Fitting information

Wrist-to-floor

Stand upright on a hard, flat floor in the shoes you play in. Let your arms hang completely relaxed at your sides. Don’t stretch down, don’t shrug up. Measure from the crease where your palm meets your wrist straight down to the floor. Have someone else read the tape: bending to look at it yourself changes your posture and typically adds an inch.

Typical range is 27"–40" (69–102 cm). This measurement is the reason two golfers of the same height can need lie angles two degrees apart. It captures arm length, which height alone can’t.

Hand length (for grip size)

Palm up, measure from the crease of your wrist to the tip of your middle finger. Keep the tape flat on the palm. Don’t wrap it over the fingertip or around the heel of your hand.

Height

Back to a wall, heels down, looking straight ahead. Measure in golf shoes if you can, or add ½" if you can’t. The chart assumes you’re standing as you stand over the ball.

Lie angle is the angle between the shaft and the ground when the sole sits flat. If it’s wrong, the sole isn’t flat at impact, the effective loft twists, and the ball starts offline before the face angle gets a say.

Rule of thumb: every 1° of lie error costs you about 3 yards on a mid-iron. Roughly a third of that’s the ball starting offline; the rest is the curve it puts on the shot, because the face is now closed or open to a path that hasn’t moved.

Why wedges punish it, and why the usual explanation is wrong

You’ll read everywhere that a lie error costs you more yards as loft goes up. It doesn’t. The yards are remarkably flat across the bag, because the bigger face error in a wedge is almost exactly cancelled by the shorter shot. What actually changes is the size of the face error itself:

face change = arctan( sin(lie error) × tan(loft) )

A degree of lie error turns a 60° wedge face four and a half times as far as a 4-iron face. The ball finishes a similar distance offline either way, but as a share of the shot it’s nearly three times worse, on the club you’re trying to hit closest. That’s the real reason wedge lie matters, and it’s why a fitter checks your wedges separately from your set.

The face-angle figures are geometry and are exact. The yardages are modelled: start direction is about 75% face for an iron, and the curve is anchored on published TrackMan face-to-path data. Treat the yards as indicative and the ratios as solid.

How the Bay Scale works

Every height has a reference wrist-to-floor: the arm length that plays a standard lie. The scale is simply how far you sit from it:

your wrist-to-floor − reference for your height = your code
1 inch of deviation = 1 degree of lie

Measure high for your height and your arms are short: your hands sit high at address and the club needs to be more upright (U). Measure low and your arms are long: hands low, club needs to be flatter (F). Land on the reference and you’re LEVEL.

The codes are the answer, not a lookup key. U2 is two degrees upright. We also report the unrounded figure, so you can see whether you sit in the middle of a band or on its edge, which is exactly the case where a fitter would test both.

Static charts get you a starting point. A dynamic fit — hitting off a lie board with impact tape on the sole — gets you the answer, because your posture and shaft droop at impact aren’t visible in a tape measurement. The two commonly differ by one step on the scale.

Length comes from height, in the half-inch steps club builders actually work in:

A second, independent opinion comes from wrist-to-floor alone: under 32" suggests −1", 32"–34" suggests −½", 34"–36" is standard, 36"–37.5" suggests +½", above 37.5" suggests +1". When the two disagree it means your arms are long or short for your height, and the tool says so rather than hiding it.

Flex by driver clubhead speed

Flex by 7-iron carry, if you’ve no launch monitor

Roughly: 130–145 yd → A; 145–160 yd → R; 160–175 yd → S; 175 yd+ → X. Less reliable than a speed reading, because carry distance mixes clubhead speed with how well you strike it.

Weight matters more than the letter

Flex isn’t standardised. One brand's S plays like another brand's R, and the same shaft in two weights behaves like two different shafts. Weight is what drives your tempo, your ability to find the centre of the face, and your consistency swing to swing.

Tempo overrides the chart at the edges. A fast, aggressive transition loads a shaft like extra speed does; a slow, smooth one unloads it. If you’re within a few mph of a flex boundary, tempo decides which side you land on.

It’s common and correct to play one flex softer in irons than in the driver. Iron shafts load differently and the shorter length makes the same flex play stiffer.

Length

Stock drivers ship at 45.5"–45.75". Tour average is closer to 44.5"–45". Shortening a driver costs roughly 2–3 yards of theoretical distance and usually returns more than that in centre-face contact, because the face is only about 4" wide and it’s much easier to find the middle of it with a shorter club. If you’re choosing between the two, take the shorter one.

Offset is the quiet variable here. More offset gives the face a fraction more time to square up and moves the CG back: genuinely helpful if you miss right, mildly annoying if you miss left.

Build-up tape adds diameter at the butt but not much in the lower-hand area, so two wraps isn’t the same as a true midsize grip. And grip weight counts: going from a 50 g grip to a 66 g midsize changes swing weight by about two points.

Gapping

Space your wedges 4–6° apart, which is roughly 10–15 yards. Start from your actual pitching wedge loft, not from a nominal "PW". If your set PW is 43°, a 56° sand wedge leaves a 13° hole. You need something around 48° and 52° in between.

Bounce

Grind

Grind is where material has been removed from the heel, toe or trailing edge of the sole. More relief lets you open the face without the leading edge lifting off the turf, which is what makes flop shots and short-sided lobs possible. Less relief gives you a wider, more supportive sole. If you’re not routinely opening the face, a full or mid sole will serve you better than a heavily ground one.

You’re allowed 14 clubs. The job is to cover every distance from your wedge floor to your driver with even gaps, and the place that always goes wrong is the top of the bag.

Adjust for arm length: long arms for your height means your hands hang lower, which means a shorter putter. Most off-the-rack putters are 34"–35" because that’s what sells, not because that’s what fits. A lot of golfers are playing a putter an inch too long and standing too upright to compensate.

Head style and toe hang

The check that beats every chart: set up comfortably, let your arms hang, and look at the sole. It should sit flat. If the toe is in the air the putter is too long or too upright for you, and a toe-up putter pushes putts right.

The ball is the only thing you use on every shot, and it’s the cheapest equipment decision you’ll make. It’s also the one with the most marketing attached to it, so it’s worth separating what robot testing repeatedly finds from what the box says.

Compression is the wrong axis

Nearly every chart you’ll find online bands balls by compression against swing speed, on the theory that a slower swing can’t compress a firm ball. This site used to carry that chart too, and it was wrong. Tested at an 86 mph driver, the fastest balls were the firmer ones, and the longest ball in the field on total distance was a premium tour ball. Soft is slow. It has been the same finding across five years of large-scale testing.

What compression genuinely changes is feel. If you like a soft click off the putter, that’s a real preference and worth having. It just isn’t a distance argument.

The cover is the axis that matters

There are two of them in practice. Urethane is softer, grips the grooves and spins more on short shots. Ionomer (often branded Surlyn) is harder, cheaper and more durable.

On full shots the firmer ionomer balls keep up with urethane more closely than the price gap suggests. The difference shows up in two places:

• Around the green. This is what the extra money buys, and it’s most of what it buys.
• In the wet. The gap widens sharply. On a wet full wedge, ionomer balls gave up roughly a third of their spin. Urethane gave up about a tenth. If you play soft, wet turf, that alone can justify the cover.

Price buys spin. It barely buys distance

Across a test of 48 balls, price and greenside spin tracked each other closely while price and driver distance did not. At slower swing speeds the distance gap between the cheapest and the dearest ball all but disappears. So the honest question isn’t “can I afford a tour ball?” but “do I hit enough wedge shots that I expect to stop?” If most of your approaches run onto the green, you’re buying something you aren’t using.

Two things that surprise people

• At slow speeds a cheaper ball makes some of its distance back on the ground. About 15% of total distance happens as roll at slow speeds against about 10% at high speed, and ionomer rolls out further. So ionomer can win on total while urethane wins on carry. If you play in the air to a soft green, carry is the number that matters to you.
• Iron distance isn’t a speed story, it’s a spin story. From the fastest ball to the slowest, 7-iron ball speed varied by about 1.5 mph. Distance varied by more than ten yards. The balls that carried furthest were the ones that kept spin down, not the ones that came off the face fastest.

How to actually choose one

Not on the range. The difference between these balls lives in chipping and pitching, where you can feel it immediately and for the price of a few sleeves. Buy three, hit twenty chips with each from the same lie, and keep the one that behaves the way you expect. That test costs less than a round and tells you more than any chart, including this one.

Source. The findings above come from MyGolfSpy’s 2026 golf ball test, which put 48 models through robot testing at three swing speeds with a driver, a 7-iron and wedges, including wet and dry full wedge shots. We’ve used what their testing found and written it in our own words. The measured data is theirs and stays on their site — if you want the numbers, the rankings or the model-by-model detail, go and read it there. We have no commercial relationship with them and earn nothing from that link.

There’s no industry standard, so these vary by a quarter-inch and a degree between brands. They’re the baseline this tool applies your adjustments to.

This is a static fitting. It measures your body and asks about your tendencies. That’s genuinely how a professional fitting starts, and for length, lie, grip size and set makeup it gets most golfers to within one increment of the right answer.

What it can’t see:

• Your posture and shaft droop at impact. Only a lie board and impact tape reveal these, and they are why a dynamic fit can land a full step away from the static one.
• Your actual launch, spin and dispersion. Shaft profile — where a shaft is stiff along its length, and its torque — matters as much as the letter on it, and only a launch monitor can read it.
• Whether your ball flight is a swing fault or an equipment fault. A slice caused by an open clubface won’t be fixed by an upright lie angle. Equipment can reduce a curve; it can’t remove the cause.
• Anything about a swing that’s actively changing. If you’re mid-rebuild with a coach, fit the swing you’ll have, not the one you’ve this month.

Use this to walk into a fitting knowing what to ask for, and to sanity-check what you’re told.