In the 1980's, huge improvements were made in golf club design and construction. Most of those improvements increased both forgiveness and distance. The object of the game is to hit straighter and farther, so golf clubs designed to do that are called GAME IMPROVEMENT golf clubs. The primary characteristics of game improvement clubs are perimeter weighting, large sweet spot and low center of gravity design.

To contrast, there actually are golf clubs that are not designed as game improvement golf clubs. Those are used by professional golfers who always hit the ball straight they just want distance. If we could always hit the ball straight, we wouldn't care about forgiveness either. But hey, we have day jobs and other things that take up our time, so we need every advantage we can get for the hours we have left to play golf.

PERIMETER WEIGHTING

Perimeter weighting means that the weight of the golf club head is positioned around the perimeter of the golf club instead of at the center. As we said above, if you always hit the ball dead center perfect, you would want a small sweet spot and no perimeter weighting so you could put as much physical mass directly behind the impact point of the ball. This would make a very long shot. However, if you are off your shot will go astray.

LARGE SWEET SPOT

A large sweet spot is generally created by perimeter weighting design. The sweet spot is the optimum place to make contact with the ball. The larger the sweet spot, the greater room for swing error. But designing for the largest sweet spot can leave less room to correct other common swing errors. Perimeter weighting can be shifted to cure toe-miss-hits and to help get the ball up in the air.

LOW CENTER OF GRAVITY

Recently, low center of gravity (LCG) has become a favored design concept. This means shifting weight to the bottom of the club to increase the ability to hit the ball up into the air. If you don't have a problem getting the golf ball off the ground, then LCG should be less important to you. It you have a big problem in this area then LCG matter a lot. Golf clubs with tungsten inserts focus on LCG, because tungsten is heavier than steel and allows the club to have even more weight where it counts.

To conclude, our overall goal is to have a large sweet spot and also solve some other common swing problems. Certain designs of the famous name manufacturers may orient more towards solving one problem than another, and certain designs provide a very balanced approach.