Goodbye Swingweight, You Mean Nothing To Us!

Sadly, despite major brands making it some kind of important measurement, and it being pushed towards golfers as such, we'll explain why Swingweight has very little to do with weight, and has absolutely no relevance to a golf swing, other than the fact that you swing a golf club.

Let's assume that there is some relevance to a golf swing, at the very least it should be called Swingbalance.

Firstly, let's take a look at how Swingweight is measured...

1. The club (including fitted grip) is placed on the Swingweight scale with the clubhead toe pointed to the floor.
2. The Swingweight scale has a pivot point at exactly 14 inches from the butt end of the club, and a weighted sliding "selector" which is positioned to the desired Swingweight on the scale.
3. In order to balance the club to the desired Swingweight you will add weight to either the tip end using tip weights, or at the butt end, traditionally achieved by using a small canister concealed within the butt of the shaft, filled with the required amount of tungsten powder. (As a sidenote here, generally with today's clubs being made with hollow graphite and steel shafts, which have relatively more weight at the butt end, to achieve a certain Swingweight only tip weights are required. Vary rarely do clubs that are straight from the factory contain any weighting at the butt end, but they almost always contain tip weights). 
4. Once you have a club that sits on the scale horizontally, you have achieved the desired Swingweight.

Perhaps you've already spotted some of the issues from just reading the explanation above, but let's delve in and dissect what's going on.

The first thing to mention is that the club is fitted with a grip. If you change grips to some which are not exactly the same weight as the old ones, the Swingweight will be affected. Adding or removing weight at the club head end will be required, meaning you'd also need to destruct the club and put the head back on with a new weight. However, doing that would change the Swingweight completely. It would no longer be for example, C3 as it was before. So, to maintain the Swingweight you can only ever use grips of the same weight on those clubs, without taking them apart completely and rebulding them.

Secondly, the clubhead is positioned with the toe pointing toward the floor. This means that the Swingweight method is balancing the club along a plane that is 90° to the plane that we actually swing the club. This is why we suggest that Swingweight has no relevance to a golf swing. It makes much more sense if we swung a golf club like a croquet mallet.

Furthermore, the specification of using 14 inches from the butt is mind boggling. Even if we did swing the club along the plane upon which Swingweight is measured, the club does not pivot 14 inches down the shaft. A golf club's pivot point is the point on the grip where your hands meet, somewhere between 4 and 6 inches down the grip depending on how wide your hands are. Therefore, the club is not even balanced at the point at which it pivots - another misnomer which is void of any relevance to swinging a golf club. Let's even assume that it is related to where the shaft flexes: nope, a shaft's maximum Bend Point, or it's Kick Point (2 entirely different things) are nowhere near 14 inches from the butt end, they are positioned closer to the tip, where the shaft is much thinner. No joy there either. 

You could argue that this method can actually be used to control the weight of the club on the whole. For example, you may want the heaviest club possible, G10 on the Swingweight scale. Unless you had a very heavy clubhead, which would require a lot of weight added to the butt end, you'd need to add a lot of weight at both the tip end and the butt end of the club. If this were the intended purpose of this procedure, it should be called Clubweight. In any case, today there are a multitude of shafts and clubheads of varying weights available on the market, which when matched together, could achieve the desired club weight. And balancing those clubs at the correct pivot point requires much more weight than was required for Swingweighting. This should be achieved with much bigger counterweights. The amount of weight required also means that there would be no possible way to get the club to balance on a Swingweight scale.

Conclusion & Last Words

Who knows, maybe this somehow made sense once upon a time when shafts were made of wood. Perhaps wooden shafts did flex higher up the shaft around 14 inches from the butt, driven by the force of a golf swing. And perhaps because of the nature of wood, a shaft didn't have a spine, therefore balancing the club on the 90° plane didn't matter because it would flex the same in all directions, unlike today's graphite and steel shafts that definitely do have a spine. Read "The Importance of Spine Alignment in Golf Clubs" to learn more about how the spine affects the flex of a golf club shaft.

Hopefully, this post has sufficiently explained Allumy Golf's viewpoint of Swingweight having no relevant meaning and offering very little for golfers of today. Having a correctly sized grip, a correctly weighted shaft of the correct length and optimal flex for a golfer's swing, balanced using the far superior BioMatch® counterweighting system, provide a golfer with a set of clubs that are much more consistent and optimised to their personal characteristics. Swingweight is irrelevant.