What Goes Into A Ping Custom Fitting?

When you’re spending your hard-earned cash on new clubs, it’s important to know that you’re making the right decisions. The simplest way to do that is to have a custom fitting to ensure you identify the clubs, specifications and total bag set-up that will optimise your strengths, minimise your weaknesses, and help take your performance and enjoyment to the next level.

Ping is one of the very best when it comes to offering a range of clubs to suit all kinds of golfers, and helping you find the right equipment. In this article and video, Paul Rymer, a supervisor at Ping’s state-of-the-art European Fitting Centre in Gainsborough, and an experienced fitter who has spent years working on Tour and fitting handicap golfers, describes what goes into a market-leading Ping custom fitting.

What does a full Ping fitting involve?

“We want to see what you do with your clubs, so we’ll measure the loft and lie of your 7-iron, then get some shot data with to see what you’re doing. It might be that you hit them well and we’re not needing to do an awful lot of change, it might be that we can see a lot of inconsistencies that we can really dial into to get you hitting the ball as well as you can.

“It starts with what you as a golfer feel like you want to get from a new set of clubs. Do you feel like you’re losing a little bit of distance? Are you missing greens with a 7-iron? Are you trying to get a more consistent ball flight? There are lots of things that we would look at, and lots of questions we’re going to ask you about what you want to achieve with your new clubs.”

What order do you look at the clubs in, and why?

“I like to do the irons first, then look at driver, and then fill the middle in where we go from driver to your longest iron. Then do the wedges, and then have a look at the putter. Whatever shaft we fit you in the irons is a little bit of a clue with where we would start with driver, but until we see you hit the driver, we always keep a very open mind, whether that’s on loft, shaft, weight or flex. But irons are a good clue as to where we’re going to start.”

How do you decide which clubs to use between driver and longest iron?

“Ping Co-Pilot is going to help us with that. A few questions around the golf course you play, a lot of it comes down to whether you can reach par-5s in two, length of your par-3s, the size of the greens. That will all come into it and help us decide if you need a long iron, hybrid or lofted fairway wood. If you’re someone who plays on a links course, the chances of you needing a 9-wood are pretty slim, because the wind is going to blow a lot. Likewise, if you play on an inland parkland course where you might have a lot of par-3s around 170 or 180 yards then a 9 or 7-wood is going to be a great club to hit into those.

“We’re always asking questions, because the Co-Pilot might say you should have a 4-iron, but how often are you going to use it? Do we need to swap that out for something like a hybrid that you might get more benefit from. The Co-Pilot has a great gapping app that allows us to swap clubs in and out, depending on what you as a player need or what the data tells us.”

What are the keys to a good wedge fitting?

“With the wedges, we always start with the most lofted first and ask a lot of questions around what you do with that club, what you do around the greens and how you play certain shots. I’d say that’s a bit less data driven, and we’d be out on the short game area giving you six or seven different types of shots to see how you play them. Some people play everything around the green with a lob wedge, a lot of people tend to use a 54° or 56°. There are a lot of questions around the conditions you play in, whether it’s tight fairways or does it get very wet in the winter.”

How do you make a putter fitting more scientific?

“Putter fittings are a lot to do with your arc type, closing angle, how you aim the putter and deliver loft, and your tempo. We have an app that looks at all that and gives you a putting handicap, which is a consistency score. Then we start looking at what we do with different toe hangs, or lengths or whether you need a mallet or a blade. You’ve got to like what you’re looking at and then we build it around there, whether you want a mallet or a blade.”