GEARS Measures What Shafts Actually Do
A golf swing takes less than two seconds. Inside it, the shaft moves in three directions: it droops, deflects, and twists. It happens at very high speed, and it decides where your ball finishes.
GEARS Motion Capture tracks all three movements, as well as body and club head data, with research-grade accuracy. What we've learned about how shafts move through robot testing and player testing is the foundation of every shaft profile we make.
The Three Directions, Measured
Deflection is how much a shaft bends vertically. Tour players average 29.76 millimeters of deflection at impact with a driver with a standard deviation of 7.33 millimeters. It's what most fittings are currently built around and far less important than droop and twist in shaft fitting.
Droop is how much a shaft bends horizontally. Tour players average 48.41 millimeters of droop at impact with a driver with a standard deviation of 13.37 millimeters. More droop creates more fade bias, because droop makes the golf club play effectively flatter.
Twist is rotation, the movement torque resists. Tour drivers average -0.75 degrees of twist at impact with a standard deviation of 3.04 degrees. A negative twist means the face is closing.
The averages aren't the story. The deviations are. There's no one way to swing a golf club, which is why we measure instead of guess. And it's why our Tour Testing Program includes two shafts.
Droop, Deflection, and Twist Are in a Tug-of-War
As golfers start the downswing, three movements fight each other the whole way down: droop, deflection, and twist. The job of a shaft is to droop, deflect, and twist in a way that works for your game.
The higher torque (softer) a shaft is, the more it droops and twists, which creates fade bias. The lower torque (stiffer) a shaft is, the less it droops and twists, which creates more draw bias.
Another way to think about it: the lower-torque the shaft, the more the club head stays with the grip. It’s easier to twist the club face closed with stiffer shafts, which is why they have more draw bias and softer shafts have more fade bias.
The Industry Has Taught Torque Wrong
For decades, there were two camps when it came to torque. For those who thought torque mattered, the thinking was that low torque shafts minimized a hook and high torque minimized a slice. On the other side, the thinking was that torque was mostly about feel, with lower-torque shafts feeling firmer and higher-torque shafts feeling softer. Well-educated people taught this in seminars. Our data kept disagreeing.
GEARS data shows that torque is the most important feature of a golf shaft design, driving roughly 50% of shaft performance. Lower torque creates draw bias. For a right-handed golfer, the dispersion pattern with a lower-torque shaft will be more to the left with a lower ball flight. With a higher-torque shaft, the same golfer will see their dispersion more to the right with a higher ball flight.
The industry has been teaching torque backward. It’s never just been about feel. It's a critical factor in determining the left and right pattern of your shots.
Shaft Fitting Isn't Up and Down. It's Diagonal.
The old shaft fitting model is vertical. If a golfer needed a higher flight, they were given a softer shaft. If they needed less spin, they were given a stiffer shaft. While this isn’t wrong, it’s incomplete and it’s been costing golfers shots.
The data says the real shaft fitting axis runs diagonally: higher-torque shafts move your shots high and right. Lower torque shafts move your shots low and left.
Because today’s driver heads are so good at controlling launch and spin, the left and right aspect of shaft fitting is far more important than up and down. Especially if you struggle with a big miss.
Most Slicers Are Playing the Wrong Torque
The average golfer slices and doesn't swing very fast. The industry hands him the softest, lightest, highest torque shaft it can make, chasing club head speed to encourage distance gains. But that shaft droops and twists open a ton, even at slower speeds. More high, right spin. The shaft is feeding the slice.
A slicer needs a much lower torque shaft. It doesn't have to be heavy, but it needs to be lower torque.
On tour, the mistake runs the other way. High-swing-speed players get the stiffest, lowest torque, heaviest shafts, and that pattern is a hook bias. Players fighting a draw or hook will have success with a higher-torque shaft because it will droop more and twist open more, encouraging a fade bias.
The Ball Doesn’t Tell All
Top launch monitor companies are unbelievably good at measuring the ball, and the top equipment companies are the same level of amazing at creating equipment that makes the ball do certain things. Where they struggle is the hard-to-see moments of the swing:
- How the shaft dynamically moves during the swing
- Where exactly the ball touches the face at impact
A launch monitor tells you what the ball did, but it struggles to tell you where you contacted the ball at impact due to certain limitations. For example, camera placement and the complexity of different face curvatures, known as bulge and roll. GEARS shows you where the ball contacted the face, accurate to 0.2 millimeters, and what the shaft did through the swing. You need both, and they have been largely missing from the fitting process.
Twist It One Way, Then the Other
Torque is measured in degrees. Put a 2.7 degree shaft in a vice and twist it: 2.7 one way, 2.7 the other. That symmetry is the point. A hand-wrapped shaft with a seam can have a twist bias in a certain direction. A filament wound shaft is seamless by design, so it’s more symmetrical.
It's why we can print a torque number on the shaft and mean it, and why a custom build from GEARS will feel and perform like the winner you pick through the Tour Testing Program.
Your Shaft Shouldn’t Be A Mystery
To help golfers better understand how their shaft is constructed, we created The GEARS Code.
