Fooling a Golf Club Fitting Scale, or Scaling a Golf Club Fitting Fool?

A poster on the Worrisome Reasonless Xenogolf website forum having a member name of Saint John states that he buys into the “grip end only fools the scale” school regarding the golf club specification of swingweight or swing weight, yet when he actually tried to put that theory into practice it did not work. There is no big surprise here, where yet another golfer is unfortunately gullible enough to apparently believe that most people posing as so-called clubfitting experts or educators on that and other similar forum sites are actually qualified enough to do so (which they are not). But here is a little more accurate information for Saint John.

Yes, you are missing something. People stating that grip weight changes only fool the swingweight scale have no idea what they are talking about, and you have been attending an inferior clubfitting “school” so to speak.

That is the kind of garbage routinely handed out and/or spread by unqualified clubfitters and so-called clubfitting educators that sadly gets into the heads of and is believed by poor gullible golfers. And when such golfers eventually get so frustrated or discouraged trying to apply such technically incorrect information as provided to them by the inept clubfitting trade, many follow the scores of others that have and continue to forsake the game.

As you have discovered through first-hand experience, swingweighting continues to work extremely well for the majority of golfers (especially more experienced players). And on the surface it appears the specification works for you (because admittedly it does not work exactly as intended for a fair number of golfers). For such players, the only swingweight value that really matters is the swingweight of the totally completed club, with its grip installed, and exactly the way a swingweight scale measures the specification. (There can be limitations and the finer details are more complex than this, but they are not difficult to comprehend when taught correctly from the ground up).

The game grew like crazy when that was the prevailing theory (because it happens to be fundamentally correct). Yet even with the addition of extensive computer and launch monitor use now, the clubfitting industry overall has regressed substantially backward in both success and reputation in recent decades. This is predominantly due to numerous incorrect (and sometimes downright absurd) clubfitting theories and practices developed and/or further spread by certain individuals and/or institutions that have become rather infamously associated with the clubfitting industry.

While some of these horrifically poor and/or invalid clubfitting theories and practices have been somewhat recently developed, many have been in existence since long before computers and launch monitors ever came into being. And as is typically the case with such devices, when you put garbage data into them (like testing club specifications based on a belief that grip weight changes are irrelevant with respect to the true swingweight of a golf club), you will get nothing but garbage data and results out of them.

The clubfitting industry as a whole has become an embarrassing laughingstock, and this rotten branch of the game continues to weigh extremely heavily on and drag down the entire golf industry. You need to quickly find yourself a different clubfitting “school” to attend or someone like a qualified clubfitting consultant to help you navigate through the incompetent mess that calls itself the golf club fitting trade. Because if you continue to believe that grip-side weight changes have no effect on the true swingweight of a golf club, I guarantee that you will be more prone to becoming the next casualty that abandons the game, and with very good reason.