Golf Club Buzzwords, What do they mean

With awesome new equipment dropping this season, that means new marketing campaigns.  These campaigns will be focused around a few buzzwords that equipment companies will beat into the consumer, like Center of Gravity (CG), Moment of Inertia (MOI), but what do they all mean?  Let’s talk tech for a minute, what is CG and why does it matter in golf club engineering? CG is simply the balance point of the club head. The location of the CG is and always will be one of the most important ingredients in golf club engineering, the reason is because it controls the clubs Moment of Inertia or MOI.   MOI in its simplest form is the club’s resistance to twisting, high MOI equals the most resistance to twisting and low MOI equals less resistance to twisting. On off center strikes, the higher the MOI, the more the club will resist twisting, thus creating a more stable club face through impact. Now that we know what CG and MOI mean, here is the role they play in golf club design.  In order to increase the club’s MOI, the CG has to be as far back and away from the face as possible. The difficult part is that as you move the CG back and away from the face, the ball speed tends to go down and the back spin tends to go up. This trade off is what has kept golf club engineers busy wrestling with creating a stable club face, without sacrificing ball speed and spin rate.  And guess what? They have done it! Now more than ever, the club face is as stable as ever and the ball speed and spin rate is as good as it has ever been. What a time to need a new driver!