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Golf Lesson #4: Game Improvement Golf Clubs

In the 1980's, huge improvements were made in golf club design and construction. Most of those improvements increased both forgiveness (the ability of the golf club to compensate for swing error — and the golf ball to go straighter) and distance (the ability of the golf club to hit harder — and the golf ball to go farther). The object of the game is to hit straighter and farther, so golf clubs designed to do that are called Game Improvement golf clubs. The primary characteristics of game improvement clubs are perimeter weighting, large sweet spot and low center of gravity design.

To contrast, there actually are golf clubs that are not designed as game improvement golf clubs. Those are used by professional golfers who always hit the ball straight — so, they don't care about forgiveness — they just want distance. If we could always hit the ball straight, we wouldn't care about forgiveness either. But hey, we have day jobs and other things that take up our time, so we need every advantage we can get for the hours we have left to play golf. Blade irons are a good example of a non-forgiving club. A professional level golfer likes blade irons, because they can "shape the shot" to go around the tree. Forgiving irons tend to "correct the shot", so they can't shape the shot as well as blade irons, but they sure can hit the ball straighter, if you miss-hit the shot. Professional golfers don't care much about miss-hits. We do.

Perimeter Weighting

Perimeter weighting means that the weight of the golf club head is positioned around the perimeter of the golf club instead of at the center. As we said above, if you always hit the ball dead center perfect, you would want a small sweet spot and no perimeter weighting so you could put as much physical mass directly behind the impact point of the ball. This would make a very long shot. However, if you are off — even just a millimeter — your shot will go astray. We don't make clubs that do that. By perimeter weighting our golf clubs, we maximize forgiveness. We do have designs with greater and lesser emphasis on perimeter weighting — but all of our golf clubs are perimeter weighted.

Large Sweet Spot

A large sweet spot is generally created by perimeter weighting design. The sweet spot is the optimum place to make contact with the ball. The larger the sweet spot, the greater room for swing error. But designing for the largest sweet spot can leave less room to correct other common swing errors. Perimeter weighting can be shifted to cure toe-miss-hits and to help get the ball up in the air.

For example, certain irons designs are heavily toe-weighted, meaning the weight of the club is heavier at the toe of the club head, to decrease club twisting from severe miss-hits off the toe of the golf club. Ping Golf is most famous for this in their designs for the Ping Zing. This idea cures one very important problem — toe hits and twisted shots, but may decrease the overall size of the sweet spot. Increased toe-weighting can stress the shaft and increase golf shaft breakage. There is a fine balance in club design between doing a good thing and doing too much of a good thing.

Another example of using perimeter weighting to solve a problem is the low center of gravity designs of Callaway Golf. Callaway Golf iron designs tend to shift weight to solve the problem of getting the ball up in the air, but may decrease the sweet spot size. However, take heart — we are talking about fractions of millimeters of sweet spot size here, not inches.

Low Center of Gravity

Recently, low center of gravity (LCG) has become a favored design concept. This means shifting weight to the bottom of the club to increase the ability to hit the ball up into the air. If you don't have a problem getting the golf ball off the ground, then LCG should be less important to you. It you have a big problem in this area then LCG matter a lot. Golf clubs with tungsten inserts focus on LCG, because tungsten is heavier than steel and allows the club to have even more weight where it counts.

To conclude, our overall goal is to have a large sweet spot and also solve some other common swing problems. Certain designs of the famous name manufacturers may orient more towards solving one problem than another, and certain designs provide a very balanced approach. Pinemeadow Golf aims to be a smart follower and take advantage of the best thinking out there in the golf world, apply those concepts to our products. All our designs focus on game improvement. We want you to hit the golf ball both straight and far.

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