The 6 Signs You Need New Clubs

Right, so as we all know, golf is hard

so you don't want to make it any harder by using the wrong equipment

Well, stay with me, because in this video, I'm gonna show you how to spot a few telltale signs

that the equipment you're using might actually be hurting your score. That's a nice looking shot

Okay, so I'm going to go and get my divot. Obviously, I'm going to repair this divot because that's good etiquette

But one thing I want you to do is when you are repairing divots, don't miss out on a good

opportunity to learn a little bit about your golf equipment. If you come down here and take a look, looking at my divot here, that's exactly what I would

want to see. It's about a dollar in length and it's very even side to side

So I'm really pleased with that. That gives me the indication that my club

now I'll tidy it up, gives me the indication that my club is soiling out correctly on the floor

from a lie angle point of view. So wherever I'm presenting that face, I'm gonna get a true reflection

in terms of its launch direction of how this club should play. However, when you look down and see your divots

if they look a little bit like this, chances are you need to go to your local pro

and get your lie angles checked out. If you're looking at a divot that's got a little bit more depth on one side to the other

that's quite noticeable there's a very good chance your lie angles are inaccurate. Furthermore if

they look like this, this kind of skinny sliver that's another really good indication that your

lie angle may not be where you want to be. That's going to affect your launch direction and as such

it's going to affect your dispersion so make sure you don't fall foul of that little telltale sign

So here's another telltale sign that your equipment choices might actually be hurting

your game and it's problem holes do you have that one hole on your course or a course that you visit

that's always that card record you can't seem to get through it well for me here at the caversham

the 16th is one of those every time i've come here i've had a little bit of a problem so looking down

the fairway there got a bunker right in the middle of the fairway in fact we've got a couple but the

first one is the one that causes me problems from this particular tee it's about 280 to 285 to get

passed that's a Sunday best driver for me in terms of carry so if there's any headwind at all

I'm struggling to make that carry if I then go down to three wood well three which is going to

go straight into it it's right at my carry distance of around 260 so that's a bit of a problem club so

if I want to hit big clubs on this hole I'm going to have to go left or right at those bunkers which

brings a little bit of jeopardy into play of the hedges on the right and left of the fairway

now ordinarily when I've come here I would go from driver three would down to my four iron and

and hitting a four iron off a hole of this length would just leave me too far in and

make my second shot become a problem. So what I do when I play here and when I study golf

courses before I go and play them is look for holes like this be it with a problem in the middle of the fairway or a dog leg that you going to run out of room with certain clubs and make sure you got a club that will cover the distance you need so for example here i pop in my driving iron which gets me around 250 yards from the tee

so i'm laying up short of that bunker i'm taking that hazard out of play entirely even if i hit my

very very best shot but i'm not leaving myself too far in so make sure you're not making those

mistakes on the golf course make sure you've got the equipment the bag set up to cover the problem holes and the things that could trip you up

Right so you might think there's not much can go wrong with your equipment in your short game

your chipping and your pitching but truth be told you'd be wrong. I see a lot of mistakes here

particularly with people like myself we play a lot of golf in the UK I think we've arguably got

the most changeable ground conditions of any golfers out there in the summer we've all seen

it we can play it off bare hard pan that feels like playing off the motorway now we're here in

november at the beautiful caversham golf club there's been a bit of rainfall the ground gets

a little bit softer and that demands a little bit more precision in strike and it demands some

thoughts on the equipment you're using so i've got a little 50 yard pitch shot here i'm on a

relatively tight bit of fairway but it's quite soft underfoot now i've got a six degree bounce

Callaway wedge here which is quite a low bounce wedge now if I just play this shot

I mean I've struck that quite well I've got away with that reasonably well there but when you've

got a low bounce wedge like this when you've just got six degrees of bounce on the sole

in soft conditions it puts a real premium on your strike if I hit that a millimetre fat there's a

very good chance it would only get halfway to the hole so when the ground gets a little bit softer

it's really worth considering going up to a higher bounce wedge. Now, a lot of you might be thinking

well, I don't want to buy two wedges. I don't want to have two wedges hanging about. In truth

that would be my preference, and that's something that I do, but I get my equipment free as a tester

so I understand your point there. So if you don't want to do that, I think there's another good

option, and this is funnily enough what Scotty Scheffler does. So Scheffler has a very, very low

bounce lob wedge, so 60 degrees, around four degrees of bounce, but then he goes up his next

wedge is a 56 degree but he's more into double figures of bounce here so I've got a 54 degree here

at 14 degrees of bounce so the angle gets a lot steeper between the back edge and the leading edge

that back edge acts like a little bit of a rudder through the soft turf and gives you that little

bit more margin for error yes you might have to play a few shots with a slightly different loft

to what you might be used to however I think it's worth it for that extra insurance from the sole

Now this counts for bunkers as well. We all know wet sand and dry sand and fine sand and coarse sand

if you're playing different courses, reacts differently. So if you've got a couple of different options in your wedge arsenal

that's really a good way to beat those changeable conditions. Right, I hope you're enjoying the video. If you are, if you could just hit that like button and subscribe to the channel

that really helps us out And get in the comments down below Let me know if you made any horror equipment errors that have affected your game

Okay, well that was annoying and it's all too familiar. Does that happen to you? You think

you've hit a good putt from long to mid-range, it just pulls up five to six feet short. Well

there is obviously a potential for human error here whereby you're just not hitting it hard

enough or your speed control is not good enough but it could also be a telltale sign that your

putter's not set up correctly for you and specifically I'm talking about your loft here

It is crucial to get your loft on your putter to match your stroke type and the conditions you're

playing on. So for example if you have too much loft on your putter the ball can come off with a

little bit too much backspin and skid too much and it won't reach the full potential of its roll

distance. Similarly if you don't have enough loft on your putter the ball can get stuck in the grass

it doesn't get above the grass quick enough on the green and start rolling which again will rob

the ball of energy and come up short so keep an eye out if you are consistently coming up short

it's worth getting your putter loft checked and I've got a very easy way to do this on your own

with just yourself and your iPhone. So what you want to do is you want to get your phone out

set it up rest it against two tee pegs face on to where you're putting if you can put a cross or a

line on your ball with a sharpie pen facing that camera what you'll notice is when you go

in slow motion film it in slow motion if that cross or the line that you put on the ball is

staying very much in the orientation it was in for the first foot or so of its roll the chances are

your loft's in a good place so you don't need to worry and you can blame your lack of ability and

lack of speed control for coming up short however if you see that ball oscillating backwards and the

cross rotating like it's got backspin there could be a very good chance you've got too much loft on

your putter and that's something you'll need to address and you'll also see if you've got too

little loft you'll probably see the orientation of the cross moving a little bit but moreover

you'll see the ball bouncing a little bit through the grass before it sets off on a true roll so

this is a really good way of getting to grips getting a feel of if you have got your loft

right it's worth checking before you start blaming yourself for your lack of ability

I thought that was a good swing and it's just set off wonky. Have you ever been in that situation where you think you're putting good swings on your iron shots

but they're just not starting off in the direction that you were expecting them to

You're looking up and it's coming out of a different window. Well, that can be another telltale sign of an incorrect lie angle

So essentially what we want when we come into impact is this club's soling out flush to the ground

because then the loft points exactly where the face is pointing. And what I mean by that is you could come in with a perfectly square club face

but if your lie angle's wrong and you're two-toe up, so you can see if this clubface is pointing squarely

at the camera and it's sold out flat on the ground without opening or closing the clubface at all

If I just get the lie angle wrong, you can see how that loft's now pointing off to the left there for me or if the lie angle two down it pointing off to the right So getting your lie angle is absolutely crucial to getting that start direction right on your golf ball and a good way you can check whether you in a good place is if you grab a golf ball

one of your practice balls and a sharpie pen and also if you've got one of these line me up things

that can be really useful but it doesn't necessarily need that pop that on your golf ball

pop a nice fresh sharpie line on that golf ball then if you just get in behind set it up so that

golf ball is nice and vertical on the ground where you're going to strike it

and then relatively soon after that you get in there and you strike that golf ball because that's fresh on the tape you want to come in a bit closer here

I've hit it out the heel but you can see how almost perfectly vertical that is for me so I

know these lie angles for me are really really good if you see any of this left to right tilt

on that line that's left on the club base then you know you've probably got some lie angle issues

which are affecting your start direction so you need to get into the pro shop and have a chat to

your local pro about getting that fixed. While we're on the putting green I want to talk about

another aspect of the putter that might be costing you strokes and it's to do with the alignment

We see so many different alignment cues available today from two balls, from top lines, from flange

lines to dots to no lines. So how do you know which one's right for you? Well there's a few

ways you can go about this. Probably the most prudent way is to go and book a fitting with

your pro who will put you on something like a Quintic or a Sam PuttLab, something like that

and can actually quantifiably measure which putters you aim better than others

If you haven't got access to that, however, it's very easy to get on a putting green

maybe go into your pro shop and ask if you can just borrow a couple of putters. You don't even have to hit any putts with these, so don't make your pro worry about that

But what you can do, take a friend out to the putting green, get them to take their phone with them

get yourself set up over a 6 to 10 foot putt, relatively straight, and aim bang at the centre of the hole

So get different alignment aids, put the first one down and get yourself aiming bang at what you think square to the centre of the hole is

When you say go, they take a picture. Refer to that picture and go and see how close to centre you are

Then move to another style of alignment aid, whether it was a top line to start with, move to a flange line, then move to the two ball, then move to a dart, then move to no alignment aids

And just cross-reference how well you line those clubs up. It's not a perfect science, but it will give you a really good indication of what style of putter

works better for you for your eyes because we're all very very different. Make sure you're checking

that out because you can put the best stroke on any of these putts you like. If you're not pointing

in the right place to start with you're going to hold very little. Right so there you have it, I hope

that was helpful, I hope that's given you a few indicators of how to spot those telltale signs your

equipment might not be working for you. Let me know in the comments down below have you fallen

foul of any of those and let me know if you fix it, I really want to hear about it. Thank you