Best Golf Clubs For Beginners: How To Choose What’s Best For Your Game

The game of golf has never been healthier.

If you are new to golf, one key area that captures your attention is what golf equipment to purchase and where to purchase it. You can purchase golf clubs from various sources, from physical retailers to online sites. If you carry out any research on golf clubs, you might also start to see and learn about custom-fitted
golf clubs and wonder if this is something that can benefit you in your early golfing life.

Choosing the correct golf clubs is vital in helping you improve your golf and get more out of the game. However, how do you guarantee you make the right decisions with so many options available?

Our guide will help you understand some of the key features and types of golf clubs aimed at new golfers and why the concept of custom fitting can benefit you. To do this, we'll break it down into the following headings:

Golf Club 101 - Understanding the Basics
What Golf Clubs Are Ideal For a Beginners Golf Bag
What Won't Help Your Game
Why Custom - Fitting Will Help You

 

Golf Club 101 - Understanding the Basics

We are allowed a maximum of fourteen clubs in our golf bags. We can choose any club to make up the fourteen, giving many options.

As a new golfer, the overall makeup of your golf bag will have some subtle differences from that of a low-handicap or elite-level golfer, as your requirements will differ based on your abilities.

What do we mean by this? For example, as a new golfer, you will have a driver in your bag the same way an elite player will have a driver in theirs. But the difference is the driver head, loft, weighting, and shaft will not be the same for your driver compared to the elite players.

The reason for this comes down to the difference in the swing mechanics of an elite player and how they deliver the club face at impact compared to a new golfer.
Manufacturers recognise this and create different driver head profiles to suit different players.

The same pattern follows through fairway woods, hybrids, long irons, and iron sets. We may see some parity when it comes to wedges and putters.

With so many choices, making the right decisions on what is best for your game is helped massively by custom fitting, which we'll look at in more detail later in this article.

But to begin, as a new golfer, starting from scratch, what type of clubs should you look to have in your golf bag, and how will they benefit you?

What Golf Clubs Are Ideal For a Beginners Golf Bag

Before we decide what clubs to put in your golf bag, a key consideration is what budget you have to utilise towards buying golf clubs. There are manufacturers at both ends of the price spectrum who produce fantastic, high-quality golf clubs that can be tailored to your specific requirements. So, whatever your budget is, you will have great options. Taking this on board, what types of golf clubs should we be looking to put in our golf bags?

Driver

Arguably the most exciting golf club in the bag, the driver can reward us with memorable shots or give us the most considerable amount of grief. From a beginners perspective, gravitating towards drivers offering maximum forgiveness and stability would be a good starting point. Manufacturers can create stability through the design of the head, internal or external weighting systems and individual technology developed by the manufacturer.

To help add more club head speed, manufacturers are also turning to materials like carbon fibre in the head construction, which is lighter than traditional titanium, allowing the head to move faster in the swing.

Fairway/Lofted Woods

A three-wood in the bag provides another option off the tee if you face a tee shot where accuracy is more important than overall distance. A good three-wood will also serve you well for the longest approach shots you'll face out on the course. Three-woods tend to mirror drivers regarding the materials used to construct the heads and the technologies used to create stability and power.

Lofted woods refer to any other wood outside of the three wood. Lofted fairway woods have become more popular with professionals as they switch out their long irons in favour of five or even seven woods. Lofted woods work well for long approach shots or tee shots on long par threes. They are easy to hit because the weight can be pulled low and far away from the face, helping to get the ball airborne.

The low centre of gravity and wider sole of the wood also makes these clubs useful out the rough. Lofted Fairway Woods looks friendly at address as you can see lots of loft on the face, but if you are still not a big fan of the looks, you can opt for hybrids instead.

Hybrids/Rescue Clubs

Hybrids entered the world to form a middle ground between long irons and lofted fairway woods. Hybrids feature a design philosophy similar to lofted fairway woods with low centres of gravity but in a neater, smaller package than their lofted fairway wood equivalents.

This low centre of gravity makes these clubs very playable from the rough, the fairway, and off the tee on longer par three holes. Hybrids will also promote a higher ball flight compared to the long iron equivalent, meaning you get lots of stopping power on approach shots. From a beginners perspective, you could mix and match between lofted fairway woods and hybrids and use hybrids down to the equivalent of five or six irons.

Irons

Using a mix of fairway woods and hybrids, the first iron in your bag could be a six or even a seven iron. Irons that are ideal for beginners will focus on ease of use and forgiving on off-centre hits.

Wide soles and cavity backs can spread the weight to the very perimeters of the face, offering forgiveness. Wide soles will also help reduce the centre of gravity, helping the ball get airborne more easily.

Iron heads can also feature multi-material construction with forged faces, providing the softest feel and feedback. Tungsten in the heads sole, cavity or toe moves mass to offer more forgiveness. Stronger steel forms the rear of the head, giving a robust performance.

Some irons also feature "speed foams"; placed in a cavity between the face and rear of the iron head to provide faster ball speeds. The beauty of the multi-material or hollow head irons is that they can look like irons a better player might opt for, but pack all the help needed for a new golfer.

Wedges

Some manufacturers will offer iron sets where the most lofted iron is the pitching wedge, meaning golfers can choose their wedges from a specialist manufacturer such as Bob Vokey.

Wedges cover the shortest approach shots and pitching and chipping. Pitching and chipping well are vital to maintaining or improving your score, and even as a beginner, getting the right wedges can help you build feel and consistency for delicate shots.

When we look at wedges, we are talking about pitching wedges, sand irons, gap wedges, and lob wedges.

Putter

Choosing the right putter for you still very much comes down to the look and feel of the putter. But even putters can feature designs that help keep the putter face stable and square to provide consistent contact. Designs like the TaylorMade Spider series are putters that help not only new golfers achieve more consistency in their putting strokes but also the best players in the world.

The significant advantage of each of these clubs is that they can be custom-fitted to suit your exact requirements. Through launch monitor technology, we can assess which heads will work best and which loft, lie, and weight configurations will work best. As well as heads, we can also fit you with the correct shafts, which can help add distance and accuracy to your shots.

Another benefit of being fitted for your clubs is that we can create consistent distance gapping between each club. You don't have to compromise on the course by easing off on a longer club or hitting a shorter club too hard to cover a certain distance.

What Won't Help Your Game

Pulling a low lofted driver from its head cover on the tee might look cool. Still, it can be detrimental to hitting the ball consistently with poor direction and distance.

When you begin your golfing journey, loft is likely to be more helpful and can give you more distance. If you want further proof, two of the greatest drivers of the golf ball in the modern era, Dustin Johnson and Lee Westwood, have used drivers with at least eleven degrees of loft successfully for years.

Long irons aren't much use if you are new to golf, so don't feel you need to carry a three- or four- iron. Sometimes, you might not even get any benefits from a five or six iron in the bag.

As we have discovered, lofted fairway woods and hybrids can be fitted to cover the same distance as the equivalent long irons but are much more user-friendly. It's easy to want to mimic the best players in the world, which can manifest in the desire to use bladed, forged irons. And while they look fantastic in the golf bag, they will offer little forgiveness and consistency if you are new to the game.

This last point may be controversial, but buying golf clubs off the shelf can be a bad idea. As golfers, we all come in different shapes and sizes and hit the ball in different ways, so thinking that a "one size fits all"; approach to golf clubs simply doesn't work.

Why Custom-Fitting Will Help You

Custom fitting is available for every standard of golfer. It helps to ensure that any investment in new golf equipment will reap the maximum rewards for your game. During a custom fitting session, the fitter will take the time to understand the following key points:

• Are you getting any lessons from a qualified professional
• How often are you playing and practising
• What your bad shots are like out on the course
• What your golfing objectives are

The fitter will then marry this feedback with the information they collect from the launch monitor while you are hitting shots to get the broadest picture of your golf game.

From this initial data collection, the fitter can begin to make recommendations and get you testing new combinations of clubs, checking the data each time to measure the improvements the recommendations are making.

At the end of the custom-fitting session, you will have a clear picture of what clubs will work best for your game. You will also have a little more knowledge on how you hit the ball as the fitter explains the data they capture from the launch monitors. Even if you are working with a professional to improve your technique, we can build contingency into the recommended clubs, meaning that the clubs will remain relevant as you continue to improve.

At Golf Tech UK, we have years of experience working with beginners and high-handicap golfers to get more from their equipment through custom-fitting. Whether you want to focus on one area of your bag or make wholesale changes, our expert fitters will work with you and help you make the right decisions.

Organising a fitting session will also give you valuable insight into how your swing works and how you deliver the club face to the ball. You'll also see first-hand the improvements that can be made from the fitters recommendations.

Custom-built golf clubs can add distance and accuracy to your game, and equally as important, they can give you confidence when you face any shot out on the golf course.

Check out our website to see the latest releases that interest you if you want to change or add new clubs to your bag this year. You can also book a custom-fitting session via the website or contact us to arrange a fitting session via E-Mail or call us.