Do you know how far you hit each club in your golf bag?
Unfortunately the answer is no for way too many golfers, including for whom I would consider serious golfers. The only thing worse than not knowing your yardages is if you “think” you do, but you don’t.
Being able to predict how far you are going to hit every club in your bag is an obvious advantage for any skill level. If only it were as easy as just knowing the yardage, picking the corresponding club, and having the ball automatically go there, golf would become a much simpler game.
What makes mastering your yardage so difficult are all the variables that go in to what makes a ball fly any certain distance. External variables such as wind, elevation, and your lie can all have serious effects on your distance. Internal factors like your swing speed, quality of contact, and impact geometry make guessing your yardages even more unpredictable.
Several years ago I had the opportunity to spend about a week in Phoenix, AZ at the headquarters of Ping Golf. In their testing facility they house one of the most famous swing robots in the world, named Ping Man. This robot is capable of producing the exact same swing every single time. However, after watching shot after shot, I noticed that every ball landed somewhere different (although very slightly) every single time. If a robot can’t make the ball go the exact same yardage every time, it’s fair to say we won’t either.
Now that we know how hard it is to accurately predict your yardages, what are some things you can do to get as close as possible?
The bottom line… get a launch monitor.
Trackman is the hands down leader in the golf industry for measuring club and ball data. But unless you want to spend $25k, I’d recommend something else. The Bushnell LaunchPro is a $3k option that (so far) has proven to me that it can display club data and (predicted) ball flight data as good as Trackman. Another unit called Flightscope Mevo+ has shown some good signs of quality data as well.
Units like Trackman and Flightscope, in their outdoor versions, are using doppler radar to actually follow the ball after it is hit. External factors like wind and elevation are automatically factored in. However, I believe that including these external factors confuse many players when they’re trying to get accurate distances. (You can tell these units to ignore these factors by “normalizing” the numbers).
When trying to learn your yardages, I find it much easier and less confusing to do this with as little external interference as possible. Therefore having a launch monitor that accurately predicts the carry distance of your shots is all you need to learn your yardages. Once you see your average carry distance for a particular club, you can take that knowledge to the course and then factor how the external factors will calculate to that particular shot.
Not intersted in spending a few grand on a launch monitor? Sign up for a session with me at the High Performance Golf Academy and in 45 minutes we can go through your bag and begin learning your yardages.
Below are two launch monitors not named Trackman that are a little more affordable and provide reliable carry distance data:
