Can you help solve my club gapping issues?

Introduction to the New Series

Hello, welcome back to the channel. Now this video is the first video in a brand new series that I’m launching on this channel to be slightly different to the other videos that I have on the channel already. So traditionally the channel focuses on product reviews or equipment reviews in the golf area and also on-course golf vlogs or golf playing videos. But I wanted to do something a little bit different and I wanted to try to release videos on a more regular basis, and to allow me to do that I thought I would create these videos which are a little bit less scripted, a little bit less polished, and are more just me switching the camera on and talking about golf related things. Now I would like to talk about equipment I am using, equipment I am looking to start using, perhaps experiences playing different courses, maybe some things that I have learned from playing, I don’t know, match play events or events against different levels of golfers, and tips and tricks that I can share with you. I want these videos to be generally fairly short and I’m thinking of releasing them on a weekly basis, perhaps every Wednesday.

The Gapping Problem

So I thought I would kick this new series off with a video about gapping. And what I’ve realized from my golf bag over particularly the last year is I have quite a big gap between my 5-iron and my hybrid. So in my old set of irons I had pitch and wedge all the way down to a 3-iron, and then I had a hybrid, 3-wood, and a driver. But after I swapped my irons out, I rather stupidly didn’t pay the extra money to get a 4-iron, and the set included 5 through to pitch and wedge, which means I now have a 5-iron and then I jump straight across to my hybrid. Now the hybrid is a 3-hybrid, I think it’s around about 21°, and generally speaking I hit it around about, say on average, maybe 210-220, whereas my 5-iron, a good 5-iron for me, probably averages about 180 to 190. So anytime I have a shot that requires maybe 200 yards, I’m caught in between the two clubs and I don’t really know what to do.

Analyzing the Data with Shot Scope

So to illustrate this, I thought what I would do is I would show you some of my performance data from the Shot Scope app. Now if you are not familiar with Shot Scope products, I use the Shot Scope X5 tracking golf watch, which means I can track all of my performance statistics as I play golf automatically throughout the entire year. Now there’s more videos on my channel for X5, I’ve also got a handy 15% discount code if you want to check it out below. But what I want to show you here is on screen you can see the app, and I’m going to go into performance, I’m going to go to clubs, and then what we’ll do is we’ll run a little filter here to say let’s look at 2023 and let’s make sure we set it to active clubs only. We’ll confirm this, and this basically shows you my performance average or longest. So you’ll see here it allows you to toggle between the average or longest or performance average. So we’ll take out longest, we don’t need to worry about average because average also includes those incredibly long shots where maybe you were playing like a links course and the ball was bounding on or those shots where you’ve duffed them and only hit at a few yards. That’s why performance average is there, because it strips those out and gives you a more accurate performance average.

The Yardage Gap

Now these are full distance shots, so carry and roll, because the way that the device works is it captures your location when you hit your shot and where you hit your next shot and then calculates the distance between. So you’ll see here that my performance average over the last year with my hybrid (so that’s the H18) is 209 yards, and my 5-iron is 187 [yards]. Now there’s a nice kind of step between all of my other clubs, so my 8-iron to 7 to 6 to 5, we’re looking at round about between sort of like five and 15 yards, say, but when we get down to the 5-iron to the hybrid, HBD, it’s quite a big jump.

Seeking Solutions and Viewer Input

So recently I’ve been thinking to myself, what can I do to try and bridge that gap? And I’d be really interested to know what you guys would suggest I do. So a couple of the things I’ve been thinking is perhaps to go for a 4-iron. I play with TaylorMade P770, are the 2021 models, so trying to find one of those with the same shaft might be quite difficult. Another option is perhaps to go for a custom fit, so I’m thinking maybe I could go for a custom fit for a 4-iron or maybe even a 4- and a 3-iron. Or on the market nowadays there are lots of different woods that are quite high in terms of loft, so you can get sort of 5-, 7-, 9-, I think you can probably go higher than 9-woods. So I’d be really interested to know what you guys would suggest that I do. So drop a comment below, so let me know if you would go for perhaps a 4-iron, or would you think about maybe going for a new hybrid or another couple of hybrids? Would you think about maybe going for a different wood or perhaps even something like a driving iron? So I’m quite open to suggestions and looking at what would best suit me for this kind of distance, because I know myself when I play, for example, my home course, the second hole is usually around about 200 yards from the tee, and I need to make a decision whether or not to perhaps lay up with the 5-iron or try and go a little bit long and take something off of it, and it usually leads to issues.

Conclusion and Call to Action

So anyway, I’ve got some thinking to do, but I’d love it if you could drop a little comment below to let me know what you think. I would like this to become more of a discussion on this channel as I said, and what I’ll do is I’ll look at your comments, I’ll have some thoughts, and I’ll produce another video to let you know what I’ve decided to do. But anyway, hopefully you enjoyed this video. Hopefully you’re up to the idea of some more future videos each week on this kind of setup, this kind of style. If you are, make sure you hit that subscribe button, drop a like below, and I’ll see you in the next video.