little we’ll just do a little back and forth, right? We’ll try and then we’ll try ping. They’re giving us very similar numbers, right? Carry is around that 195 number. You’re getting good smash, better land angle, better height, right? And of course, that much better spin. I mean, if you look at compare the spin here, we’re a thousand more than what you started with. Little mis hit, but 190 high on the face. Spin came down a little bit. You still got that carry of one uh 189 with 15 yards of roll out, right? Still really good numbers there. Love the forgiveness. Yeah, not bad. That one fell onto my heels a little bit. So, a little bit right. Yeah. Well, I mean, we’re we’re 63 swings in, right? We’re almost to a full round of golf. So, here, let me see that. Yeah. All right. Here is the ping. Yeah, that one looked good. Yeah, very similar numbers. At this point, what I look at, we’re in between two clubs that are producing very, very similarly. Right. You have a great problem right now. Which one of these awesome clubs am I going to get? There you go. Little mis hit again. Yeah. Really good. So, what are we thinking, my man? I don’t know, man. And it’s really close. Um, I think I’m leaning towards these. It’s something about it just feels like a little bit more weight in the head and it just feels like I’m able to stay on plane a little bit more for whatever reason. But I would Hey, uh, I would agree. Uh, per the numbers. That’s an absolutely great fit for you. Okay, we got this one here. Nice KBS light 100 stiff shaft. Swinging a little quicker here at 93 versus 91. Getting some good ball speed, good smash. Uh 190 carry is what we’re getting here with about 12 13 yards of roll out. Much better than the 20 yards. Okay. We’re getting higher spin, higher height, better land angle, and that’s what’s creating that. Okay. Mhm. So, here we are. So, these are the two times you hit the ping dispersion down the middle. Nice and tight. I love it. Couple of mis hits of course here, but I mean, I’m loving this. This is what I like to see. Okay. One thing you might notice, and it kind of stands out, is your carry is actually a little bit more with with your irons. And again, like I said earlier, those are game improvement irons that are meant for ball speed. So I I I expected this ball speed out of it with your your skill level, but with that spin, that’s all it’s doing. Spin is not spin is it can hurt you and help you, right? Too much spin gets eaten up in the air and it doesn’t go as far. Too little spin will just fly and fly and fly and go a little That’s why with drivers, we’re trying to hit low spin. Right. Right. So with that amount of spin, that’s why we’re seeing uh more carry distance numbers, but also more roll out numbers. Yeah. Right. And then of course you didn’t have that consistency with the dispersion here. Big pulls over here which we didn’t see once with any of these irons, right? A little bit heavier of a of a swing weight, nice light shaft kind of protect that back like you said. Are you okay with a little less distance? No. And like I said from the beginning, I’m not too worried about the distance part and especially with something like a sixiron where, you know, traditionally I would have it roll out a bit. You know, having that stopping power on on an iron like that is obviously great. So yeah, we lost about 5 yards of carry distance, but what we gained in dispersion and consistency and that stopping power, money, absolute money. Yeah, I love it. Great. So yeah, so we found the right irons. There we are. Uh we’re going to go four iron down to the the utility wedge. The gap wedge there comes in a 50°. So after this, let’s take a look at some wedges. See if we can’t get you gapped properly. Uh and making sure that it’s consistent with the irons that you just got fit to. Okay, cool. Sounds great. Thanks for watching everyone. Please hit the like and subscribe button below and check out the channel.