Golf fairway fitting is essential for game improvement. Most golfers have difficulty with their fairway metals. The shaft is long, the ball must be swept off the ground and the distance the ball travels amplifies small errors. All of this is made more difficult by the inexpensive shaft found in most off the rack fairways. Professional golfers use premium driver shafts in their fairways. They fit the hardest club in the bag to hit with the same quality shafts they use in their drivers. It is little wonder that the typical fairway I see, which was purchased for less than the cost of a decent shaft, delivers inconsistent results. For most of us, finding that great shaft fit is not something that needs to happen more than once. We might change fairway heads on that shaft, but the investment in a great fairway shaft is a long term benefit. Quite often we can simply upgrade the shaft on your fairway head.

Contemporary fairway heads incorporate much of the technology found in driver heads. The smaller size of the faces limit the size of the sweet spot, but the best new fairway heads maximize what can be done. Most fairy heads have a sole “slot”. Like the slot in hot face irons, the slot increases the flexibility of the bottom of the face. This increases the sweet spot of the face, enhancing low face impact ball speed. This is especially important in fairway and hybrid heads where low face impacts are common.

Many inexpensive fairway shafts have soft tips designed to add launch. However soft tip shafts droop and twist losing control the the head. The centrifugal force of the swing “droops” the head down. If this is uncontrolled or inconsistent you will have a difficult time sweeping the ground with a fairway head. As a consequence, it is difficult to develop a consistent swing. This is masked when fitting off a matt. You should always do golf fairway fittings off the turf.